Reported by Michaela Towfighi

(Excerpt featured below. To read full report, go to: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/arts/de-kooning-higgins-sharp-harwood-fbi.html)

When Lou Schachter visited the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 2014, he appreciated the flowers by Georgia O’Keeffe, the cityscapes from Edward Hopper and the signature splatter of Jackson Pollock.

But he was most intrigued by the empty frame on one of the gallery walls.

A small plaque nearby explained that in 1985, someone had cut Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre” from the frame and made off with it. No one had seen the painting since.

Schachter, a corporate consultant with a homespun interest in unsolved mysteries, was fascinated by the story of one person distracting security while another took the abstract oil painting of a nude woman. He loved to write and took notes with the intention of digging into the theft someday.

The de Kooning turned up before he got around to it. In 2017, it was discovered hanging behind the bedroom door of Jerome and Rita Alter, retired public schoolteachers who had died. Valued at $400,000 when it was stolen, the painting is now considered worth more than $100 million.

After the painting’s long restoration process, Schachter got back in his car and drove hundreds of miles from Palm Springs, Calif., to Tucson, Ariz., to see “Woman-Ochre” where the empty frame had once been.

If this were anybody but Lou Schachter, that might have been the end of the story. But after visiting the museum, he drove past the Alters’ former ranch house in Cliff, N.M., and continued on to the antique store in nearby Silver City that had unknowingly bought the de Kooning as part of the Alters’ estate sale.

A conversation with one of the store’s owners, David Van Auker, gave Schachter a thought: Was it really the only painting the Alters had ripped from the walls of a museum?

“David sort of had a twinkle in his eye as he said to me, ‘You know, just because something isn’t on the F.B.I. stolen art database doesn’t mean that it’s not stolen,’” Schachter said.

That was all it took to send him on a hunt involving two more artworks, a helpful museum director and eventually the F.B.I.

From Drudgery to Eureka

For years, Schachter has crisscrossed the country in his convertible — first a chocolate brown Mercedes and now a newer gray model — on a quest: “Finding really strange crimes with oddball characters in interesting places.”

Schachter, 60, has documented those gripping tales on a blog called “True Crime Road Trip.” An excursion near San Angelo, Texas, lent itself to a story about a woman killed by a car bomb. In Victorville, Calif., he recounted a bank robbery. Ketchikan, Alaska, set the scene for a story involving a decomposed body.

His posts offer intricate accounts of the protagonists, down to the details of where they ate breakfast. Schachter is meticulous, hanging on to the old calendars that provide a thorough account of his itineraries.

He retired in 2020 but has been traveling and writing for decades. After two books about sales, he is now working on narrative nonfiction about Los Angeles corruption and New York City in the 1970s.

The interest in true crime sprouted from an unsolved case in his own family. Nobody was charged after his grandfather was fatally shot in a Los Angeles restaurant in 1933.