The Story Told Around the World

On the morning after Thanksgiving in 1985, a man and a woman walked into the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson. Within minutes, Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre had been cut from its frame, and the pair were gone. The case went unsolved for thirty-two years. Then, in 2017, the painting was found behind a bedroom door in the New Mexico home of Jerry and Rita Alter, two retired schoolteachers. How it got there has never been proven, and no one was ever charged. The story has been covered by newspapers, magazines, television and documentaries around the world.