The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!

by Alan Hirsch

  Cussen turned to the ransom notes. Had Bunton given careful thought to the first note, the quirky August 30, 1961, ransom note (Com 1) penned ten days after the theft?

  “I just took a pencil and wrote it at random. . . . It just came naturally.”

  Cussen took him through the letter line by line, asking for Bunton’s interpretations.

  “Are you really saying you expected any result at all to come out of that letter?”

  “Well, I still think a result should have come, if people were half-humane at all.”

  “Had you really expected there would be [results]?”

  “I was absolutely confident there would be.”

  Cussen took Bunton through other Com notes more quickly, before turning to the all-important typed letter to Lord Robbins dated May 20, 1963, which formed the basis of a separate charge of “uttering a threat.” Bunton denied having anything to do with that letter, but Cussen reminded him that his fingerprints had been identified on the pendant letter sent that same day to Lord Rothermere. Cussen implied that Bunton had grown “angry and bitter” at the silence that had greeted his previous letters and hence had written directly to Robbins. Bunton insisted that he was only “disgusted,” not angry or bitter, and adamantly maintained that he knew “nothing whatever” about those two letters.

  Cussen pressed as to why, when Bunton received no response from the authorities throughout 1963 and 1964, he still chose not to return the painting. Bunton replied that he had held out hope. Cussen made one final attempt to break through.

  “Was not the real reason why you kept it in the cupboard of your home because it was going to stay there so far as you were concerned at that time forever?”

  “Well, I did give it up.”

  Cussen fired back: “Is not the real truth this: You knew there was no hope, and this idea you have put to the Court that you always intended to return it is not the correct one?”

  “Well, I say that you are completely wrong.”

  The frustrated barrister turned to the judge and asked if it would be a good time to adjourn. Court was adjourned until 10:30 the following morning.

  Before cross-examination could resume, other matters had to be taken up. First, Cussen informed the Court that the portrait had been brought back to the courthouse and placed in the jury room. However, the painting was now in a new frame—the original lying in pieces in the Thames or in some apartment in Kings Cross or God-knows-where. Judge Aarvold expressed concern that the new frame would confuse the jury and proposed that the government “call a witness to give some idea of the [original] frame.”

  The judge next asked when they wished the jury to view the painting, noting that “it is not a portrait we want to keep in the central Criminal Court.” For every minute The Duke spent in court, visitors to the National Gallery would find an empty space where he belonged.

  Cussen replied that now would be a good time for the jury to see the work of art at the heart of the trial. Aarvold called in the jurors and informed them that they would be taken to see the painting and would find a gentleman in charge of it who “will remain completely and utterly silent. He is not there for you to ask questions of, he is only there as custodian; not that we do not trust you, of course.” The jury was ushered into a back room for a close-up look at The Duke of Wellington.

  With the jury again gone, the judge and counsel for both sides resumed discussion about the frame. They agreed that Philip Hendy, the director of the gallery, who was present in court, would make the ideal witness as to the frame. Court was adjourned so that the attorneys themselves could look at the painting. It is unclear how viewing the portrait could affect either side’s approach to anything, especially since the judge had rebuffed defense efforts to question the painting’s quality or authenticity, but perhaps the lawyers simply wanted another look at the object whose purchase had set everything in motion. Goya’s Portrait of the Duke, like the Maltese falcon in Dashiell Hammett’s famous detective novel, had become the stuff dreams are made of.

  At last everyone returned to the courtroom and Cussen resumed cross-examination of Bunton, picking up as promised in 1965, when a depressed and disgusted Bunton continued to get no response to his ransom notes. Cussen pounced on Bunton’s description of the theft (in Com 5) as “an adventurous prank.” Pressed on that language, Bunton conceded that “it was serious, but I considered charity much more important.”

  The prosecutor turned to the March 21, 1965, letter to the Daily Mirror, which said that if £30,000 were raised, “you will get the portrait.” Cussen placed on this language the obvious construction: Unless the money were raised, the Mirror would not get the portrait. Bunton rejected that interpretation, insisting that under no circumstances did he intend to keep the portrait.

  Cussen turned to the typed letter to Rothermere, which Bunton denied having authored. He went through it line by line, eliciting that various parts expressed views similar to those held by Bunton. The unfazed witness remarked with a straight face, “There must be thousands of people who hold my views.”

  Reprising an old line of questioning, Cussen demanded to know whether the taking of the painting was “in order to revenge yourself on authority in general?” Here, somewhat surprisingly, the usually unyielding witness replied, “You could put it like that to some extent.”

  Cussen took a last stab at getting Bunton to acknowledge authorship of the disputed letters to Robbins and Rothermere and his having in fact tossed the frame in the Thames. Failing at that, he finally turned the witness over to Hutchinson for re-direct-examination.

  Defense attorney Eric Crowther later recalled that Cussen’s cross-examination of Bunton consisted of “two charming old gentlemen having a sparring match.” If so, Bunton won the match on points. Parts of his story made no sense, and he’d been caught in contradictions, but he had more or less successfully stuck to his story with respect to what were emerging as the key points of contention: He always intended to return the painting and had not written the May 20, 1963, letter to Robbins.

  Chapter 18: FINAL ROUNDS

  Notwithstanding Bunton’s success in fending off Cussen, the defense was sufficiently worried about certain vulnerabilities that Hutchinson engaged in a fairly extensive re-direct-examination. He got Bunton to retract the suggestion that he was motivated by revenge; he was, of course, motivated only by charity. He also asked a series of questions to drive home what was obviously becoming the main defense theme.

  “You have told the jury on numbers and numbers of occasions that if a collection was started you would have sent the picture back?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have also said that if there was not a collection, well, then you intended to send it back?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you took [the painting] . . . did you ever intend to keep it forever?”

  “Not at any moment.”

  “Or destroy it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or sell it?”

  “No.”

  “Or injure it?”

  “No.”

  He turned to what was emerging as a serious problem for the defense: the frame. Hutchinson asked whether, at the time of the theft, Bunton envisioned treating the frame any differently from the painting.

  “No. Just the same,” Bunton said.

  As for the disputed letters to Robbins and Rothermere, Hutchinson elicited that these, unlike the letters indisputably written by Bunton, had been registered as well as typed. He also elicited that Bunton could not have sent letters to Robbins and Rothermere even if he had wanted to: he did not know their addresses. Cussen had brought out that the disputed letters, like several of the others, were postmarked Darlington. Under Hutchinson’s gentle prodding, Bunton dismissed this as “pure coincidence.”

  Hutchinson asked whether there was any threat or menace implied in the March 21, 1965, letter to the Daily Mirror, and Bunton responded, “None whatsoever.”

  “Did you have any intent
ion to try and frighten, threaten or menace the editor of that newspaper?”

  “Well, the suggestion is ridiculous.”

  At this point, the judge intervened, wishing to ask about a matter “I am interested in and I daresay the jury is interested in—the reasons for the return of this picture.” Aarvold asked a series of factual background questions, establishing the precise sequence of the various letters, culminating in the painting’s return. He specifically wanted to know why, after two months in which the Daily Mirror would not guarantee the £30,000 Bunton wanted, he nevertheless returned the painting on May 20.

  “I said I may as well get the best deal I can. They will get something. They will put it on exhibition, and if they don’t raise £30,000, they will raise £3,000.”

  “You do not say that in your letter [accompanying the left luggage office ticket].”

  “No, but that was the only deal I could get, so I took it.”

  “You said ‘Some future wise guy may offer to tell you all.’ That is all you sent in to the Daily Mirror?”

  This straightforward question elicited another one of Bunton’s head-scratching replies.

  “Yes, my Lord, but the idea was to keep my identity because even on the Daily Mirror exhibition it could have been any amount, and I wanted if possible to transfer the money for licenses if the sum was large enough. If it wasn’t large enough, they could have put the money to any charity.”

  Having hit a wall, the judge proceeded to advance his own theory as to why Bunton returned the painting.

  “Round about the 23rd of March your tongue was loosened a bit with a few drinks, and as you described it, you got a bit careless and you told your friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “The suggestion is—you might as well deal with it—that you, having told your friend, gradually worked up feelings of worry and anxiety, saying to yourself, ‘Good gracious, my friend may tell the police, I had better get rid of the picture,’ and with that feeling you put it into the Birmingham left luggage office on the 5th of May.”

  The defendant, never shy in the face of authority, responded as follows: “That is completely wrong, my Lord.”

  Ignoring the blanket rejection of his theory, Aarvold resumed his account of what had led Bunton to return the painting.

  “And having put it in the Birmingham left luggage office on the 5th of May, you did not take any action to send the ticket to the Daily Mirror until the 20th of May because your anxiety was getting greater. You were more worried about the whole thing, and you thought, ‘there is a £5,000 reward out for people to give me away. My friend may have mentioned it to somebody else and they may try to get the £5,000 reward. The best thing I can do is to remove the incentive and return the picture, and then perhaps they won’t give me away.’ That is the suggestion made as to the reason why you returned the picture.”

  Bunton reiterated that “that suggestion is completely wrong,” without explaining why.

  At this point, Judge Aarvold, having done the prosecutor’s job, backed off. He said, “Mr. Hutchinson, I put that as the suggestion which has been made about that matter. If you want to deal with it by further questioning, now is the time.”

  Hutchinson protested that the judge’s theory “is a completely new suggestion to me.” The judge had presented him a mess he had no choice but to try to clean up. In fact, Bunton had said that the fear of his friend blabbing and someone coming forward for the reward had caused him to come forward in August, two months after the painting had already been returned. He had not given this as his reason for returning the painting. If that was in fact why he had returned the painting, as Aarvold suggested, the notion that he always intended to return it suffered a severe blow.

  Hutchinson elicited from Bunton that he had returned the painting because his negotiations with the Mirror had given him some hope, not because he had feared someone coming forward for the reward. Sounding weary and perhaps discouraged by the judge’s intervention, Hutchinson declared his questioning complete. Cussen waived re-cross-examination, and Bunton was finally done. The large man descended the witness stand, perhaps sensing that his brief period of celebrity was winding down.

  Hutchinson called the second witness for the defense: Julius Grant, a forensic scientist with expertise in typewriters. Grant had examined the typewriter Bunton turned over to his attorneys and concluded that it was not the typewriter on which the disputed letters to Lord Robbins and Lord Rothermere had been produced. He was on and off the stand in just a few minutes, with Cussen declining to cross-examine.

  Hutchinson next called Bunton’s twenty-three-year-old son John, for the sole purpose of confirming that the typewriter in question was his father’s. John Bunton stated that he had lived in his father’s Newcastle house from November 1962 through February or March 1964 and that he recognized the typewriter, which was normally kept under a table. It was definitely the typewriter he was now looking at, and there were no other typewriters in the house. Cussen again declined cross-examination. The judge chimed in to ask John Bunton who used the typewriter. “My father, your honor,” he replied, before stepping down and resuming his accustomed seat in the courtroom as a spectator. He was on and off the witness stand even quicker than Julius Grant.

  Their combined testimony about the typewriter was potentially important. Significantly, all his Com letters, and the subsequent letters to the Daily Mirror, were handwritten, bolstering the defense claim that Kempton had nothing to do with the typed May 20 letters.

  John Bunton’s brief testimony also caused the memory of one trial participant to play tricks. In his memoirs, defense attorney Eric Crowther recalls Kempton Bunton telling him that he did not know how to use a typewriter—a surer way to debunk the notion that he had sent the typed letters. Crowther proposed calling Bunton’s wife as a witness about his incompetence at the keyboard, prompting Bunton to snap, “Do you want to ruin everything?” He proposed, instead, that a different family member, his son John, testify about his nonfamiliarity with typewriters. When the defense summoned John for that purpose, Crowther noticed that John was a dead ringer for the widely circulated Identikit of the Mr. Bloxham who had returned the painting to the left luggage office in Birmingham. Crowther recalled advising Kempton Bunton to get his son out of there, “unless you want him arrested too,” and the defense choosing not to call John Bunton to the witness stand.

  Crowther had no reason to dissemble, but his memory must have been faulty, because his account is demonstrably false: The trial transcripts verify what John Bunton himself vividly recalls: He did testify (and not about his father’s inability to type—to the contrary, he identified his father’s typewriter and said that his father used it). Apparently no one in the courtroom remarked a resemblance between the witness and the Identikit version of Mr. Bloxham, or at least no one thought to raise the matter.

  One more witness remained to complete the presentation of evidence. As promised, Philip Hendy, director of the National Gallery, took the stand to discuss the frame of the purloined painting. Hendy was questioned by Judge Aarvold rather than by the attorneys. Aarvold directed Hendy’s attention to the painting, which had been brought before him in the courtroom, and asked him how the original frame compared to the current frame. Hendy replied that the two were “virtually identical.” However, under further questioning, Hendy acknowledged, “The frame of the stolen painting had a rather better gold leaf, which was actually original. I don’t think that one is.”

  “I dare say you would not choose a poor frame to put round the Goya?” Aarvold asked.

  “The other frame was bought for that purpose. I went out and bought it on the day the picture came to the National Gallery. It cost £100.”

  Aarvold asked a court attendant to remove the frame so that the jury could handle it, remarking that it was heavy and admonishing, “Try not to drop it, members of the jury.”

  The witness stepped down, and Judge Aarvold asked Cussen whether he wanted the frame kept as a tr
ial exhibit or returned to the National Gallery. Cussen shrewdly opted for it to be exhibited, where it could remind the jury that Bunton’s “adventurous prank” had permanent consequences, however small.

  Now only closing arguments and the judge’s instructions remained. The closing arguments suggested what had increasingly become the focal point in the eyes of the attorneys: the quirky aspect of the Larceny Act that permitted, even required, Bunton’s acquittal if he had not intended to “permanently deprive” the National Gallery of the painting. The defense would again play its ace card: Bunton had returned the painting.

  During his questioning of Bunton, prosecutor Cussen seemed flummoxed by that stubborn fact. On several occasions, when Cussen proposed to Bunton that he planned to keep the painting if his ransom demands were not met, Bunton reminded him that he had not kept it, even though his demands were not met. But Cussen, in closing argument, seized on Judge Aarvold’s suggestion that Bunton returned the painting to prevent someone from receiving the £5,000 reward, a risk that arose only because Bunton had indiscreetly told someone about the theft. Were it not for that indiscretion, he would have kept the painting, defeating his legal defense that he always intended to return it. Cussen leaned on that argument in his final address to the jury.

  Defense attorney Hutchinson, for his part, dismissed this argument as a new theory trotted out “in the 59th minute” by a desperate prosecution (though the argument he so stigmatized had in fact originated with the judge). As noted, he had a point: Bunton had claimed that preventing someone from receiving the reward was why he had come forward, but that was two months after he had returned the painting. Hutchinson urged jurors to apply the letter of the law, even if they found absurd the idea that you can be innocent of theft solely because the theft was not intended to be permanent.