In March 1994 an Argentine man in his mid-forties flew from his home country to New York, sat for an interview with the ABC news program Prime Time, and then turned himself in. His name was Ricardo Silvio Caputo, and he told the authorities that he had killed four women in the 1970s, that his victims were haunting his dreams, and that he was afraid of voices telling him to kill again. He had been a fugitive for twenty years. In that time, across North, Central and South America, he had married twice and fathered six children.
He was born in 1949 in Mendoza, Argentina. His brother Alberto said he had been physically and sexually abused as a child. In 1970 he moved to New York City. In 1971 he stabbed to death his fiancée, Nathalie Brown, nineteen, on Long Island. He was found mentally incompetent to stand trial and committed to the Matteawan State Hospital in Fishkill, where a young psychologist, Judith Becker, treated him. With her help, other inmates said, he won a transfer in 1973 to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island, a far looser place that gave patients day furloughs. He began turning up at her apartment in Yonkers. In 1974 he walked away from Wards Island, and that year Becker, twenty-six, was found murdered in Yonkers.
He went west. In 1975 Barbara Ann Taylor, twenty-eight, a woman he was living with in San Francisco, was killed. In 1977 he was living in Mexico City with Laura Gomez, and she was killed too. The press called him the Lady Killer. No murder after 1977 was ever definitively tied to him, although he became a suspect in two: Devon Green, twenty-three, a chef killed in Los Angeles in 1981, whose former co-worker saw him on a crime program and recognized him as a man who had worked at her restaurant, and Jacqueline Bernard, sixty-four, killed in New York in 1983, whose friend Linda Wolfe argued in a 1998 book that Caputo was her killer. He was charged with neither.
His lawyer said psychiatrists in Argentina had diagnosed him with multiple personalities, one of them psychotic, and that it was this one that had killed. In 1995, under a plea bargain, he dropped his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and pleaded guilty in Nassau County to manslaughter in Nathalie Brown's death, twenty-four years after it, and was sentenced to eight and a half to twenty-five years. He was then sent to Westchester County, where in June he pleaded guilty to the murder of Judith Becker and was given twenty-five years to life.
He served his sentences at Attica. On October 1, 1997, playing basketball in the prison yard, he had a heart attack and died. He was forty-eight.