Who steals a $160 M painting just to hide it in their bedroom for 32 years?

It's a mystery that baffled authorities for more than 30 years. In 1985, a painting by Willem de Kooning (Woman-Ochre) was slashed from its frame at the University of Arizona's art museum. Now valued at roughly $160 million (US), the whereabouts of the missing masterpiece remained unknown until 2017, when it turned up in rural New Mexico, hanging in the bedroom of two retired school teachers, Rita and Jerry Alter. 

It's a premise straight out of a Hollywood thriller, or at least a true-crime podcast: a daring heist that stumped the FBI, with two mysterious figures at its centre. 

When Allison Otto first read about the case, and the growing suspicion surrounding the Alters, the filmmaker knew there was a great story waiting to be told. The tale of the painting's recovery occupies the opening acts of her first feature, The Thief Collector, which arrives May 3 at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival.

"The story haunted me for months," Otto tells CBC Arts in a video call from her home in Seattle. There was something about the Alters, she says. "They just seemed like the unlikeliest people to have committed this crime." 

As she reached out to folks who knew the couple, she learned the Alters were maybe a touch more adventurous than other middle-class Americans of their era — notably, they were globe-trotters, vacationing in 140 different countries. But consensus describes Jerry and Rita as being ordinary enough, beloved by family and friends. (The Alters passed away before the painting was retrieved; Jerry died in 2012, Rita in 2017.)

All these years, were they secretly harbouring an interest in Abstract Expressionism — a passion that was positively criminal? Were these the kind of people who'd rob a museum?

Who steals a painting, anyway?

While art theft is very much a real-world concern, the sort of criminal who actually absconds with a priceless painting is rarely, if ever, infiltrating the world's great museums in a three-piece suit, pocketing Monets for kicks. (Thomas Crown types, they are not.) And in one portion of The Thief Collector, Bob Wittman, founder of the FBI's special art crime squad, explains the reality. 

Says Wittman, most of these bandits fall into one of three categories. Some are the equivalent of high-stakes shoplifters; theft, for them, is purely a crime of opportunity. The second and most common profile is a thief who robs for money — although most of them can't unload the loot without drawing the law's attention. The third, says Wittman, is the criminal who steals for the love of art: the titular "thief collector." 

"They feel that since they care about it, they are entitled to have these pieces," says Wittman in the film. "Those are the most dangerous [thieves] and they're the hardest to capture." 

As Otto kept digging into the story, it seemed this unassuming couple from New Mexico fit the profile. The missing painting was no longer the mystery; the real riddle was the Alters themselves. Who were these people, and why did they do it?

Why do we love stories about art heists so much?

The story of Woman-Ochre's theft and recovery winds up taking a backseat in the documentary as Otto spends most of the film speculating on Jerry and Rita's escapades. But like dangling a 100-carat emerald in front of a cat burglar, the mere mention of a heist is bound to entice audiences.

From the Ocean's series and beyond, there are few popcorn thrills like a heist flick. Maybe we're suckers for the comfort of a predictable plot structure. Maybe there's something oddly satisfying about watching a movie star quadruple-backflip their way through an alarm system — or bother themselves with any criminal chore, for that matter, so long as it's accomplished with an Olympic-level grade of precision. 

Whatever the reason, we love these stories, and that seems especially true at the moment. On Netflix alone, heist dramas have delivered some of the streamer's all-time biggest hits. Lupin — which opens with a raid of the Louvre — became an international sensation upon its debut in 2021. At the time, it was their second most-watched original series ever. (Money Heist, a long-running thriller, sits in their current Top 5 rankings.) As for movies, the No. 1 entry is Red Notice, a caper where Gal Gadot, Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds are all in pursuit of a museum-grade tchotchke.

Those are just the scripted examples. In terms of non-fiction fare, is there any bigger genre than true crime? And art-world intrigue has driven some of the less murder-y examples of note. Maybe you've binged all four hours of This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist. That 2021 Netflix docuseries dives into the unsolved looting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a case that remains on the FBI's top 10 list of art crimes. 

Myrocia Watamaniuk, senior international programmer at the Hot Docs Festival, is plenty aware of the genre's popularity. (She's curated the festival's Artscapes program for years.) "Scandal, art theft movies: people love to watch them. I know that. I could have programmed this one [The Thief Collector] just based on that idea," she says.

"The reason that true crime and all those things are so popular is because there's a huge number of people, like myself, that really want a ringside seat to those kind of stories," says Watamaniuk — stories that offer a "complete break from reality," she explains. And for most of us, the tale of museum-burgling retirees would probably check that box.

'It's not your traditional art heist film'

But there's more to The Thief Collector than the thieving itself. Otto describes the picture as a story that mixes fantasy and reality. "It's not your traditional art heist film, it's like a weird psychological exploration," she says. It's this side of the documentary that compelled Watamaniuk to include it in this year's festival. "The real selling feature," she says, "is the fact that it's so much more."

To provide a peek into the couple's lives, the doc mines a stash of Alter family photos and home movies. But in building Jerry and Rita's characters, Otto relies on a book of short stories, clunky tales of adventure that Jerry self-published in 2011. (For the curious, it's still available on Amazon; that's how Otto scored her copy.)

"Once I started reading the stories, I realized how integral they were to understanding Jerry's psychology and the uncanny parallels between these stories and his real-life desires," says Otto. There's a chapter about a museum theft, for example. But there's also one about murdering the handyman — which leads to one of the doc's more unexpected turns: a real-life inspection of the Alters's old property, specifically the contents of their septic tank. 

Dramatizations of Jerry's stories appear throughout the doc, and Otto's styled them with the same symmetry and rich retro colour palette as a Wes Anderson joint. (The director definitely has a thing for heist plots — Bottle Rocket, The French Dispatch, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Fantastic Mr. Fox — so it's a cute and fitting style choice.) There's a re-creation of the Tucson robbery too, with Glenn Howerton (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and Sarah Minnich (Better Call Saul) playing Jerry and Rita respectively.

It's the stuff of Hollywood fantasy

"In Jerry's mind, you know, he was a hero," says Otto, talking about the book of short stories. "His characters are living this grandiose life and they're doing all these wild things and they're all representations of him." 

The real-life theft of the de Kooning was a bit more "stumbly bumbly" than a Hollywood heist, Otto notes. A few pieces of circumstantial evidence have further linked Jerry and Rita to the crime. The couple would have been in Arizona at the time of theft; a family photo confirms they were there for a Thanksgiving dinner. And if you slap a fake moustache on Jerry, the couple resembles the police sketch of the suspects. Eyewitness accounts also describe the thieves making their getaway in a red sportscar, much like the one the Alters drove. 

But if they stole the de Kooning, why did they do it? "I think it was for the thrill of it," says Otto, who came to that conclusion while reading Jerry's book. "I think he was frustrated by not ever receiving accolades that he felt he deserved," she says. "This was a way to both fulfill his thrill-seeking desire and also to stick it to the man," she laughs. "Like, I am just as qualified as you. I can even one up you by stealing this painting. I'm better than all of you, kind of a thing. It's a combination of arrogance and ignorance."

There's not a ton of scholarship on the subject of heist films, something Julian Hanich, an associate professor of film studies at the University of Groningen, mentions in a 2020 essay on the topic. But in Hanich's analysis, fans of the genre crave a lot of the same things as Jerry. 

On screen, looting the Met isn't a cut-and-dry crime, it's an act of rebellion — a way of breaking past the gatekeepers, in both the literal and think-ier sense. The thieves are often under-appreciated geniuses, blessed with some secret talent that's uniquely lucrative in the context of a cinematic heist (explosives, acrobatics, styling outfits for the Met Gala). And as for motive, plenty of them simply do it because they can. (Thomas Crown, after all, turned to crime out of boredom.) It's a fantasy of total mastery and freedom. "Getting in and out whenever you want: this is the dream the heist heroes turn into a fictional reality," writes Hanich.

But maybe in the Alters' case, that dream was an actual reality. "That book of stories is almost — it is his voice," says Otto. "It's his way of revealing what he did, confessing to it in a sneaky kind of way.

The Thief Collector premieres at the Hot Docs Festival May 3. For more info and showtimes, visit www.hotdocs.ca