Disappearing Ink

by Travis McDade

  That was all about to change, because when the other two men from Kenyon saw Barth peering into the building, they walked over after him. They all reacted the same way—they had to get in there. They could see hundreds, maybe even thousands, of books stacked everywhere—it looked like the storage room for a bookstore, except with no discernible climate control and an iffy roof. But there was a more immediate problem than the books’ vulnerability to the elements, and he strolled over right behind them. Dreading their discovery of this very thing, Breithaupt tried to scatter them like pests, telling the men they had no business getting in the structure; it was Hupp’s property and not part of the agreement. Barth argued back that Breithaupt needed to get Hupp’s permission so that they could have a look. The agreement was based on good faith, and this was a clear breach of that. But Breithaupt did not get Hupp’s permission, and none of the men got in the shed that day. That was too bad for Kenyon, because when they came out two days later with the express purpose of getting in the “book barn,” things were much different. In the time since they’d been there, Breithaupt had been to work on the place; the books had been gone through, organized, and a great many of them removed.

  Still, the three set about identifying stolen books once again. Over the course of another day they managed to get 126 more items. So in the three visits he had made, Barth claimed a total of 300. Most of these items came from either the Kenyon Special Collections or the main stacks. But Barth also managed to rescue some books that belonged to other institutions including Ohio State, Ohio University, Ohio Wesleyan, Denison, and Kent State.

  Though this seemed like a lot of books to everyone involved—this was well before Barth had had a chance to do anything like a complete survey of the collection—it was a fraction of Breithaupt’s take. In addition to the ones he sold, gave away to friends and family, and had squirreled away on the Caves Curve Property, there was something else no one at Kenyon knew about. Breithaupt rented a unit at K&P storage on Pittsburgh Avenue in nearby Mt. Vernon. He kept books there, too.

  The Return of Christa Hupp

  Though neither Barth nor Temple knew it yet, the long process of getting their books back from David Breithaupt, and seeing him punished, was just beginning. Very soon after Barth went through the books to determine which of them belonged to Kenyon, Christa Hupp returned. The extraordinary influence she wielded over Breithaupt—and her competence in the arena of book sales—was then turned to direct their legal decisions in a way that proved so remarkably bad it almost seemed to have a malign intent. Shortly after she came back their attorney William Kepko resigned. From there, the couple started a practice of constant refusal to cooperate with Kenyon. Whatever good faith had been built up between Breithaupt and the college—strangely, given the fact that one had been stealing from the other for years, there was still an air of cooperation—was destroyed by Hupp. It was a development that would ultimately be absolutely ruinous for Breithaupt and bring more than a little trouble to other members of his family, but it would leave Hupp relatively unscathed. Whether that was by design or merely a happy accident for the unpleasant woman is impossible to know. In any event, Breithaupt would basically fall on his sword for Hupp—a sword that, it turned out, existed only because she created it.

  It seems likely that if the couple had retained Kepko and cooperated with Kenyon College, almost all of the tribulation that would be visited upon Breithaupt in the future would have been avoided. Instead, in the months and years following Hupp’s return, Breithaupt’s life took a sudden and dramatic downward turn. This process began near the end of May, exactly a month after the first discovery of the crime, when the Knox County Sheriff’s Office put in a call to the Columbus office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  By late May, it was clear to Captain Foster that the matter of David Breithaupt had exceeded an important threshold: there appeared to be more than $100,000 worth of items stolen. In addition to that, it was obvious that some of these stolen books had travelled interstate. So on May 25, the complaint against Breithaupt was forwarded to the FBI. An agent in the Columbus office then referred some of the details of the matter, gathered by the Knox County Sheriff, to the local US Attorney. She, in turn, analyzed the known facts, and then determined the case qualified for a federal prosecution. She assigned it to a prosecutor that afternoon and, just like that, set the ball rolling on a federal investigation.

  The FBI started its work on the shoulders of the Knox County Sheriff. The items that had been seized from the Caves Curve Farm included a Compaq laptop and twenty-eight floppy disks—these were handed over and analyzed. All the local authorities’ notes—including not only police but those of the county prosecutor—were forwarded, and by the middle of June a proper FBI case rumbled to life. After a few weeks’ lead time—and the traditional American mid-summer break—on Wednesday, July 5, the principals met for the first time. This meeting, held at Kenyon, included Special Agent David Stout, Chris Barth, Dan Temple, Dan Werner, and Captain Foster. It was here that representatives of Kenyon notified the FBI that their central goal was to get the books back. This is what they had said from the beginning, and demonstrated by not only making those trips to Caves Curve, but also by having already bought back the books they could locate. And it would remain, almost stubbornly, their central aim right up until Christa Hupp basically took the matter out of their hands. Barth presented the FBI agent with a list of the items he had so far determined Breithaupt had stolen, including ones they had bought back, gotten from the Caves Curve Farm, or knew to still be missing. Barth had also, by this point, researched books that he got from the farm that belonged to Ohio State and Ohio University—they had come up on a catalog search as either lost or stolen. That is, they had not been bought at any book sale.

  Barth also showed the FBI—who had Hupp’s email records for the past year—how to let people know who had bought books from her how they could positively recognize them as belonging to Kenyon. He described Kenyon’s marking techniques, and the various college or literary society bookplates that could be found in the books. In turn, the Kenyons were shown a list of books on a document the FBI found on Hupp’s computer—it had both book titles and Kenyon call numbers. Barth immediately recognized several books from the list as some he had seen on the nascent “missing list” he was creating for the general stacks.

  Creating a list of missing items from Special Collections was not overly complicated. A complete survey of the collection had been done around the time of Breithaupt’s hiring, so almost anything missing from the collection, even if not verified by being found in his house, or up for sale, or sold, could be attributed to him. (That is, attributed to him by people at Kenyon; law enforcement would need far more proof than simply a missing item.) But items stolen from the general stacks, of course, could have been taken by almost anyone. So a list of books missing from the general stacks that happened to coincide with a lot of the books on a list found on Hupp’s computer was a very helpful lead as to the sorts of things he liked to steal.

  Two weeks later, armed with what they knew from the Kenyon folks, two FBI agents met with Breithaupt, and his attorney, Kepko, who was then still on the job, at the Knox County Sheriff’s office. In a room straight from central casting—there was “a single light bulb dangling from a ceiling cord,” Breithaupt later remembered—he was grilled by two humorless agents. Under the influence of several Xanax, taken in anticipation of the event, Breithaupt told them, at length, about his time in New York, and his job at Kenyon. He denied any of the thefts, of course, and said that though he had been into the Special Collections on several occasions, it had never been without an escort. The reason he did this, he said, was because he had become recently interested in distinguishing between original engravings and reproductions. When he would find books on the stacks of the general collection, he would try to determine if the plates in them were originals. The only way to do this, he said, was by using the magnifying glass in the Special Collecti
ons. This was an excuse that had the interesting characteristic of being doubly untrue—not only was that not why he was in there, but there are far more obvious ways to tell an original from a reproduction than by using a magnifying glass. He also noted, in some detail, how he found books on the back dump, and others at various local books sales.

  Strangely, in an interview that consisted primarily of lies and obfuscation—and, at one point, a brief discussion of Breithaupt’s novel, also on the computer’s hard drive—the back-dock/book-sale dichotomy played a part in the only bit of helpful information he offered. One of the documents the FBI pulled from Hupp’s computer was a five page list of book titles—consisting of some 300 altogether—that was annotated with dates sold, amount paid, and a mysterious letter notation alternating between “b” and “k.” (On more recent entries, in place of either of those, there was a “?”) This list had been created recently, the FBI could tell, and probably in response to Temple’s request of Breithaupt in those friendly early days. He had never delivered on his promise to provide a list, but this recently-created document found on Hupp’s computer seemed at least to be an embryonic form of it. Like almost every excuse he used, this list was both overly complicated and beyond belief.

  Breithaupt explained to the men in the room that the “b” next to a title meant it had come from a book sale; the “k” meant it had been thrown out by Kenyon. So, if this was to be believed, not only had the couple been keeping meticulous track of the books they’d gotten from Kenyon, starting in May 1997, and how they got them—a task that seems, to say the least, peculiar—but that books from the college comprised basically the entirety of their business. That is, not only was every back dock book from Kenyon, so were all the ones bought at book sales. In fact, the only books that were not labelled as having come from Kenyon, via the back dock or some book sale, had the notation “gville”—something that was not explained, but that meant Granville, the home of Denison University. Those recent entries that had a question mark next to them—like for instance, a couple of Flannery O’Connor letters and a Joyce Carol Oates manuscript—had, of course, also come from Kenyon. (Why he had not simply slapped a “b” or “k” next to those was not explained.) In any event, whatever this document was meant to show, what it really showed was that the entirety of their business—and, therefore, their financial life—was dependent upon David’s access to the library. His desperate pleas to be let into Special Collections in the last weeks of his employment were now more clear than ever; everything he had going for him in life was based on the access he had to that room in the basement.

  What was not included on that list, of course, were any items they had sold before 1997, nor any items they had sold to booksellers, or by mail, or that David sold to dealers via email, or gave to friends and family. Nor, of course, were the many books still resting at the Caves Curve Farm included. Nevertheless, the list, as incomplete and alone as it was, was an astounding testament to the depth and breadth of Breithaupt’s thefts from Kenyon.

  Breithaupt was then shown a different list. This one had been created by Barth, and was comprised of 245 books—though not documents or manuscripts—missing from the Special Collections. The agent pointed to several books on the list and asked Breithaupt about them. One of these, Sherwood Anderson’s Marching Men, worth approximately $225, had been recovered from the Caves Curve Farm in the earlier sweep. The agent asked Breithaupt how he came to possess it. Breithaupt replied that he was not exactly sure, because he had more than one copy of it. One came from the Kenyon campus bookstore, he said. The manager, Jack Finefrock, had apparently bought too many books from Columbus-area bookstores, and they were crowding out customers and students. The bookstore at Kenyon had long been more than a bookstore, and Finefrock more than just the guy who ran it. It was practically a campus institution, where students studied and gathered, and an important part of the culture at Kenyon. It was also, interestingly, the subject of a number of security upgrades over the years because of book theft; Finefrock updated the electronic security as well as had undercover employees watch the stock. But to Breithaupt, of course, it was simply another place to say he got books.

  So, according to him, there were complaints about the bookstore, including by college trustees, that there was no room to study or walk around. So the bookstore conducted a massive sale where books sold for, at most, a dollar. In addition to the possibility that he got Marching Men at this book sale, he said he might also have gotten it at the Post Office dump, where students were known to throw books away. Or maybe at a book sale at the local public library. Some book sale somewhere explained it. Nevertheless, he took pains to mention, if there had been any indication in that or any other of the books he found that they belonged to Kenyon, he would, he said, have brought it to a library official’s attention. This was a strange thing to say, given that, in almost all of the books they sold, there was at least some indication of the college’s ownership. But things that did not make any rational sense, or stand up to the facts of the real world, were being said by David Breithaupt at that point nearly without pause.

  Despite this promising start, it eventually began to seem to the people at Kenyon that the FBI was not in a hurry to prosecute the crime. Both Breithaupt and Hupp were still at large, of course, and free to dispose of the books they still had. After the hurried clip of the first few days, and the prompt response of the sheriff’s office, the deliberate pace of the federal investigation—it was not until the second week of September, nearly two months after Breithaupt was interviewed, that members of the library staff were interviewed—was frustrating. But though people at the school did not know it, this is standard operating procedure for federal investigations. They usually take a long time. Worse still, the feds are generally less forthcoming with information than even local authorities. There are good investigatory reasons for this, of course, but that does not make it less frustrating. The FBI was doing extremely detailed work to bring in the case—but to the people at Kenyon, it seemed like very little at all was taking place.

  The FBI investigation worked in concentric circles of knowledge. Breithaupt himself, and the people closest to him, were investigated first. Then, in September, other librarians were interviewed. In late October, the FBI, having gotten Hupp’s eBay records, started sending out to field offices in the United States, Asia, Australia, and Europe, requests to interview people who had bought books from Hupp—each time telling them to neither sell nor alter the book, as it was the property of Kenyon College. Throughout the fall and winter, reports came from agents all over the country telling similar tales about books bought on eBay. Eventually the circle of interviewees would expand to include the janitors, campus police, and even the student workers Breithaupt had interacted with while on the job. Some of this last group had not set foot on campus for half a decade by the time they were interviewed, and barely remembered Breithaupt at all.

  Because there was little direct contact with the FBI, either Dan Temple or Kenyon’s attorney would periodically send items to Agent Stout, keeping him up to date on the college’s own continuing efforts. In December, for instance, Temple sent to the FBI a list of books Kenyon wanted to re-purchase. Running to nineteen pages, the itemized list contained author, title, date, and the amount the school was willing to pay for its return. Eight still-missing Flannery O’Connor letters were listed, and Kenyon would pay as much as $500 apiece for them. The total they were willing to pay for all the books on the list came to a shade under $70,000.

  The FBI forwarded this list onto Interpol; because the couple had sold many items internationally, it was plausible to assume they might also have some overseas connections. After giving a rough outline of the details of the theft, the international police agency was told how to identify Kenyon books, including a description of bookplates, the college stamp and certain marking techniques. Of the occurrence of call numbers, the announcement noted that the couple “on occasion erased the penciled-in number but an imprin
t may still be visible.” (Like a lot of things in a large investigation, this one bore little fruit. Interpol did eventually find a possible match at a Christie’s auction in June 2004. It was of A.F. Frezier’s 1717 book Voyage to the South Sea, estimated to be worth $2,000. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out not to be the same book.)

  The FBI investigation continued on into the spring and then summer of 2001. Every two or so weeks another piece of information, usually from a distant field office, would come in. Someone in Arizona remembered getting a personal note on Hupp’s letterhead. A professor in Bloomington, Indiana, who bought a book, was told by Hupp that her daughter went to school there, and they should meet up next time Hupp was in town. (Though the man had no idea, he was, in a circuitous way, buying locally. His money, earned in Bloomington, was sent to Gambier, before returning, inevitably, to Bloomington, to be spent.) A student who was friendly with Breithaupt remembered that when he went down to the Special Collections room he often took a newspaper with him. A Texas man who spent $660 for a book published in 1601, titled Sphaera Ionnis de Sacrobosco, said he “would not have purchased the book if he had realized it was written in Latin.”

  Almost none of these bits of information were particularly helpful to the case, and there was a sense, by the August 30, 2001, interview with a former student worker, now a financial analyst living in Cleveland, that there was very little more to be had from an investigation. This man remembered Breithaupt fondly, and described him as a little strange and quirky. He recalled that Breithaupt complained about money, and was not on good terms with the people in Special Collections. He also remembered that he both collected and sold books on eBay. But he never suspected Breithaupt of being a thief.