Hidden in Plain Sight - Josh Dean of Chameleon Weekly

On November 29th, 1985, the day after Thanksgiving, two people, a man and a woman who seemed to be young retirees, entered the University of Arizona's Museum of Art in Tucson shortly after opening.

This isn't a heavily traveled museum on the busiest of days, but at that hour, on a Friday, there was virtually no one there.

The woman, who had glasses and wore a scarf over her hair, stopped to talk to the security guard on duty about a painting that hung in the museum's stairs, while the man, who had dark hair, glasses, and a mustache, wandered off.

Not too long after, maybe five, at most 10 minutes, the man came back down from wherever he'd been, met up with a woman, and they both left.

It was a very short museum visit.

It wasn't until the guard on duty took his next walk through the museum's exhibits, the most routine of duties, because nothing ever changes in a museum, and was frozen in his tracks by something shocking.

One of the museum's most valuable paintings, Willem de Kooning's Woman Ochre, was gone, cut out of its frame and not with great care.

Snaggy fragments of the canvas were still there, attached to the wood frame.

The 30-by-40-inch abstract Impressionist oil painting was one of de Kooning's most famous and controversial works, estimated to be worth between $100 and $150 million.

So the museum called on the FBI's art crimes team to help investigate.

Agents had only two real clues, a rough description of the perpetrators, as well as the type of car they'd come in, a rust-colored sports car with black louvers in its rear windows.

Investigators got nowhere.

No suspects were ever identified, and the crime went unsolved.

Woman Ochre had just vanished.

In 2015, upon the 30th anniversary of the theft, the University of Arizona Museum of Art rehung the original frame, empty, with just some jagged edges of the original work still attached, and made it and its story part of the collection.

Everyone assumed the painting was gone forever, hanging in some evil mastermind's secret lair, or perhaps even lost or destroyed on the black market.

Then, in 2017, an antique dealer in Silver City, New Mexico named David Van Auker was asked to bid on the estate of a retired schoolteacher who just died.

Her name was Rita Alter, and she'd lived in a lovely house up in the scrubby, pinyon-pine-covered hills outside town for decades by that point, with her husband Jerry until he pre-deceased her about five years before.

David and his partners weren't really into estate sales, but the caller, the nephew of this recently deceased lady, mentioned that there was some nice mid-century modern furniture in the house.

So David figured, why not? He'd drive out and take a look.

The furniture was okay, nothing super great.

And I wasn't really thrilled with the estate, but I walked into the master bedroom and they had taken a door off of one of the dressers and and they had positioned it just so that you couldn't pick it up without closing the bedroom door i normally would never have closed the bedroom door and looked behind it but i had to close it to get this piece that they took off it made me think that it was positioned there purposely but when i closed the door i looked up at first i thought it was a print

It was not a huge piece and it was in a cheap gold frame behind a bedroom door where you'd hang something to cover a hole in the plaster, not to show off.

But then as I stood up, I could see the wrinkles in it and things and I realized that it was an actual painting.

So I called my partner into the room and I said, what do you think of this? And he's like, I kind of like it.