How Love Turns People into Art Thieves: The Psychology Behind Infamous Heists Part IV: Thrill Seeking and The Masters of Deception

Woman-Ochre by Willem de Kooning

As you may have read in Parts I, II, and III of this four-part blog post, I challenged myself to uncover the underlying psychological reasons people become art thieves. I found those who steal for love of the art to be the rarest and most intriguing.

Art Theft Psychology: When Love, Thrill-Seeking, and Deception Collide

In a cold sweat, I watched a chilling reenactment of Jerry and Rita Alter stealing Willem de Kooning’s famous Woman-Ochre painting from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985.

Directed by Allison Otto, this 2023 documentary, The Thief Collector, details the life, love, and crimes of a couple even more secretive and duplicitous than Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus.

At 9:00 a.m., the morning after Thanksgiving in 1985, Jerry and Rita Alter were the first visitors to the UAMA. They pleasantly greeted the curator, who then disappeared into his office. Prepared to steal, Jerry wore a fake-looking mustache and a long coat. A headscarf covered Rita’s blond hair.

Jerry quickly headed upstairs while Rita kept the female guard distracted with questions about the art in the main-floor gallery. Upstairs, Jerry quickly sliced the de Kooning out of the frame, rolled it up, and stuffed it into his coat. He joined Rita downstairs, and they quickly left, driving away in their red, sporty car.

The Woman-Ochre Heist: A Couple’s Calculated Crime in Plain Sight

The theft was quickly discovered. There were no surveillance cameras, but a police sketch of the couple was produced, and the FBI worked the case, but to no avail. The couple and the painting could not be found, and the case was closed two years later in 1987.

This theft has similarities with the Brietweiser pair’s style in the division of labor: the woman diverts, the man steals, a daytime crime, and a small museum. But Stéphane would never have harmed a beloved painting by cutting it out of its frame, nor would either he or his partner have allowed anyone to identify them as the thieves.

The Alters did not seem nearly as smart or practiced at stealing, but this comes into question later.

Masters of Deception: Hidden Pathology Behind Seemingly Normal Lives

At the time of the theft, the Atlers were popular high school teachers. Rita was a stunning-looking speech teacher, and Jerry, a fit, dark-haired music teacher who played the clarinet. Students, colleagues, and family members described them as a charming, devoted couple who spent most of their free time together and travelling to exotic places.

After the theft, the Alters drove 4 hours back to their ranch house in Cliff, New Mexico, population 293. Their modest home was isolated in a vast desert landscape with no other dwellings in sight. In the front yard, busts of famous artists and musicians sat on a strange circle of pillars surrounding a display of vicious-looking cacti.

Inside, the couple remounted the de Kooning in a faux-gold frame and placed it in their bedroom so it could be seen only from their bed when the door was closed. Then they resumed their pleasant-faced lives (or lies).

In 2017 (more than 30 years later), when the de Kooning painting was discovered in their bedroom after both Alters were dead, no one could believe these attractive, fun-loving people could have committed this audacious crime. Woman-Ochre was now worth $160 million, having increased in value from $400,000 in 1985.

When the FBI reopened the case, investigators and psychologists participated. An early question was why had this couple stolen the Woman-Ochre painting? Clearly, not for profit. It must have been for love, or the work had some other important meaning. Since de Kooning showed this picture in 1955 at the place and time the couple met, they might have seen it together and connected it to falling in love.

Alternatively, the content may have spoken to them for another reason.  It portrays a naked female figure rendered in de Kooning’s aggressive version of Abstract Expressionism. While this Dutch American artist was a leading figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s, and particularly famous for his groundbreaking “Women Series,” most ordinary viewers think Woman-Ochre (like the seven other famous “Women” paintings) looks grotesque, violent, and sloppily painted.

Now, why would this nice, well-groomed, attractive couple want something so ugly and unpleasant, especially in their bedroom? A psychologist like me might say, because that’s who they really were inside. Woman-Ochre represented their secret identity.

As those involved probed the hidden layers of the Alters’ lives, other valuable stolen paintings and sculptures were found among their belongings, which were then residing in a church thrift store. Questions were also asked about how this couple of modest means paid for all the month-long trips they took, often three times a year.

Perhaps they were international art thieves, it was speculated. They stole and sold art to pay for their addictive, thrill-seeking trips. If this were true, they stole art for love as well as for profit, something Stéphane Breitwieser did only when he was desperate.

Confounding the mystery of this couple further was the book of crime-related short stories Jerry wrote. It was described by Allison Otto “as either pulp fiction or stranger-than-fiction accounts of his own life.” Several of his stories are dramatically re-created in the documentary The Thief Collector. “The majority of the protagonists in [Jerry Alter’s] stories are avatars of him and his wife, and the stories are very over the top,” Otto said.

There is a story called The Thief Collector, and another called The Thrill Seekers, in which a mother and daughter steal an enormous emerald. There is a story about Jerry and Rita watching an African ceremony in which two men viciously kill each other, and the couple can’t stop laughing.

It gets worse. In another enacted story, Jerry suspects that the Mexican itinerant worker he hired to make repairs is screwing his wife. He sneaks up behind him, smashes a sledgehammer into his head, and then dumps the body into their septic tank. The enactment is very convincing, and I close my eyes when the action repeats. Holy shit, is the untalented Jerry Alter really The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith’s murdering con artist?

In the last scene of the documentary, it is discovered that the Alters never had their septic tank cleaned in 30 years, and the police begin searching for the remains of a murdered corpse. Also discussed was the fact that everyone knew Jerry had hired several itinerant workers over the years, but none of them were ever seen again.

Suspicion crackled in the hot, desert air. Had Jerry gotten rid of all of them? Unfortunately, this is a confusing section of the film, and the findings are maddeningly inconclusive.

In a final scene, his nephew reported that Jerry had ambitions to be a great musician, writer, or artist. Many of his garishly colored, repetitive paintings of intertwined intestinal-like pipes covered the walls of their house.

He never succeeded in any of the arts. But his nephew recalled him holding up his book, saying, “If I can’t be famous, I can at least be infamous.” And taunt people with the great unsolved mystery of Rita and me, he left unsaid with a wicked smile.

As a mystery-loving, art-loving psychologist, I am left with the uncivilized wish to strangle them both were they still alive.

As a psychologist who has studied and treated couples for over 40 years, I’ve seen an impressive number of disturbed pairings, but none of them begin to approach the pathology of Jerry and Rita Atler. I thought the worst kind of couple were those who screamed bloody murder or verbally sliced each other up, like George and Martha of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. 

But Jerry and Rita were infinitely scarier, given their pathology was hidden behind a shared façade of smiley normalcy. Jerry’s weird abstract paintings were like pictorial versions of them. At first, the images appeared like brightly colored pipes curling around each other. I thought the paintings strange and unappealing. But the obsessive number of them in every room on every wall began to feel creepy and threatening, like a host of cheerfully colored snakes coiling to strike.

Wrapping Up This Series

From a therapeutic point of view and looking deeper at why my chosen thieves “loved” or “needed” the art they stole, I think certain art spoke to them at a potentially curative emotional, often unconscious level. I’d speculate that for Stéphane and Ann-Catherine, the art they chose to steal made them feel special and cared for, the beautiful works like soothing substitute parents in a harsh, unloving world.

Only ten inches tall, the small ivory sculpture Adam and Eve by Georg Petel (1627) was among the first spellbinding artworks to set off the couple’s 6 year stealing spree. Stéphane was transfixed by the sculpture’s dazzling beauty, by “the first humans gazing at each other as they move to embrace…” He had to possess it and frequently stroked the loving couple in his attic bedroom. Perhaps he imagined saving them (along with himself) from Satan, who was coiled in the tree next to them.

Professor John Feller treasured the beauty of the porcelains and ceramics he so meticulously researched. He only stole these precious objects when he perceived them as cast aside and neglected, crying out for the care and protection only he could provide. Feller seemed to strongly identify with their fragility, vulnerability, and neglected state. I speculate that in his mind he was rescuing not stealing the mistreated works to provide them with the loving care he so desperately needed but could not secure for himself. 

In the case of Dr. Frank Waxman, his primary aim seemed to be to steal famous artists’ works. Admiration or “love” for the artwork appeared to be secondary to his wish to acquire the artists’ celebrity, prowess, and importance. In Waxman’s fantasy, if he could annex or identify with Picasso’s giant stature, he could obliterate his own smallness and deficiencies. 

The Atlers’ thefts were driven by more than one psychological motive. But regarding the theft of de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre, I think that in addition to their general attraction to this striking work, the most compelling draw was that it spoke to their true but hidden selves.

The blatant grotesqueness, savagery, and rage expressed in this violent painting possibly gave this undercover nightmare couple a kind of comfort nothing of conventional beauty could provide.

At the end here, I’m left to wonder why I become so enchanted with certain paintings. My longest-term love affair is with The Open Window by Matisse. A beautiful reproduction of it sits in front of me right under my computer screen, where I’ve written most days with it for the past 10 years. Whenever I need to pause or get stuck, I look down on it, and the blaze of colors flares up off the page and warms my face and energizes my flagging spirit.

The Open Window by Matisse

I never tire of looking at the red-and-gold French shutters flung open against walls of turquoise and rose, the view of blue-and-orange sailboats tilting on pink waves. The sky in brushstrokes of white, blue, and purple, the whole scene radiating light, air, and joie de vivre.

Now, when I’m in the analytic mode and wonder why I’m so enchanted with it, the answer seems right in my face. It's the joy of life that Matisse so magically conveys. The painting allows me to experience a brief sensation of pure joy, and I realize, rather sadly, that this is an emotion I cannot easily access and rarely do.

Ironically, Matisse was often depressed, but somehow, he found a way out of the darkness by creating a host of joyous paintings.

I thank you, Papa Matisse and all the other artists who have brought beauty and joy to our world of love-struck art fans.

***

Find out more about my novel, Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief: A Kate O'Dade Art Crime Novel

Let's connect on social media: Find me on X, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky