It would be better to steal them all at once.
* * *
–
As he ducked in and out of class and rehearsal rooms, he thought through the details of the plan. How would he get inside? What route would ensure he remained inside the museum for the minimum amount of time? Should he start with the Birds of Paradise, the Blue Chatterers, or the Indian Crows? How often did the guards make rounds? How many guards were there? Where were the security cameras? If he entered through a window, how would he climb back out with a suitcase full of birds? Would one suitcase suffice?
He created a Word document titled “PLAN FOR MUSEUM INVASION” and started compiling a list of tools he’d need: grappling hooks, a laser glass cutter, and latex gloves to conceal his fingerprints.
Sometimes during rehearsal an inner voice would emerge and say This is ridiculous!, but it was faint, always drowned out by the other voice pushing him forward. If you’re going to do it, that voice told him, you need to start taking concrete steps to pull it off.
The moment when Edwin’s plans emerged from the realm of fantasy into that of reality transpired during a routine checkup at a doctor’s office. While he was waiting in the examination room for the physician to arrive, his eyes fell on a box of latex gloves. I’m gonna need a pair of those, he thought, pocketing them.
And so Edwin’s preparations began in earnest. On June 11, 2009, seven months after his first visit to the Tring, he ordered an 8mm diamond-blade glass cutter through his eBay account: Fluteplayer1988. To protect the spoils from insects, he ordered a box of fifty mothballs.
He transferred the photographs from his camera to his computer and studied the proximity of one cabinet to another, assessing how long it might take to cover each of his coveted species.
He pored over a map of the museum. He went online and studied maps of the town of Tring, its main streets, side streets, and alleyways. The train station was east of the town center, over a good two miles of dimly lit country road. It would be easy enough to slip into Tring, but once he arrived at the intersection with Akeman Street for the final quarter-mile south to the museum, he’d be face to face with the Tring police station.
But he had already discovered a less conspicuous approach. He had noticed a narrow alleyway running parallel to Akeman, weaving behind the houses and restaurants. The path—Public Footpath 37—would deposit him directly behind the Ornithology Building.
There was a wall, but he could easily scale it. There was barbed wire, but he could easily snip it. There was a museum window on the second floor, just a few feet from the wall, but he could reach it.
All that remained in his planning was to select the optimal date. If he was to do it before the Royal Academy of Music’s term ended on July 1, when he would return home to New York, he was running out of time.
The morning of June 23, Edwin woke up ready, confident. He performed at the academy’s “London Soundscapes,” a daylong tribute to composers who had left their mark on the city over the past few centuries, among them Purcell, Pepys, Handel, Hayden, and Mendelssohn. In his concert hall locker, he stashed an empty suitcase, a miniature flashlight, a wire cutter, the gloves, and the glass cutter. After the performance, he swapped his flute for the suitcase, made his way to Euston Station, and boarded an evening train to Tring.
The Midland train is painted parrot green and toucan yellow, its ride quieted by a coffee-colored carpet. Just before the Kings Langley stop, halfway to Tring, the Grand Union Canal appears and runs between the tracks and the A41 highway the rest of the way. A woman’s voice murmured the name of each stop, “Wembley Central, Harrow & Wealdstone, Bushey, Watford Junction . . .”
Edwin had nine stops and thirty-five minutes to change his mind.
* * *
• • •
His well-rehearsed plan had quickly gone off script—after he lost the glass cutter, it had taken several nerve-wracking minutes to bash enough of the window away to make room for his suitcase, but he was too charged with adrenaline to worry about cuts as he wriggled past the window frame’s jagged edges into the museum.
Fifteen hundred unlocked steel cabinets lined the route he’d plotted, containing hundreds of thousands of birds. Only a small placard bearing Latin scientific names indicated their contents. His flashlight cast a faint dome of light as he hurried down the hallway, scanning for COTINGIDAE, which included the Indian Crow. He’d originally planned to take only a handful of each species, but when the moment came, he couldn’t resist emptying out entire trays. The only Indian Crows he left behind were the smaller females and juvenile males, which hadn’t yet grown their orange breastplates.
Forty-seven Indian Crows, weighing about a half-pound each, fit neatly in his suitcase. Before proceeding to the cabinets containing the seven species of Blue Chatterers, he carefully shut the cabinets, to avoid arousing the suspicion of the museum staff.
After relieving the Tring’s drawers of ninety-eight tiny Blue Chatterers, he made his way to the birds of the Malay Archipelago.
He pulled out a tray labeled SERICULUS AUREUS, containing the nine-inch-long Flame Bowerbird of New Guinea, famous for a hypnotic courtship dance in which it raises its wing like a matador while dilating and contracting its pupils. He wedged seventeen tangerine and golden skins into his suitcase.
At last he made his way to the Birds of Paradise. He maneuvered twenty-four Magnificent Riflebirds into his luggage, which was now brimming with several continents’ and centuries’ worth of specimens. Still, he managed to find room for twelve Superb Birds of Paradise, a species renowned for its bouncing courtship dance in which it shows off a stunning breastplate of iridescent aquamarine feathers.
Upon arriving at the cabinet containing Alfred Russel Wallace’s beloved King Birds of Paradise, he gingerly laid thirty-seven of the birds, five of which bore Wallace’s handwritten tags, into his suitcase.
* * *
–
Edwin realized he had lost himself in the plunder: he had no idea how many birds he’d taken or how long he’d been inside, but he knew the guard’s next round must be coming up soon. Whether he managed to get back out the window and into the anonymity of the street before their paths collided would depend on how efficiently he moved. He walked briskly through the corridors, wheeling his full suitcase behind him. By the time the guard finally got up from the soccer match, Edwin was gone, having climbed out the way he came in.
As he made his way up the footpath, a tremendous wave of fatigue overcame him as his adrenaline subsided. He reverted to a kind of limbic motor movement, instinctively shuffling one foot in front of the other, breathing heavily as he emerged from the alleyway onto High Street. As he headed east, the storefronts yielded to houses, the houses to farms, and soon he was alone in the blackness of the ancient trees that formed a canopy over the narrow road, quietly counting off the forty minutes until the faint lights of Tring Station rose in the distance.
His original plan was to catch the 10:28, or failing that the 11:38, direct back to London. The last train left at 12:16 a.m., but he was certain he’d be finished well before then. When he finally arrived at the station and checked the time, he realized he’d missed them all.
By his estimation, he had been inside the Tring for nearly three hours. The next train home wasn’t until 3:54 in the morning. As he sat on the platform, with maybe a million dollars’ worth of birds in his suitcase, he began to worry—for the first time in months of planning—about getting caught.
What if the guard noticed the broken glass on his next round? Had he remembered to close each of the cabinets? Had he left any fingerprints on the glass cutter? Was that a cut on his hand? Had any drops of blood fallen inside the Tring? Could they identify him by his blood? Had he walked in front of any security cameras? Where was that glass cutter?
What if they were already doing a dragnet at that very moment, fanning their way steadily
outward from the scene of the crime with flashlights and bloodhounds, primed with the scent of dead birds, working their way toward the station?
He was exhausted, but he couldn’t risk sleeping. Whenever someone walked over the nearby bridge spanning the tracks, adrenaline shuddered through him, snapping his weary mind awake with dread.
* * *
–
The Midland train slipped into Tring at 3:54 a.m., its headlights scattering the shadows on the platform. He clutched his suitcase and waited impatiently for the doors to open, desperate to get far away from the museum and back to the city, where he could blend into the crowd of Londoners and luggage-toting tourists.
He boarded, but the doors lingered open. A high-pitched beeping sounded from a box above the door. Had the conductor received some kind of alert?
At last the pneumatic doors shut with a solid, reassuring thump. A comforting prerecorded voice bade him “Welcome aboard this London Midland service to . . . Euston Station.” Most of his fellow passengers were fast asleep. Rather than using the overhead rack, he kept the suitcase and its precious contents between his legs, resisting the urge to peek inside.
As the train approached the next station, he peered nervously out the window, searching for flashing police lights or constables with K9 dogs on the platform. But no such thing appeared. With each stop, the museum slipped farther away, and he began to relax.
Forty minutes later the automated voice announced, “We are now approaching London Euston, our final destination.” Commuters gathered by the doors, snapping purses shut, zipping up jackets. “Please remember to take all of your personal belongings with you when you leave the train.”
He was almost there. Dawn broke as he hurried down the street toward his flat, suitcase wheels clacking noisily over the seams of the sidewalk.
Hoping not to wake his housemates, he tiptoed through the apartment. Back in his room, the sunlight was already starting to filter in through the windows. Safe at last, he unzipped the suitcase and peered in at a flash of turquoise and crimson, indigo and emerald, hundreds of lifeless cotton eyes. As he spread them out on his bed with mounting excitement, he felt it was the greatest day in his life. It wasn’t a dream. They were all his.
He cleared a space on his bed and fell into a deep sleep.
9
THE CASE OF THE BROKEN WINDOW
On June 24, 2009, the Natural History Museum’s on-duty security guard was halfway through his round when he noticed shards of glass near the base of the building. Perhaps a drunk had tossed an empty bottle over the wall of the nearby public footpath? He scanned the area until his eyes settled on the smashed-out window overhead.
He hurried inside to inform the Tring’s curators that there seemed to have been a break-in.
The police arrived and began searching for evidence, examining the bird skin cabinets in the immediate vicinity of the broken window and scanning the ground outside. Mark Adams, the senior curator responsible for the Tring’s bird skin collection, raced to the stacks containing the museum’s most precious specimens.
On the museum’s staff since 1990, Adams had recently coauthored a journal article, “Extinct and Endangered Bird Collections: Managing the Risk,” noting that “damage and theft” were increasing concerns.
To protect these rare specimens, the Tring’s staff had moved them to “a high-visibility area adjacent to the curators’ offices where any activity in the collection may be easily monitored.” Adams acknowledged the risks inherent in consolidating everything into one area—a fire could consume the entire collection in one swoop, for example—but he stressed that their approach meant that “only a few key areas need additional protective measures to maintain security.”
Now, with an active crime scene, he feared the worst as he nervously unlocked the cabinets containing the Tring’s treasures: the Galápagos finches collected by Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle, skins and skeletons of extinct birds like the Dodo and the Great Auk, a collection of John James Audubon’s birds, and an original bound edition of his Birds of America, the most valuable book in the world.
Mercifully, nothing seemed to be missing.
Asked by police for an estimate on when the window had been broken out, the security guard could suggest only a twelve-hour period.
All were puzzled about what the intruder had been after. The police mentioned that there had recently been a rash of smash-and-grabs around town by petty thieves looking for laptops and other electronics, but after a search of the staff offices, nothing of value appeared to be missing.
A relieved consensus was forming. It appeared as though their culprit had poked his head in, looked around, and finding nothing of obvious value, left empty-handed. He’d have become a rich man if he’d known how much Darwin’s finches might fetch on the black market, or that Birds of America had recently sold for $11.5 million at auction.
And so no systematic audit of the Tring’s collection was ordered. Even if it had been, with over fifteen hundred cabinets housing 750,000 specimens and a small staff, a complete audit—which hadn’t been conducted for at least a decade—could take weeks.
Dr. Robert Prys-Jones, the museum’s collections manager, was relieved that nothing appeared to be missing. A brief police report was written up, and the case of the broken window was considered closed.
* * *
–
The glow of Edwin’s successful heist was fleeting. He couldn’t brag about it to his friends, his girlfriend, or his brother. He couldn’t leave the birds out in the open in his apartment. He now had one of the greatest private collections of birds in the world, but he had to keep it a secret—or, eventually, come up with lies about where he had found the specimens.
In the days that followed, he was consumed with paranoia and guilt. When the buzzer on his front door rang unexpectedly, a bolt of fear shot through him. He started sensing that people were following him when he walked through his neighborhood. Were the police already on his trail? What had they found that linked him to the crime? Even the ring of his telephone startled him.
He considered taking them back. If he deposited them in front of the Tring and slipped off into the night, it would be as if the theft had never happened. Or instead of returning to the scene of the crime, he thought about leaving them on a random street corner and calling the police with an anonymous tip. But both scenarios sparked new fears of getting caught: walking away from a suitcase in a major city is pretty suspicious behavior, and there was no telling if cops were staked out by the museum.
And why go to such lengths to take the birds, just to return them a few days later?
* * *
–
After all, nothing had changed. He wasn’t giving up his hobby: the mere sight of his haul made him ache to start tying again, but the rest of his equipment—the vise and bobbins and tinsel and threads—was back in New York. And while he was set to return home in a matter of days, it would be folly to risk bringing the birds through customs. He would have to wait until the fall to start tying, when he could bring his tools back to London.
He still needed a new flute. His parents were still struggling. And the demand for a new supply of feathers within the fly-tying community, which had recently named Edwin “Fly Tier of the Year” in the forum, was as intense as ever.
Before long, the fear and guilt receded, taking with them any notion of returning the birds. Why should anyone care about some old birds taken from a musty museum, especially when it had so many to spare?
* * *
–
He returned to the plan, beginning with an inventory. He carefully placed each specimen on his desk, unfurling the two-foot-long tails of the Resplendent Quetzals and gingerly cradling the King Birds of Paradise as their iridescent jade disc-plumes wobbled back and forth. He opened up a blank file on his computer and made a tally. He was astounded by the numbers. Had he re
ally grabbed forty-seven Indian Crow skins? Thirty-seven King Birds of Paradise? Thirty-nine Resplendent Quetzals?
By the time he finished, he had logged 299 skins from sixteen different species and subspecies. All the obstacles he had faced over the past decade of tying flies—the drudgery of splitting wood for hours just to be able to afford a few of John McLain’s feathers, trudging to estate sales and antique shops in vain hopes of finding a bargain, calling zoos in search of molted feathers, tying flies with cheap substitutes while prized birds on eBay were snapped up by wealthy men—vanished beneath the pile of birds around him. Over a century earlier George Kelson had bemoaned the difficulty of finding good Bird of Paradise feathers, but Edwin now had more than old Kelson could’ve imagined.
Edwin had an unrivaled supply of product in a marketplace not dissimilar from the drug trade—crowded with self-professed feather addicts, white- and blue-collar, young and old, near and far. There were two obvious ways to push the feathers: he could approach wealthier tiers—doctors, dentists, and lawyers with capital—and offer to part with an entire skin. Under this model—essentially wholesale—he’d pull in a lot of cash up front, but the total revenue would be considerably less than if he harvested the feathers and sold them in individual packages. Such an approach—more similar to retail—would require dealing with a much higher volume of customers and smaller increments of cash, but he’d earn more in the long term. The easiest thing to do, of course, would be to sell the entire haul to a rich collector, but that would have negated one of the main goals of the heist, which was to obtain materials to last him a lifetime of tying.
The Feather Thief Page 10