In retirement, Lou Schachter has combined his interests in travel and writing with the blog True Crime Road Trip. Photo / Jamie Lee Taete, The New York Times
After a valuable de Kooning was discovered behind a bedroom door, a true crime fan wondered: Is that all the thieves stole?
When Lou Schachter visited the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 2014, he appreciated the flowers by Georgia O’Keeffe, the cityscapes from Edward Hopper and the signature splatter of Jackson Pollock.
But he was most intrigued by the empty frame on one of the gallery walls.
A small plaque nearby explained that in 1985, someone had cut Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre from the frame and made off with it. No one had seen the painting since.
Schachter, a corporate consultant with a homespun interest in unsolved mysteries, was fascinated by the story of one person distracting security while another took the abstract oil painting of a nude woman. He loved to write and took notes with the intention of digging into the theft someday.
The de Kooning turned up before he got around to it. In 2017, it was discovered hanging behind the bedroom door of Jerome and Rita Alter, retired public schoolteachers who had died. Valued at US$400,000 ($665,000) when it was stolen, the painting is now considered to be worth more than US$100 million.
After the painting’s long restoration process, Schachter got back in his car and drove hundreds of miles from Palm Springs, California, to Tucson, Arizona, to see Woman-Ochre where the empty frame had once been.
If this were anybody but Lou Schachter, that might have been the end of the story. But after visiting the museum, he drove past the Alters’ former ranch house in Cliff, New Mexico, and continued on to the antique store in nearby Silver City that had unknowingly bought the de Kooning as part of the Alters’ estate sale.
A conversation with one of the store’s owners, David Van Auker, gave Schachter a thought: was it really the only painting the Alters had ripped from the walls of a museum?
“David sort of had a twinkle in his eye as he said to me, ‘You know, just because something isn’t on the FBI stolen-art database doesn’t mean that it’s not stolen,’” Schachter said.
That was all it took to send him on a hunt involving two more artworks, a helpful museum director and eventually the FBI.
For years, Schachter has crisscrossed the country in his convertible – first a chocolate brown Mercedes and now a newer grey model – on a quest: “Finding really strange crimes with oddball characters in interesting places.”
Schachter, who turns 61 Monday, has documented those gripping tales in a blog called True Crime Road Trip. An excursion near San Angelo, Texas, lent itself to a story about a woman killed by a car bomb. In Victorville, California, he recounted a bank robbery. Ketchikan, Alaska, set the scene for a story involving a decomposed body.
The True Crime Road Trip series allows him to combine his interests. Before each trip – some lone excursions and others with his partner, Patrick Wayne Wilkes – he dives into a lengthy research process he compared to searching for gold in a murky mine.
“It’s just days and days of drudgery and you’re hoping it will end with a eureka,” he said.
As Schachter drove away from the New Mexico antique store in 2023, trading his typical true-crime podcast for a soft-rock radio station, he mulled over the question about Jerome and Rita Alter.
He had learned about the store, Manzanita Ridge, from news coverage of the de Kooning’s discovery and decided he had to visit after watching The Thief Collector, a 2022 documentary about the heist. After his trip, Schachter returned to the documentary, which explains that Manzanita Ridge had not bought the Alters’ entire estate. A portion was donated to a local thrift store, which then sold some pieces through Scottsdale Art Auction.
Intrigued by that detail, Schachter began looking through auction catalogues online.
After finding two paintings from renowned New Mexican artists that were seen in the documentary, he used a reverse-image search to identify them: Aspens by Victor Higgins and Oklahoma Cheyenne by Joseph Henry Sharp.
Those titles differed from their listings by the auction house, Fall Landscape and Indian in a War Bonnet. In a bigger revelation, the search results indicated that Higgins’ work, a landscape of yellow trees against periwinkle mountains, was part of the collection at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico.
Schachter’s online investigation yielded a story about a heist at the Harwood in 1977, when both paintings were lifted from the gallery walls. But things did not quite connect. That thief was caught and jailed, and the paintings were returned.
Then came the eureka: a newspaper clip that mentioned a theft at the Harwood in 1985 – the same year the de Kooning was stolen.
Schachter crafted a three-paragraph email to the museum’s executive director, choosing his words carefully. His message had to be concise but not curt, and he packed the note with detail to prove a point that its recipient might find crazy.
“I knew I had something amazing,” he said.
Juniper Leherissey, the Harwood’s director, grew up in Taos and knew that Higgins was a founding board member of the museum. But until Schachter’s email, she had no idea its collection of 6500 items, mostly paintings and prints from New Mexico, had a few holes.
On the spring afternoon in 1985 that Aspens and Oklahoma Cheyenne were stolen, David Witt, the museum’s curator at the time, was away in Santa Fe. In a cruel irony, he was attending a seminar on museum security.
Witt found out that evening that the pieces were missing. A police report filed that day says that a woman using a wheelchair had asked for assistance getting to the gallery, which was then in a small space on the second floor of a building that doubled as a public library. The sole librarian on duty left his post behind the circulation desk and took her upstairs in a rickety elevator.
The excursion to and from the gallery provided just enough time for a second visitor to yank two paintings from the walls, put them under a long black raincoat and walk out the front door.
“The subject had his hands in his pockets as if he was holding something under his coat,” the police report stated.
Eight months later, the de Kooning disappeared, with the thieves using a similar tactic. It is possible the Harwood thefts were a test run before the more brazen heist.
Schachter ended up finding the key clue first. Once Leherissey received his email in October 2023, she created a binder of evidence: old police reports, handwritten notes from Witt, a notice from the US Justice Department and details of the museum’s collection.
After she delivered that evidence to the FBI in March 2024, the museum and Schachter were left in the dark for more than a year. Susan Garst was on the case.
Garst, who has a background in archaeology and fine arts, is one of the FBI’s special agents whose sole focus is stolen artwork. Decades could come and go before pieces resurface, but her team operates under one basic premise: “It’s still stolen no matter how many years pass.”
With the help of the head start from Schachter, Garst tracked down the buyers who had separately purchased Aspens for US$93,600 and Oklahoma Cheyenne for US$52,650 in 2018. The buyers, who she said would remain anonymous but had operated in good faith, agreed to relinquish ownership to the FBI.
So 40 years after the artwork was swiped from the Harwood, and two years after Schachter began pondering during a convertible ride out of Silver City, Garst hand-delivered the paintings to the Harwood in May. They are on display through September 7.
Recovery is only the first step in the process. The next is responsibility, although time can work against those efforts. The Harwood thefts are closed in the eyes of the Government, Garst said, because the Alters are dead.
Schachter, however, remains fixated on travel logs showing that the former teachers voyaged lavishly around the world. He is confident that the Alters – who were never criminally charged – stole other artworks and resold them.
Schachter acknowledges that he has no proof. Yet. It can be easy to overlook details in the background until you know what to search for.
One of the photographs shown in the Thief Collector documentary captures Jerome Alter playing the clarinet at his New Mexico home. Behind him, the yellow trees of Aspens leap from behind a lampshade. The solemn face of Oklahoma Cheyenne hangs above.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michaela Towfighi
Photographs by: Philip Chueung, Jamie Lee Taete
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