was a backer of the project, and one day Wolfgang showed up at the production house to cut some initial footage. Helene first met him in an editing trailer. "I thought the guy was a real bigmouth, a lunatic," she says. But during a weeklong seminar on 16-millimeter film production organized by Fischer, "I saw that he was an absolute perfectionist, intelligent, educated, and a totally open, social human being," she says. Fischer was smitten by the attractive, girlish 34-year-old: "The first time I saw Helene, I said to myself, I'm going to marry this woman and have children with her," he tells me. At the end of the seminar, she broke up with her partner and moved in with Fischer. Around the same time, the pirate documentary collapsed in rancor, leaving both the boat and crew stranded in Majorca. (Helene says Fischer gave away the boat, at a loss of at least $100,000, and paid off the crew.) In February 1993 they married, and Wolfgang took Helene Beltracchi's last name. Their daughter, Franziska, was born nine months later. Helene Beltracchi tells me that she discovered the truth about Wolfgang's secret career "the first or second day" of their relationship. They were at his home in Viersen, and she noticed the paintings of a number of famous 20th-century artists hanging on the walls. "I asked him, 'Are these all actually real?' . . . . And he said, 'They're all mine . . . I made them.' I said, 'So