The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!

by Alan Hirsch

  We have, to this point, been ignoring a crucial datum about Bunton—one that was in fact ignored for fifteen years and that necessarily calls for a reassessment of the man. He did not steal the Goya. Of course, it has always been assumed otherwise for a good reason. The wrongful conviction of Kempton Bunton was a case of inaccuracy but not injustice. Rather, from almost the moment he learned what his son had done, Kempton Bunton embraced the act as his own. He never corrected the misconception, not even in his memoirs. There was a fleeting moment, after his son confessed in 1969, when Bunton acknowledged his own innocence. But when the authorities chose not to pursue the matter, he blithely resumed his identity as the proud convicted felon, the man who had pulled off a great crime in service of a great cause and gladly paid the price for his deed.

  This leads directly to the third of Bunton’s potential tragic flaws—his indifference to truth. In his interview with the police, in depositions, at his trial, and in his memoirs, he did not hesitate to lie. While many of Bunton’s fabrications centered on the theft of the painting, and thus helped deflect attention from his son John, his motivation went beyond paternal protectiveness. He may have convinced himself that this was his sole motivation, but he didn’t quite convince his son. A half century later, John Bunton described his father’s motives as follows: “His goal was to ensure I wouldn’t be in any danger, and his TV license campaign was a convenient personal motive aimed to put the focus on him. The fact that it was able to draw attention to his campaign was a bonus. I also think he thought the publicity may help him get his plays published.”

  John Bunton is surely correct that his father’s mixed motives involved a degree of personal aggrandizement. But, all things considered, John’s assessment seems too generous. Kempton Bunton could have helped his son cover up the theft easily enough simply by concealing or anonymously returning the painting. Instead, he did almost the opposite. He seized on his son’s action and turned it into his own crusade. Even more, he turned it into his identifying act, that for which he would be long remembered. (In his biography of Jeremy Hutchinson, Thomas Grant observed that Bunton had established his place in an “English gallery of demotic hero-villains” led by Robin Hood.)

  Bunton clearly relished his notoriety. His detailed memoirs, which he tried to market, revolve around the theft. He went to his grave cultivating his image as the man who had stolen the Goya. It was a brazen case of identity theft (although his clever attorneys might have argued that it is not identity theft when the “victim” voluntarily yields his identity, as John Bunton effectively did).

  Kempton Bunton didn’t just seize credit for a crime he had not committed; he clung tenaciously to that credit. In his seventy-five-thousand-word memoirs, he never gets more worked up than when discussing Pamela Smith’s claim that he was not the actual thief. When considering his comments about Smith’s accusation that John Bunton was the culprit, we must keep in mind that she was correct. Nevertheless, Bunton refers to Smith as a “dangerous lunatic,” a “troublemaker,” a “hysterical unstable woman,” a “slanderer,” and “a public nuisance.” And he’s just getting started. Smith’s claim that John was the Bunton who stole the Goya was a “cock and bull story” bred of “desperation” for some combination of money, revenge, and notoriety. Or so Kempton speculates while lamenting that her dastardly motives “will forever be a mystery to me.”

  Bunton excoriates a fair number of people in his memoirs, but often with some leavening reflection, some recognition of nuance or mitigating circumstances. His assault on Pamela Smith, who exonerated him of a felony, stands out for its single-minded ferocity. Maybe an element of this is personal—there is an intimation of some unusual relationship between Smith and Bunton, and she and his son Kenneth had a volatile relationship. But what drove Bunton crazy was Smith’s official declaration that someone else had pulled off the daring theft of the Goya. She threatened his (bogus) identity, an unforgiveable sin.

  A Bunton defender might respond that he waged his hyperbolic attack on Smith to divert attention from the accuracy of her charges and thus to protect his son. That hypothetical defense is unconvincing. If all he cared about was protecting John, Bunton could have left Pamela Smith’s accusation out of his memoirs altogether rather than highlighting it. Smith’s claim was never aired publicly. Bunton went out of his way to address it and (if his memoirs were to be published, as he hoped they would be) therefore publicize it. She clearly touched a nerve. How dare someone suggest that he was not in fact the important historical figure who had pulled off an art theft for the ages?

  The fact that Kempton Bunton did not actually take the Goya only enhances his allure. Seizing on someone else’s crime has a special audacity and also illustrates the difficulties that pervade any legal system. Possessing a stolen object for four years and attempting to ransom it off constituted multiple felonies. On top of that, Bunton committed serial acts of perjury. None of that was punished. Instead he was convicted for something he didn’t do. You get your fifteen minutes one way or another, even if for the wrong reason. And, at a time when we are learning about the frequency of wrongful convictions, he stands as a colorful example—someone who wished to be acquitted even as he wished to receive credit for the acts for which he stood trial.

  Kempton Bunton was a charming charlatan who took himself too seriously. While he lays a claim to our attention, the real hero of this story is in most respects his opposite, genetics notwithstanding. The apple fell far from the tree.

  John Bunton stole Goya’s Portrait of the Duke in part to support the cause of his overwrought father. In the immediate aftermath of the theft, Kempton came to London to protect John. But, over time, they essentially changed places and reversed the natural order of things—the son protecting the needy and immature father. John wouldn’t put it that way, in part because he dislikes attention and lacks grandiosity. For the better part of fifty years, John Bunton lay low and allowed his father to indulge his crusade, enjoy the limelight, and feel consequential.

  John Bunton’s life, like his father’s, lends itself to vastly different prisms. The case for him as anything but heroic is easy to make. John’s single public accomplishment involved committing a felony that he himself dismisses as “stupid.” He then let someone else take the fall for him, and he spent the rest of his life in anonymity. To be sure, one should credit him with turning away from a life of petty crime and becoming a responsible citizen and devoted father. Those accomplishments, common though they may be, are the sort that sustain civilizations, recalling the lovely ending to George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, the paean to all the ordinary folks “who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

  But John Bunton’s life has been “hidden” in a way that is much more interesting than that of most ordinary folks. If Kempton Bunton’s defining act involved stealing his son’s identity, John’s defining act was willingly yielding his identity to his father. Kempton, but not John, has a Wikipedia page. If someone were to write one for John, it would surely emphasize that the most significant event of his life is one he mostly hid from.

  Yet seeing John as a mere supporting actor in his father’s farce turns reality on its head.

  When Christopher Bunton first confirmed that his father, not his grandfather, had stolen the Goya, he remarked similarities between the two: His father, like his grandfather, had started life as a mischief-seeking ne’er-do-well. But they turned out fundamentally different. Kempton talked a good game, but he never could have taken the Goya. By contrast, his son had the requisite physical ability to squirrel The Duke out of the National Gallery, and also the will. But John lacked imagination. He acted first, thought later. What could he do with the painting? Call his father. After that, he was done with it—whereas Kempton’s genius lay in his ability to dream up and execute a plan to exploit the theft after the fact. They were, in hindsight, a perfect criminal pair, a father–son team for the ages: One had the wherewithal to do the crime, the other to take
the credit.

  If Kempton Bunton was all talk and no action (at least with respect to the Goya), John Bunton was all action and no talk. Whereas his father spilled tens of thousands of words fabricating how he had taken the painting, treating the police and jury and would-be readers of his memoirs to multiple versions, John Bunton himself said next to nothing, even when asked. When I queried whether any part of him felt proud to have pulled off the near-perfect crime, the only theft of a painting in the history of the National Gallery, he replied, without elaboration, that the theft was “the stupidest thing I ever did.”

  John Bunton’s recognition that a felony that accomplishes nothing should be lamented rather than celebrated already puts him well ahead of his father in terms of self-awareness. But the bigger difference between them is really the difference between John Bunton and most people in comparable situations: He never attempted to capitalize on his notoriety. Even after he was outed and could easily have come forward to exploit his youthful escapades, he opted to remain out of the limelight. Asked whether he ever felt that his father had usurped him, John replied tersely: “I never wanted credit.” Chris, his son, confirms that John has always been “keen to avoid media attention.”

  Unlike Kempton and the legions of others who get their fifteen minutes of contrived fame, John Bunton really did do something noteworthy—immoral and illegal for sure, but certainly impressive, indeed (as respects the National Gallery) unprecedented. John Bunton could have taken bows for the physical accomplishment and boldness, even while acknowledging the ultimate folly of the deed. But he has declined to celebrate himself in any fashion. He lacks his father’s attachment to public declaration. He will produce no memoirs explaining, justifying, and calling attention to himself.

  While John Bunton eventually came forward and agreed to the true story finally being told, he did so out of concern for his family. He maintains hope that this book “will bring attention to Kempton’s plays and give them a chance to be published or at least seen by someone that counts.” If that happens, he remarked, perhaps it will “lead to some kind of financial legacy that would add more irony and be so fitting.”

  John Bunton adds, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens.” He may have inherited his father’s excessive optimism, but he has surely earned the right to expect the improbable.

  Chapter 24: (NON)CONCLUSION

  Starting the day the Goya was noticed missing, August 22, 1961, until more than fifty years later, when newly released documents established that the wrong Bunton had been blamed and punished for the theft, the case was always a combination of whodunit and howdunit. For almost half a century, chroniclers of this crime thought Kempton Bunton the culprit, but there were always some who doubted Bunton’s guilt. The notion that a large, elderly man could not have committed this crime accounted for the open skepticism of Judge Aarvold at Bunton’s trial and may have influenced both the jury and Aarvold himself in holding Bunton only minimally accountable.

  As it turned out, the doubters were right—the theft was pulled off by the much younger and more athletic John Bunton. That Kempton Bunton knew the actual culprit explained the major piece of evidence supporting his guilt: the bizarre ransom notes revolving around his pet cause. His son stole the painting, but Bunton wrote the notes. It all came together.

  It should come together—such is the nature and appeal of true crime. When law enforcement, reporters, or amateur sleuths eventually piece together the facts surrounding a crime, the seemingly inexplicable becomes explained, mysteries are resolved. Robert Frost’s epigram about poetry’s payoff, the “momentary stay against confusion,” applies equally to crime solving. We figure out not just the who but the how and everything else. The world, or at least this slice of it, comes to make sense.

  When I was first attracted to the Goya theft many years ago, it was precisely because of the tantalizing unanswered questions. Was it sheer coincidence that the painting was stolen fifty years to the day of the theft of the Mona Lisa? How did Kempton Bunton pull off this athletic feat? Or, if Bunton was innocent, why did he take credit/blame for the theft? Why did a jury produce the remarkable verdict of guilt for stealing the frame but not the painting? Who was the Mr. Bloxham who returned the painting? Who was the man who confessed in 1969?

  As I began finding answers to these questions, other questions emerged. The fact that John Bunton, not Kempton, kidnapped The Duke of Wellington explained a lot but opened up new lines of inquiry—because, as it turns out, people should have known all along that John Bunton was the actual culprit. Pamela Smith came forward and fingered John Bunton as the thief during Kempton’s trial. John Bunton himself came forward and confessed in 1969. The confirmation decades later that he was telling the truth raised anew a crucial question: Was he disbelieved and if so why? If he was believed, why did the authorities not prosecute him? It is particularly difficult to put together a puzzle in which the pieces keep changing.

  I have tried to answer all the pertinent questions raised by this case. Readers will judge how successfully. But if the goal of true crime is to put together a large and complex puzzle, it is rarely fully achieved. The awkwardness of experience usually frustrates the attempt to create a consistent narrative that explains all the pertinent facts. Think about the O. J. Simpson case, a crime exhaustively investigated and the subject of literally dozens of books. Virtually all observers conclude that Simpson did in fact murder his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman, and most pieces of the puzzle fit, but a few remain discordant, such as the fact that the glove left behind by the killer did indeed appear too small for Simpson’s hand. Was it sheer coincidence that this glove was discovered by Mark Fuhrman, a rogue cop who had been removed from the case and thus had a motive to “solve” the crime dishonestly? In leaving such issues unresolved, the Simpson case was more rule than exception: In the real world, the evidence rarely fits tidily into a narrative that explains everything.

  On the other hand, when the pieces that do not fit are too large or too central, we cannot be confident that the crime really is solved. In the Simpson case, there are reasonable explanations for the ill-fitting glove, various ways it may have shrunk. As for Fuhrman being the one to find it, well, such things happen. Moreover, maybe Fuhrman did plant the glove, in an effort to frame a man who was in fact guilty. Perhaps none of these things seems likely, but one of them is probably the case. If improbable meant impossible, numerous solved crimes would have to be declared unsolved.

  But when it comes to the theft of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, a large problem remains. After perusing thousands of pages of documents and talking to various people with firsthand knowledge of the theft and/or trial, after reading Kempton Bunton’s memoirs and peppering John Bunton with questions, after reading the files of Kempton’s attorneys, just about everything fits into place. Indeed, all but one question has been answered satisfactorily. As it happens, that one question goes to the heart of the case: the timing of the theft.

  Timing is obviously a crucial component of many criminal investigations, particularly in murder cases. The authorities have numerous vehicles for estimating time of death, ranging from the well-known (autopsies) to the more obscure (forensic entomology—the study of insects surrounding corpses). These sciences tend to be inexact, creating a focus, in many cases, on whether the accused could have committed the crime given the relevant time frame. Depending on the particular set of facts, either the prosecutor or defense argues that the apparent time of the crime is more flexible than one or more witnesses or other evidence would suggest.

  The situation involves different particulars, but the same general idea, with crimes other than murder. No expert could shed light on when The Duke of Wellington had been kidnapped from the National Gallery, but none was needed: Eyewitnesses did the trick. Because the painting was seen at 7:40 and noticed missing shortly after 10 (and again shortly after midnight), and given that the security system went on around 9, it seems obvious that the painting was taken
sometime between 7:40 and 9 P.M. However, this irresistible inference contradicts the account of the crime given by John Bunton.

  In the original typewritten account of the crime that he gave me, Bunton said he entered the gallery at roughly 4:30 A.M. Of course, he could have been mistaken—but by so many hours? Could he really recollect going in at the crack of dawn when he actually did so at night? The unlikelihood is compounded by his specific recollection that, in the days before the crime, he held conversations with a security guard, who told him that the alarms were switched off at 4:30 A.M. for cleaners entering the building. Moreover, Bunton gave me a detailed account of how he spent the hours before the crime, including the fact that, after entering the yard post-midnight, he “had to hang around for 2 hours hoping alarms were off. At around 4:30 I went in.”

  What could possibly explain the enormous discrepancy between the apparent time of the crime and Bunton’s recollection? The most obvious explanation is that someone simply remembers incorrectly. If so, whom? It has to be either two security personnel or John Bunton, but either option poses problems. On the one hand, it seems impossible that the security men were mistaken—partly because there were two of them and partly because they registered their perceptions contemporaneously, whereas John Bunton gave his account many years later.

  It is at least theoretically possible that the two warders (both long since deceased) falsely claimed to have noticed the painting missing because they thought it even more incriminating if they failed to notice it missing. However, that would have been a strange calculation on their part, since no one knew when the painting disappeared.

  More likely, then, Bunton was mistaken about the time of the theft. The problem, as noted, is that it seems impossible for him to be off by so much. At the conclusion of my research (long after he gave me the narrative stating 4:30 A.M. as the time of the theft), I mentioned to John in an email that security personnel reported the painting missing before midnight. He replied unequivocally, “It was 3 A.M. I’m not sure why they would say otherwise.” Note that Bunton originally said 4:30. This change dovetails with a broader phenomenon: On any number of smaller points, Bunton’s recollection today is at variance with his recollection at earlier points or with independently established facts. For example, he believes the police did not ask him for a fingerprint when they interviewed him in December 1965, two weeks after his father’s trial. But contemporary records show that they did. And in 1969 he told police that he did not recall giving his name as Bloxham when he returned the painting, whereas he told me that he did in fact give that name (at his father’s suggestion).