The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  He led them to his room, where his girlfriend was just waking up, confused by the commotion. He gestured at the large cardboard boxes containing what remained of the skins.

  “I was having some psychological problems,” he said. “I was depressed. I regretted it. . . . I was going to put the stuff back the next day, and I’m sorry.” He pointed out a flatscreen TV in the corner, telling them he had stolen it from the Royal Academy’s International Student House—though no one had asked.

  Adele’s colleagues snapped pictures of all the birds as he had stored them in his apartment, which was now a crime scene. They bagged up all the skins, patches of birds, and packs of feathers, including some that hadn’t come from the museum, such as the Malayan Peacock Pheasant he’d received from Jens Pilgaard. They unplugged his laptop and seized his camera and passport.

  In that moment, Edwin finally succumbed to the shock of what was happening, suddenly feeling hollowed out. Despite all his planning, he had never imagined this moment.

  * * *

  –

  Adele placed him under arrest and led him down to the squad car below. With a guilty suspect in the backseat and a trunk full of dead birds, Adele drove to the police station halfway between London and Tring, in Watford, which was equipped with sixteen “custody suites”—or jail cells. They took a mug shot and a DNA swab, which would be run against the drop of blood found at the crime scene, and deposited Edwin in a cell by himself to wait.

  As the bars locked shut, he became extremely agitated. He had no idea how long he’d be there. Nobody even knew where he was. Apart from the first few days after the heist, during which he’d been hounded by anxiety that he’d be found out, he had been certain he wouldn’t get caught. But now that he was behind bars, all he saw was uncertainty. Would he go to prison? What would happen to his family? What would happen to his audition with the Boston Symphony? His future as a musician?

  * * *

  –

  Adele called up the Tring to tell the curators the good news. Knowing that the skins would require special handling, she summoned them to the station. It was a high moment in her career. She had come to know the museum’s staff well, particularly Dr. Prys-Jones, who had introduced her to the world of Alfred Russel Wallace and the scientific importance of the bird skins. Her newfound appreciation of the specimens’ value—which went beyond the monetary—had motivated her to solve the case, and she had done it. The thief was behind bars. All that remained for her to do was the interrogation, and then the Crown Prosecution Service would take over. Since Edwin had admitted his guilt, his case wouldn’t go to trial: it would proceed straight to sentencing.

  Mark Adams arrived in Watford and began the work of identifying each skin. Of the 299 skins that Edwin had taken, 174 intact specimens had been recovered in his apartment. Unfortunately, only 102 skins still retained their labels.

  A massive blow had been dealt. Only a third of the birds were recovered in a scientifically uncompromised condition. For some of the individual species, the numbers were even more dispiriting. Of the seventeen missing Flame Bowerbirds, nine had been recovered, but all of them were missing their tags. Of the forty-seven Indian Crow skins, nine were recovered but only four with tags. Three of Wallace’s Birds of Paradise were recovered, all without tags. (The only detached labels discovered in Edwin’s apartment were two written in Wallace’s handwriting.) Of the King Birds of Paradise, only three out of thirty-seven skins were recovered with labels.

  And those were only the full skins. There was also a heap of Ziploc bags filled with individual feathers or hacked-off segments of breasts, capes, crests, and necks. Identifying the species and subspecies would be challenging, and more devastatingly, it was ultimately pointless: the bird fragments were scientifically useless.

  After several hours, Adele had Edwin brought into the interrogation room. She asked if he wanted an attorney. Thinking that if he cooperated, it might all blow over, Edwin waived his right to counsel and confessed. He rattled off the names of those who had bought skins—Jens Pilgaard, Andy Boekholt, Dave Carne, Mortimer, and others—and how much they had paid for them. He didn’t feel particularly bad naming names—it was their mistake to have trusted him.

  By that point, Adele’s colleagues had already combed through the e-mails, Skype chat records, and other files on his laptop. They wanted to know who else might have been involved in the burglary.

  Had someone put him up to this? she asked Edwin. She went through the various fly-tiers with whom he had exchanged e-mails prior to the break-in, but he insisted, again and again, that he had acted alone.

  In the middle of the interrogation, a fly tumbled out of a ceiling duct onto Adele’s notebook.

  “Oh my god! Is that a fly?!” she shouted, flicking it from her page. It catapulted across the table and landed next to Edwin, who swiftly trapped it beneath a glass of water.

  * * *

  –

  After about an hour, Adele had what she needed. She gave him a slip of paper informing him of the terms of his arrest and the date of his court hearing and released him from custody. Edwin didn’t even know where he was.

  He was equal parts indignant about and confused by his treatment at the hands of the police. An excruciating day in that cell, and all he had was a slip of paper about a court appointment.

  As he wandered around Watford trying to get his bearings, he wondered why they hadn’t strapped one of those anklets on to track his movements, and an idea flashed through his mind: I could just leave!

  14

  ROT IN HELL

  As he made his way back to his apartment in Willesden Green, Edwin knew he couldn’t just flee. He wouldn’t make it past security at Heathrow; Detective Sergeant Hopkin had confiscated his passport. He braced himself for the phone call he knew he had to make.

  His mother answered. Confessing to her was worse than his time in the cell, as he began to sense how the crime would affect his family. When Anton, who was headed off to Juilliard that fall, learned that it was his own brother who had stolen the Tring’s birds, he burst into tears. Edwin could hear him crying in the background. There was no one else to blame. Telling everyone he was sorry wouldn’t change a thing.

  After the initial shock, the conversation pivoted toward the more practical question of how to keep Edwin out of prison. They would need to find a lawyer and figure out how to cover legal fees. His father also wanted to locate, buy, and return as many of the stolen skins as he could, with the hope that this might reflect favorably on his son’s character. His mother would fly to London in time for his first court appearance two weeks later.

  * * *

  –

  Following such a monumental event, one expects the world to stop, or to at least reconfigure itself in response to the news. But in those first few days, with the exception of Edwin’s family, nobody around him knew what had happened. The morning after his arrest, he reported to rehearsal and played an orchestral piece along with his classmates. But as he practiced, his mind was consumed by the prospect of being deported, which would mean he couldn’t graduate.

  Graduation was only six months away. If he left England without a degree, all his hard work would be for nothing. The coveted spots in the most prestigious orchestras would slip from his reach. There were, of course, more immediate fears: after all, it wasn’t some petty theft to which he’d pleaded guilty—the birds were worth about a million dollars, and he’d broken all sorts of international conventions protecting endangered species by trafficking skins and feathers throughout the world.

  To survive this, he would need an incredible defense attorney.

  * * *

  • • •

  At his first court appearance, on November 26, 2010, at the Hemel Hempstead Magistrate’s Courthouse, Edwin shuffled into a large glass box for defendants in the middle of the courtroom and pleaded guilty to burglary and mone
y laundering, while his mother and a few friends looked on from the gallery.

  All criminal cases in the UK begin at the level of the magistrate’s court, which typically deals with minor offenses like speeding or drunk and disorderly conduct. But Edwin’s prosecutors, armed with a guilty plea and the pile of evidence that Adele had unearthed in his apartment, felt that the sentencing powers of a magistrate judge were insufficient to address the severity of the crime.

  In the hopes of obtaining leniency, Edwin’s lawyer, Andy Harman, characterized his client’s actions as a youthful flight of fancy—a mistake made in the spur of the moment—and Edwin himself as an earnest naïf who, propelled by an obsession with fly-tying and fascination with James Bond, had begun to have “extremely childish fantasies” about breaking into the museum. He said his client had taken only a couple of weeks to plan the theft, pointed out that he used the train as his getaway vehicle, and noted that he hadn’t used “exotic tools” to break in. “He didn’t even take a torch”—a flashlight—“and has been described going around trying to get light off his phone,” he added incorrectly. “It was a very amateur burglary.”

  The judge was unmoved and accepted the prosecution’s petition to transfer the case to the Crown Court, comparable to a superior court in the United States.

  The British press covered the now-sensational news story much more widely than it had the Tring’s original call for help recovering the skins. “Flute player admits theft of 299 rare bird skins,” the BBC announced. “Exotic bird pelts ‘worth millions’ stolen from Natural History Museum by musician acting out ‘James Bond’ fantasy” ran the Daily Mail’s account. (For all the 007 references, though, the British press neglected to mention that Ian Fleming had found his spy’s name after stumbling across a copy of Birds of the West Indies, written by the American ornithologist James Bond.)

  It was only a matter of hours before the news hit the forums. On FlyTyingForum.com, someone posted an article about the arrest under the headline “RARE FEATHER THIEF BUSTED . . . and he’s one of us. Shocking.” On FlyFishing.co.uk, a user wrote: “I hope Rist, if found guilty, is jailed and then deported, his feathers and fly collection should be confiscated, for incineration.” Another replied, suggesting that Edwin might be innocent: “Although it would be nice to think that the police only ever arrest the guilty, that is far from the case. The allegations against this man have yet to be proved, and to convict him on this forum is to usurp the function of the courts.”

  There was, however, one poster on FlyFishing.co.uk who knew Edwin well. Terry, who had hosted Edwin at his fly-tying guild in Bristol a couple of years earlier, wrote that he was “devastated to hear” how Edwin had “train-crashed his whole life not only as an extremely talented & world class fly tyer but as a highly gifted musician.”

  In the heart of the feather underground, at ClassicFlyTying.com, a user posted a link to one of the articles about the arrest. Before it was deleted by Bud Guidry, the site’s administrator, the thread had generated eighty-five comments and 4,596 views, one of the largest in the site’s history.

  The same tiers who were overjoyed by the flood of rare materials Edwin had introduced were now outraged to learn how the college student had obtained them. Anton soon appeared in the comments, defending his brother from what he described as “irresponsible accusations.” But the more Anton insisted the articles weren’t conveying the whole story, the more attacks came. Finally he asked Guidry to remove the thread. On November 29, 2010, three days after Edwin’s initial court appearance, Guidry made an announcement:

  for reasons i won’t disclose, all posts concerning this topic of stolen birds have been deleted. i would appreciate a compliance by all members at this time to restrain from making any other post on this subject.

  thanks

  the administrative team

  John McLain, the retired Detroit detective who had sold Edwin his first feathers, appended an update to his website, where he had once written: “You may not have heard of the Rist brothers before, but you certainly will in the future.”

  “There is no way to condone Edwin’s apparent actions and no real way for me to really understand them,” wrote McLain. “The Salmon Fly tiers in general do not deserve a ‘Black Eye’ over this now, they as a group had absolutely nothing to do with it. There may be an individual or two that knowingly helped after the fact and I sincerely hope that will be handled by the proper authorities, 99.99% of the fly tiers that covet these feathers are as shocked by this as I am.”

  McLain surely recognized that he was one of the more public figures in the community and that any journalist Googling “Edwin Rist” would find his site. He, like Bud Guidry, wanted to do whatever he could to ensure the Tring heist was not a stain on the collective reputation of salmon fly-tiers and that the responsibility was borne by Edwin alone.

  Guidry, perhaps anticipating increased scrutiny from the authorities, also deleted many of the illegal sales posted on the forum’s Trading Floor, which meant they would no longer appear in a Google search. Unless someone had the specific URL for each post, they were irretrievable.

  Still an active member of the forum, Edwin saw vicious comments made by people he had known for nearly a decade. Some of his former friends, mentors, and customers were saying he should rot in hell for what he’d done.

  * * *

  –

  Edwin’s sentencing began on January 14, 2011, at the St. Albans Crown Courthouse, an hour north of London.

  The Honorable Judge Stephen Gullick asked Edwin to identify himself, before asking one of his lawyers, Peter Dahlsen, a series of rapid-fire questions.

  Referring to documents submitted by the defense, the judge asked, “Are you going to invite the sentencing Court to go down some form of mental health route?”

  “I’d certainly invite the Court to consider a sentence which would not involve immediate custody,” Dahlsen replied.

  “That’s not my question,” Judge Gullick snapped.

  “I know it’s not your question.”

  “It’s a deliberately phrased question,” the judge stated. “Are you seeking some form of disposal which involves, albeit in the community maybe, some form of mental health requirement?”

  “Yes,” Dahlsen answered.

  If Edwin’s sentencing was to revolve around a mental health defense, the court would need a professional assessment. Dahlsen said he had someone in mind, but it might take several weeks to schedule an analysis. Their exchange concluded, the judge turned to Edwin.

  “Edwin Rist, just stand a moment. You must come back on the 11th February, on which day I hope that sentence can be passed in your case.”

  “I’m adjourning your case for the purpose solely of seeing whether or not there is a mental health package which can be formulated and placed before me, but I must make it clear to you that the fact that I’m giving that opportunity to you and your lawyers does not mean that I’m necessarily going to follow it.”

  15

  THE DIAGNOSIS

  At the psychological evaluation, Edwin stared at the stack of forms before him. One of them asked him to rank between 1 (definitely agree) and 4 (definitely disagree) his reaction to a long list of statements, including:

  “I prefer to do things the same way over and over again.”

  “I live life for today rather than the future.”

  “I find making up stories easy.”

  “I don’t like to take risks.”

  “When I talk on the phone, I’m not sure when it’s my turn to speak.”

  How on earth was he supposed to respond to “I would never break a law, no matter how minor”? Three, “mildly disagree”?

  The man observing him had lean features, thinning hair, and a posh London accent. He peered at Edwin through wire-framed lenses, studying his mannerisms. “Sorry, am I making you uncomfort
able?” he asked.

  “Ummm . . . yeah?” Edwin replied.

  The man was Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, and Britain’s leading authority on autism and Asperger’s syndrome. He also happens to be a cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen, the comedian behind the famed Borat character. Baron-Cohen is occasionally approached by legal defense teams to conduct psychiatric evaluations of their clients and draft expert reports. His diagnosis of Gary McKinnon, a Scot who hacked into the Pentagon in 2001, gave the British government a basis to decline the U.S. extradition request, on the grounds that American prisons were ill-equipped to care for him. It was the McKinnon affair that gave rise to the term Asperger’s Defense.

  Because of the way Edwin had spoken about the theft—that he didn’t see taking the birds from the museum as such a big deal and that he never thought he’d get caught—his attorneys thought his actions might be explained by some form of autism. Now Baron-Cohen was charged with determining whether Edwin suffered from the disorder.

  After Edwin filled out the questionnaire, he talked to Baron-Cohen about fly-tying, his childhood, his goals for the future, and all the terrible things that were being said about him in the forums. In his four-page report, which was presented to the court on University of Cambridge letterhead, Baron-Cohen spoke admiringly about Edwin’s hobby, noting that he’d “taken fly-tying to the highest level of an art form, and is deeply immersed in the subject both as an artist and from a historical perspective.”