Sketches were circulated in an effort to identify them, but no leads turned up[2] until it was recovered 32 years later after it was offered for sale at a New Mexico antique store, where it had been part of the estate of Jerry and Rita Alter, two former New York City public school teachers who had retired to the area.

[1][3] The museum did not put it back on exhibit,[4] except for one day before sending it to the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, and raised funds to restore and repair it.

Suspicion has fallen on the Alters, who were photographed at a family Thanksgiving dinner in Tucson the night before the theft, and displayed it in their house in a manner that only they were likely to have seen during their lifetimes.

They also did bear a slight resemblance to the couple in the sketches, and Jerome Alter later wrote a book of stories in which two characters carry out a similar theft of a museum piece to reserve for their own exclusive enjoyment.

De Kooning started Woman-Ochre, an extension of his earlier Woman series, in 1954 while living in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village along with other artists and intellectuals of the New York School.

The former, especially Jackson Pollock, felt the artist had been unable to sustain abstract expressionism's goal of pure painting by resorting to what was still recognizably figurative art.

"[6] From outside the arts community, critic Emily Genauer attacked the works from a feminist perspective, calling them misogynistic depictions of women being tortured.

[6] After de Kooning completed Woman-Ochre in 1955, it was displayed at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York for two years, part of a one-man show of 21 works, mostly oils but with a few sketches, only two of them abstract.

[6] Ultimately, he gave UAMA 200 works including Woman-Ochre, many of which were by de Kooning and other abstract expressionist painters such as Pollock and Mark Rothko.

For two weeks at the end of August 1981, it was displayed at the Guild Hall of East Hampton, New York, which had exhibited many of de Kooning's other works and helped popularize him.

At the time the museum had no security cameras, so investigators had to rely on eyewitness accounts[2] which described the man as in his late 20s, with dark brown hair, glasses and a mustache, wearing sunglasses and a dark blue water-repellent coat with a hood; the woman was said to be older, with a scarf and granny glasses, reddish-blonde hair, wearing a red water-repellent coat and tan bell-bottoms.

[2] Like many other art museums that have suffered thefts of works on display, it did not replace Woman-Ochre, instead placing a blank ochre-colored canvas on the wall behind the frame, where the cut fibers were still visible, to call attention to the loss.

She and her husband, Jerry, who had predeceased her in 2012, a former clarinetist and music teacher in the New York City schools, had retired to the area in 1977[5] and built a house on 20 acres (8.1 ha) of land near Gila National Forest[11] that included a sculpture garden with busts of Beethoven and Molière,[1] where they raised their own chickens and ducks.

She called up a friend, David Van Auker, who ran an antique store in nearby Silver City, and Roseman hired him to appraise the art and furniture in the house that the family itself had not wanted.

[8] Silver City has a large population of artists, and shortly after Van Auker put it on display, a customer recognized it as a work by de Kooning, a remark the proprietors dismissed.

[4] On the advice of the Albuquerque FBI office, which told him to put it in "a very safe place", Van Auker took the painting back to his Pinos Altos home and hid it behind his sofa,[13] staying up all night and guarding it with his guns.

[4] FBI agents from the Phoenix office, who had been investigating the theft since university police turned the case over to them, made the 225-mile (362 km) trip east[1] along with Miller and a UAMA team later in that day.

At the lawyer's house, where he was having a small party for family and friends, the Grant County sheriff greeted Van Auker, Miller and the FBI agents.

When she saw Woman-Ochre in the lawyer's home office upstairs, Miller fell to her knees and gasped, a moment Van Auker recalled as "electric".

A large stray black stroke in the upper left corner that matched that on the remnants provided the final confirmation, and Odegaard formally authenticated the painting.

[15] The instrument used during the theft to remove the painting from its frame was sharp enough to cut cleanly through the canvas, but for that same reason it would take a long time to match the threads exactly and reattach them, Miller explained.

Likewise, the window on the side of the room that faced the setting sun was equipped with a heavy blackout curtain that would have blocked sunlight from the direction when drawn.

Originally, UAMA expected to have Woman-Ochre back on its walls where it was stolen from after Thanksgiving 2020, around the 35th anniversary of its theft;[17] those plans were postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of many art museums at that time.

[18] Once she had finished that task, Rivers removed two layers of varnish, one added by MoMA in 1974 and the other by the thieves,[d] with solvent mixtures, allowing de Kooning's original colors to return.

She noted that one of the two varnishes was slightly fluid at room temperature, which had led to the painting collecting much of the dust in the desert air during the time it was in the Alters' home.

[21] While going through his aunt and uncle's estate, Roseman, who still strongly doubts that they were the thieves, found a picture taken showing the couple at a family Thanksgiving dinner in 1985, the day before the painting was stolen.

[22] In one piece of luggage in the house, Seawolf found a small compartment containing a scarf and glasses she believed were similar to those the female thief wore to the museum.

[3] One other person who did, an artist neighbor who went into the bedroom with the Alters' permission to photograph a painting she had made of them on horseback in the Himalayas, then hung there, recalled seeing the de Kooning and asking the couple about it; they did not answer her questions and did not want to talk about it.

[1] Roseman, who also saw the painting behind his aunt and uncle's door when he began arranging support services for Rita due to her worsening dementia early in 2017, but did not recognize it, has offered an alternative theory as to how the couple came into possession of Woman-Ochre.

[5] After the rediscovery of Woman-Ochre in the Alters' house, their neighbors, who described the couple as pleasant but generally keeping their own company, also noted that it seemed strange that they had been able to travel so much[20]—their book jackets said they had visited "140 countries on all seven continents, including both polar regions"[3]—on their salaries as public school teachers, or (later) their pensions, often being away from Cliff for weeks at a time.