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The mystery of a nondescript middle-aged couple hanging a stolen $150m Willem de Kooning painting behind a bedroom door in their Cliff, New Mexico home may be closer to being solved after the FBI agreed to assist to trace two more paintings. which had been in the couple’s possession.

A new twist to the story of Jerry and Rita Alter, a pair of teachers from New Mexico who financed a life of travel and adventure to the extent that they were suspected of being international art thieves, recently emerged when a major agency confirmed US federal law enforcement that. was involved in the case.

The couple, now dead, are believed to have led a series of art heists in the mid-1980s. In one, the couple allegedly walked into a museum in Tucson, Arizona, and stole the de Kooning using a fraudulent method. A woman distracted the museum staff with questions while a man in a fake mustache lifted the painting from the wall, put it under his coat and walked out.

The Woman-Ochre heist was never definitively pinned on the Alters – the photo was found in 2017 after Rita died and now hangs back in Tucson. But the FBI’s involvement in another heist in the same year could help resolve questions about the Alters’ motives, if not their apparent theft scheme.

According to their travel agent, who was interviewed for The Thief Collector, a 2022 documentary about the couple, they were “adrenaline junkies” who loved to fly to one country and then pay smugglers to hide to another country.

According to the Taos News on 24 April, the second theft involves two paintings by the Taos Society of Artists – Victor Higgins’ Aspens and Joseph Henry Sharp’s Indian Boy in Full Dress – from the Harwood Art Museum in Taos, New Mexico. in March 1985. .

A woman in a wheelchair distracted the museum assistant by asking questions about the elevator while a man in a long black coat – not wearing a fake mustache in this case – went up the stairs to the second floor where he got the paintings hang them.

“Then he’s up there with a roomful of paintings and he can make as much noise as he wants – but he works quickly,” former curator David Witt told the outlet. “By the time he was done with his commotion up there, [the attendant] back at the circulation desk – just in time to hear Jerry running down the stairs.”

In a news report at the time, the paper said the heist occurred while Witt had been attending a seminar on museum security in Santa Fe. A police report said there was “no physical evidence left at the scene”.

After Jerry Alter died in 2012, five years before his wife, their nephew cleared out the home and donated some items to the Town and Country Garden Club thrift store in Silver City. Customers at the shop saw the de Kooning and the Taos work was sold at an auction in Arizona.

But now the Harwood Taos Museum wants them back and has called on the FBI to help find them.

Harwood executive director Juniper Leherissey told the Taos News that she thinks they were bought out.

“I don’t know if they’ve been sold by that buyer since then, but someone probably bought and lived with them for many years,” Leherissey said. “Hopefully they will recognize that they belong to the Harwood and give them back.”

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