The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!

by Alan Hirsch

  Perhaps because this letter was free of the rancor of the other letters to the Daily Mirror, and also lacked the flair of the ransom notes, it was dismissed as a hoax.

  While the thief took a brief hiatus, he was not prepared to follow the Mirrors advice and vanish from history. It wasn’t long before the case took its strangest twist yet. With the painting returned, the police had little hope of apprehending the thief. Four years earlier, someone had risked his liberty to commit an outrageous, well-publicized felony. Then, on and off for four years, he had desperately tried to ensure that the risk was not in vain while expressing increasing anxiety that he would be punished for the deed. He wanted money but also repeatedly demanded assurances of a pardon. Clearly, the painting meant nothing to him except as a bargaining chip. Having failed to get anything out of the bargain, at least he managed to return the painting and extract himself from the mess. If nothing else, he had the satisfaction of having pulled off the perfect crime. The last letter venting to the Daily Mirror was presumably the storm before the calm, the last he would be heard from. This turned out to be true . . . for several weeks.

  Chapter 10: DEFEAT

  When his letter of March 15 (Com 5) initially met the same fate as his previous ransom notes, Kempton Bunton sunk into a funk. All that was needed for his plan to succeed was a single man to see the light. “Had there been such a man,” he wrote mournfully in his memoirs, “television would have had 40 extra viewers every week, needy, lonely folk in the twilight of their lives. . . . Who would have worried at such a situation? I wonder if propriety be not a curse at times.”

  Faced with the world’s irrationality, Bunton reached his nadir (“fed up, tired, disillusioned”) in early 1965 and contemplated the unthinkable: surrender. “It would be heartrending to return the picture, but what else was there to do—destroy it? That would be the act of a mental idiot. I would have to retire beaten, just as I was over the TV campaign of 1960.”

  His depression did not last long. Just when despair brought him to the breaking point, someone actually responded to his last desperate appeal. And not just anyone but the influential Daily Mirror. Bunton claims to have learned of this development by way of a fluke. He kept up with the newspapers (ever hopeful that the theft, and especially his ransom notes, would be reported on) via libraries, which tended to carry “every paper excepting the Mirror.” Serendipitously, one day a passenger seated in front of him on a bus pulled out a newspaper and “Goya” caught Bunton’s eye. On closer inspection, Bunton saw the Daily Mirror’s front-page appeal to the thief to turn in the painting in exchange for an effort by the newspaper to help raise £30,000 by exhibiting it. “The headlines seemingly 10 feet high hit me full blast,” Bunton recounted in his memoirs.

  He thought the matter over for a few days, but, perhaps surprisingly, the sudden prospect of partial victory failed to bolster his spirits. Life taught Bunton to expect the worst, and now he found himself increasingly nervous that the Mirror’s choice of exhibition spot would be inadequate. “What if after having acquired the picture, they fobbed me off with a side street showing?”

  Accordingly, he responded to the Mirror’s offer with the aforementioned letter of March 21, insisting on a guarantee that £30,000 would be raised. That letter set in motion the series of events described in the previous chapter, culminating in the return of the painting.

  Bunton’s memoirs convey his thought process throughout the tense exchange between himself and the Daily Mirror. The newspaper’s refusal to guarantee the £30,000 naturally alarmed him, producing “another checkmate.” He struggled to discern how the end game would play out.

  “I felt reasonably certain that no committee of five would redirect the money, but what if the collection amounted to a paltry few thousand?” Because that possibility “would represent failure, and a failure cannot afford to be caught out,” he decided to return to waiting mode. But just as the authorities had outwaited him for four years, the Daily Mirror also showed more patience than its negotiating partner. Finally, Bunton said “to hell with the ‘thing’—I would return it to the Mirror.”

  A defeated Bunton “took the Duke from his ‘prison,’ opened him up, and examined the portrait carefully for possible damage. There he lay upon the bed looking contemptuously at me.” Bunton had observed The Duke’s contempt the first time he had eyed him four years earlier, and The Duke apparently hadn’t lightened up. Now Bunton felt compelled to treat the contemptuous stranger better than The Duke treated him. “He would have to be cared for a little longer. At all costs that sarcastic face must be protected.”

  Sarcastic seems a bizarre description of the countenance of Goya’s Duke of Wellington, but Bunton, never a fan of the duke or his portrait, appears to have suffered from the inverse of the Stockholm syndrome—over time feeling increased disdain for his captive. Certainly he felt bitter about how everything was finally playing out.

  “How the hell could society value such a thing at £140,000 when half the world was starving?. . . My small attempt to remedy the situation had failed.”

  Given his chronic failures, Bunton reckoned, “I would have to be careful at this last juncture.” He wrapped and secured the painting with special care and decided to leave the parcel far away from his home in Newcastle. A plan took shape to take the train to Birmingham, drop the parcel off at the left luggage office, and post the ticket to the Mirror.

  Bunton realized the obvious utility of having someone else physically return the painting. To the police, in court, and in his memoirs, he consistently maintained that he had recruited a “teddy boy” he happened to spot while milling around the left luggage office in Birmingham. The young man had willingly executed the errand, then handed Bunton the ticket. Why did this teddy boy give his name as Bloxham? In his memoirs, Bunton cryptically writes, “Somehow somewhere the name of Bloxham turns up as the name given by this teenager, but I was never aware that any name was necessary in the depositing of a package.”

  With good reason, Bunton does not claim that the name was fabricated by the luggage room attendant—what motive could the attendant possibly have for volunteering a name if he wasn’t given one? Regardless of whether it was necessary in 1965 for someone to give his name when depositing a parcel in the Birmingham station, the young man (teddy boy or otherwise) who dropped off the painting did give his name as Mr. Bloxham. Here Bunton shows his ability to make a clever lawyerly diversion, culminating in his suggestion that the name “must remain a mystery.” (One aspect of this case does indeed remain mysterious, but, as we shall see, the identity of Mr. Bloxham is not it.)

  Bunton returned to Newcastle, where he waited a few days, clinging to the hope that the Mirror would reverse itself and guarantee the £30,000. Then he returned to Birmingham (“via the Hitch Hike method”) and sent the ticket for the parcel to the Mirror. He did so from the outskirts of the city. “Feeling disgusted at the whole affair, [I] did not bother even to enter Birmingham, let alone check as to the parcel.”

  Disgusted, but before long also relieved. “Listlessly I read the headlines, [and] at least I was safe. No one could connect me with the affair, and one could breathe more freely now.”

  He remained curious how much money the exhibition of the Goya would fetch. “At least Wellington was going to do some good, even if only a trifle.” He followed the newspapers closely in search of the outcome but found no mention of an exhibition of the painting. “I was shocked, astonished, and puzzled.”

  Things turned out even worse than Bunton had feared: Instead of The Duke being exhibited at a “side street showing” that might raise a “paltry few thousand,” it would be exhibited nowhere, unless one counts the National Gallery’s exhibit of Spanish works, which of course raised not a penny for Kempton Bunton’s charity of choice.

  Bunton did not accept defeat graciously. He composed and sent off the angry letters to the Daily Mirror described in the previous chapter, and he seethed even more than those letters convey. In his memoirs, Bu
nton alleges that the Mirror was duped by gallery director Lord Robbins, whose behavior was inexcusable. “It is not a lawbreaker he is denying, but the people for whom this battle was fought.”

  As for the Daily Mirror’s response to his angry letters, its insistence that it had broken no promise, Bunton notes only that these “idiotic comments” merited no reply. He resolved to do exactly what the Mirror proposed—to vanish from history. “I was now finished with the whole affair.”

  At this point in his memoirs, Bunton digresses to describe “a very serious incident that happened at this time.” As it turns out, this incident proved crucial to later events connected with The Duke. Bunton’s son Kenneth was living in Newcastle with a woman named Pamela Smith. Bunton observes, “I am not what one would call a religious person, and the fact that my son was so to speak ‘living in sin’ did not in the least bother me.” What did bother him, however, were the recurring “violent rows” between his son and the live-in girlfriend.

  Like many an unwise parent before and after, Bunton chose not to keep a suitable distance from his child’s messy relationship. Rather he visited the couple regularly, and “of course advice was freely given by me to both of them.” But apparently his advice had no effect, or at least nothing helpful. The failed relationship (or perhaps his well-meaning meddling?) in turn helped produce “the shock of my life.”

  One day Bunton dropped in at the abode of his son and Pamela Smith but found no one home. He doesn’t come out and say that he intended to visit Pamela rather than his son, but that can be inferred, since he notes that “my son would be at work and his ‘wife’ [was presumably] at some shop or maybe gossiping with a neighbor. . . . I sat down idly to await her return.”

  Both Kenneth Bunton and Pamela Smith have long since passed away, so we will never know why Kempton Bunton paid Smith daytime visits. No one has ever suggested anything illicit between them, although in his memoirs the unhappily married Bunton remarks in passing that “Pam and I were the best of friends.” At other times he expresses hostility toward Smith, which she would eventually return semipublicly. It is unfair to infer anything untoward about their relationship. Perhaps Bunton came by that fateful day simply to dispense some of his “freely given” advice about how Pamela might better get along with his son.

  If there was indeed anything improper about this visit, what transpired may be considered condign punishment. By happenstance, Bunton noticed an old envelope on the mantelpiece. “It was no business of mine, but I did pick it up.”

  He was shocked to see his own address on the envelope. Inside, he found a copy of one of his letters to the Daily Mirror sent near the end of the Goya affair. It turns out (he reports for the first time in his memoirs) that he was in the habit of writing rough drafts of such letters in pencil before resorting to the block capitals that he would later draft and post. He intuited that he had accidently dropped this letter at his son’s house and that Pamela Smith read it and placed it on the mantelpiece as a way of communicating as much to him. Whether this surmise makes sense, and for that matter why he carried around a rough draft of the letter in an envelope addressed to himself, are issues not easily adjudicated at this juncture. Regardless, Bunton concluded, “My secret is out.”

  He admonished himself not to panic. “It may be that the contents [of the letter] had not connected her conscious mind with Goya.” He decided to “wait and observe her behavior” before deciding how to proceed. Fate gave him that opportunity forthwith—Pam showed up at her house. Kempton reported that he left an hour later but gives no account of what happened in the interim apart from a one-line description of what did not happen: “None of us had mentioned anything of the note in the old envelope.” That silence failed to reassure Bunton. To the contrary, that “very fact alone gave me the firm impression that she knew everything.”

  The idea that Pam Smith was on to him made the next few weeks difficult for Bunton. He grew increasingly convinced that “Pam had me connected with Goya” and feared that “after the next argument with my son, she may come out into the open,” especially because the offer of a reward for information about the missing painting remained outstanding and she would surely have found that prospect hard to resist. In sum, “I knew that she had put two and two together, and only her regard for me had kept her silent.” But he could not trust such virtue to last indefinitely, so “it was I who decided to come into the open.”

  Before doing so, Bunton wished “to make sure that Pam actually did know.” That does not mean that he wished to ascertain with certainty her knowledge so as to avoid turning himself in unnecessarily. Rather he meant it literally. He would (for reasons he does not explain) make sure Pam knew the truth: “I at once told her everything.” Pam pleaded with him not to come forward and assured him that she would not turn him in. But Bunton could not believe her. “Money is a strange master,” and the reward now at Smith’s disposal “had me frantic.”

  He decided to preempt Smith’s recovery of the reward, going to the police to confess before she came forward to identify him as the thief. This solution came at a cost—”I shrank from coming forward as a two-time loser. . . . I would be called an out and out idiot,” but a little reflection set his mind at rest. “Why should I be ashamed? There had been nothing dishonorable about my part of the case. [Lord] Robbins, by accepting all and giving nothing, was the real villain of the piece.”

  Bunton’s resolve to turn himself in came too late to spare his own marriage. His irritability and panic over Smith’s impending treachery led to “endless arguments with the wife over nothing in particular,” until Bunton abruptly walked out on his spouse of forty years. In his memoirs, he tentatively attributes blame to his recurring whipping boy: “I wondered vaguely if Wellington had any hand in it.”

  A few days of aimless wandering and lamenting later, Bunton found himself in London prepared to give himself up. At one point he stumbled past the National Gallery and considered resuming the battle with his nemesis. “Was it worth taking a last look at Wellington—no—it would be better not to do so. Hadn’t I had four years in which to gaze my fill?”

  Instead he passed his last few hours of freedom in a pub, downing a pint of beer and drafting a written statement for the police about the entire affair. This included an explanation of why he was coming forward, “but [I] withheld the name of Pam, as I did not wish to implicate anyone. I had done this job—I would see it through.”

  Chapter 11: SURRENDER

  On July 19,1965, at roughly 8 P.M., a large bespectacled man with a round face and a gray crew cut, appearing to be roughly sixty years of age, showed up at the visitor’s room on the ground floor at Back Hall, New Scotland Yard. The man, who wore a gray suit and top hat, claimed to have information about the Goya stolen from the National Gallery four years earlier and returned two months earlier.

  Summoned to deal with the visitor, Detective Sergeant Frank Andrews said to him, “I understand you have information to give to police respecting the theft of the Goya portrait from the National Gallery in London.”

  “You don’t have to look any further, I am the man who took it,” the man calmly replied.

  “Can you give me some more information which will enable me to decide that what you are saying is the truth?” Andrews asked.

  “I am the man who took it and I am the man who sent it back. I can tell you exactly how it was packed. Will that do?”

  “Tell me first how you came to take the picture,” Andrews said.

  “I am not saying anything more. Is the reward of £5,000 still available if I’m turned in by someone?”

  Andrews said he did not know and again asked the man how he took the picture. The man again declined to respond but pulled from his pocket a small writing pad and said, “This is the actual pad I wrote the ransom notes on.”

  Andrews, familiar with the ransom notes, gave the man a piece of paper and requested that he “write me some words on this piece of paper in the same manner in which you wro
te the ransom notes.” The man removed a pencil from his pocket and wrote, “I have decided to turn myself in as I have reason to believe that somebody else is about to do so.”

  Andrews proceeded to summon his immediate superior, Detective Chief Inspector John Weisner, who then took the lead in interviewing the intriguing stranger.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” Weisner asked.

  The man replied, “I am turning myself in for the Goya.”

  “Are you saying that you stole it?”

  “Of course. That’s why I am here.”

  Weisner asked for the man’s name and address but instead received a surprisingly aggressive response: “That can wait. As soon as you decide to charge me I’ll tell you who I am but not before. Are you going to charge me?”

  The above interaction took place more than two decades before a groundbreaking book, Confessions in the Courtroom, illuminated the surprisingly common phenomenon of false confessions. The authors, Professors Saul Kassin and Lawrence Wrightsman, divide false confessions into three categories, two of which result from aggressive interrogation tactics by police. The third category, the “voluntary false confession,” involves someone coming forward of his own accord, often in high-profile cases, out of desire for notoriety or to protect the real culprit out of love or fear. While Confessions in the Courtroom sheds light on the voluntary false confession, it describes a phenomenon already familiar to law enforcement in 1965: Three decades earlier, the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby elicited more than two hundred people coming forward to take “credit.”