Fortunately the Tring’s spreadsheet included a column indicating the “approx no. of specimens represented by feathers and skin fragments” for each species of bird. I pitied the curators for having to undertake such an assessment. No part of their training had prepared them to answer the questions now before them: How many feathers made up a Resplendent Quetzal? If they had two Bird of Paradise wings but no body, did that represent one specimen? After sifting through the Ziplocs, they concluded that the total number of skins still at large was sixty-four.
Having the spreadsheet was like possessing one half of a map that revealed the coast of an unknown country. The column delineating the number and species of birds still missing shimmered like the starting point of a trail that disappeared into the terra incognita of an ongoing crime.
My mind raced through all the obstacles to finding them. To identify Edwin’s customers, I’d need to figure out how to dig up the evidence of his sales on the forum that had been deleted. I’d need to somehow convince him to talk to me. I’d have to determine if he had worked alone or with an accomplice. I’d have to find a way to break through the wall of silence surrounding the Tring heist in the fly-tying community and earn enough trust for people to start sharing their secrets.
I distractedly paged through the sheaf of press releases that Prys-Jones had given me, not expecting to find anything new. But at the bottom was a single sheet of paper with the heading “Information From Police from Interview with Edwin Rist.”
Immediately, the official story put forward by Edwin’s attorneys began to unravel. In the articles quoting their remarks to the court, they painted Edwin’s actions as impulsive and amateurish, claiming that he’d spent only a “couple of weeks” plotting it out. But the notes from the interrogation included a timeline of Edwin’s planning, reflecting that he’d first written to the museum under false pretenses in February 2008, fifteen full months before the theft. He admitted to having discussed his plot over Skype with a roommate three months before he first visited the museum to photograph the birds. In the month leading up to the burglary, he purchased the glass cutter and a box of mothballs. In the interrogation, he admitted to putting an extra lock on his door to protect the birds and to buying fifteen hundred Ziploc bags in order to sell feathers.
The second half of the document included a short list of individuals whom Edwin had named as customers, along with the prices he’d charged. Four buyers and nine birds were listed, for a total of $17,000 in sales. Conspicuously absent, however, were Edwin’s listings of Indian Crow feathers I’d seen on the ClassicFlyTying.com forum. If he hadn’t volunteered those during his interrogation, what else had he hidden? Who else had bought from him? Had the four named buyers returned the skins to Tring?
I don’t know if the museum meant to pass me the document, but it was the hardest evidence I had, opening up several new leads.
As I stepped back outside into the freezing air, my phone buzzed with a call from Detective Sergeant Hopkin, agreeing to meet with me the next day. Exhilarated by my proximity to the scene of a crime I was now determined to solve, I turned up Public Footpath 37 in search of the spot where Edwin had climbed over the wall. The darkness was complete, and in the distance, the medieval bells of the St. Peter and St. Paul Church began to ring ghostlike through the cold air. The footpath’s brick walls amplified every shuffled footstep, and as I quickened my pace, the echoes galloped after me. I was surprised by my thumping heart, and when at last I arrived behind the Ornithology Building, I looked around, wide-eyed. Nobody would have seen him back here. Unless someone had been passing by, nobody would’ve heard the sound of a window breaking. And while a tall person could have scaled the wall, I sure would have wanted someone there to help out. I got on my tiptoes to look for the window, wondering how big a suitcase Edwin might have fit through it, but I couldn’t get a good view.
For a moment, I considered trying to hoist myself up but imagined how the conversation would go if the Tring’s security guard happened to be passing on the other side of the wall.
* * *
• • •
“I looked you up, suspicious copper in me,” Adele said with a smirk, as she led me down the footpath behind the museum the following morning. At the time of my visit, the exterior of the Ornithology Building was under renovation, encased with scaffolding and blue mesh bunting to prevent pieces of cladding from falling off and injuring workers. Large PERMANEX SECURITY signs, emblazoned with the logo of a scowling American Bald Eagle, hung from the scaffolds.
She had a clipped speaking style; pronouns were dropped, and only the essential information was conveyed. “Obviously had been here before. Then came along here,” she said in reference to Edwin, pointing to a portion of the wall running behind the museum. “Shimmied up. Cut the glass here.” In the light of day, I could see that there were now bars on the window Edwin had bashed out, but there was still an opening in the barbed wire, which the museum believed he had snipped away. She pointed to the area where she’d discovered the latex glove fragment, the glass cutter, and the drop of his blood.
“Do you think he acted alone?” I asked, staring at the gap in the barbed wire.
“I was question-marking whether there was another person,” she said, as her police radio beeped quietly on her hip. “I’m never going to be able to prove that he was on his own. I’m not going to prove he wasn’t on his own. I can only go on objectively what I’ve got. So . . .”
“Did you ask him about the missing skins?” I asked.
She told me he gave her a few names—the same ones that appeared on the document the Tring’s curators gave me—but that he “couldn’t remember” exactly what he’d sold. Their search for what was missing was limited to a public appeal. Several people had responded by returning skins, but “the difficulty is they’re all over the world, so it’s not easy to do the follow-on inquiries.”
Sensing that I was a bit underwhelmed by her reply, she echoed what Dr. Prys-Jones had told me: Edwin’s admission of guilt had essentially concluded the investigation. She told me they had looked into a Canadian and a couple of Americans whose names had come up in the investigation, but that she didn’t have the time or resources to track down every last skin. She was charged with solving the crime, and she had done it.
“But don’t you feel like justice has been denied?” I pressed, since Edwin hadn’t gone to prison.
“As the police officer you do your bit, then the next bit is down to Crown Prosecution. . . . All the negotiations between barristers and stuff, I’m not necessarily involved in. Don’t necessarily agree with them either, but that’s not my part of the story.”
I knew from reports on the sentencing hearings that Dr. Baron-Cohen’s diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder had played a crucial role in keeping Edwin from being incarcerated, but whenever I asked fly-tiers who knew him whether they thought he had Asperger’s, they just laughed, as if they couldn’t believe my naïveté. Since she’d been the one to interrogate him, I asked Adele her opinion.
“There’s your million-dollar question, isn’t it! And I can’t answer it for you.” She paused to consider the next part of her reply: “However, if I had Asperger’s, I’d be really cross that someone’s saying because they’ve got it, they’re a criminal . . . otherwise everyone with Asperger’s would be committing crimes.”
We were interrupted by a phone call from her son. When she finished, I asked her if she would reopen the case if I ever found out who had the Tring’s missing birds.
She said she would have to run it up her chain of command and, depending on where the birds might be, check with Europol or Interpol, “but, yes—if there was evidence, it’d be brilliant. We’d try to retrieve those skins.”
* * *
–
I left England with two conclusions. First, contrary to the fly-tying community’s claims, the Tring’s inventory was accurate: they were still
missing at least sixty-four skins, potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I didn’t know if the birds had all been plucked to smithereens and their tags removed, or whether they were stored in perfect condition in the attic of an accomplice, who was waiting for things to blow over before he started chopping them up for sale. Hell, Edwin himself might still have them, stashed in a long-term storage unit somewhere.
Second, no one else was going to hunt them down but me.
20
CHASING LEADS IN A TIME MACHINE
Initially, the story of the Tring heist—filled with quirky and obsessive individuals, strange birds, curio-filled museums, archaic fly recipes, Victorian hats, plume smugglers, grave robbers, and, at the heart of it all, a flute-playing thief—had been a welcome diversion from the unrelenting pressure of my work with refugees.
I had regarded it as an amusing puzzle, doing research here and there and reaching out to members of the fly-tying community in my spare time. But something changed after my visit to the Tring, once I realized the true scope of the theft and the loss it represented to scientific understanding, and once I learned that so many skins were still missing. The side hobby turned into a mission, a quest for justice in a crime where none had been served.
* * *
–
As soon as I got back to my apartment in Boston, I taped the Tring’s spreadsheet and Adele’s interrogation notes on the wall next to my computer.
Soon a strategy began to emerge. So long as Edwin continued to ignore the requests I periodically sent for an interview, I would circle him, talking to those who had bought his birds, teasing out the names of other customers, cajoling them into forwarding incriminating e-mails, and exploring whether he had worked with an accomplice. If Edwin thought I had the goods on him, I figured, he might feel it was in his interest to tell his side of the story.
Until this point, those in the fly-tying community who had bought Tring birds had no reason to talk to an outsider like me. But now that I could confront them with the evidence from the police interrogation notes, some started to sing.
Of the four individuals Edwin had named, two of them immediately started telling me everything. They forwarded e-mails that Edwin had sent them and they shared photos of the birds they’d bought, and they provided letters from the Tring’s curators to prove to me that their skins had been among the nineteen that were returned to the museum. They also named other buyers.
The third individual, Mortimer, the dentist who had inspected several skins during a layover in London prior to placing a seven-thousand-dollar order, reluctantly answered some questions before going silent.
The last person mentioned by Edwin in the interrogation was a Dutchman by the name of Andy Boekholt, the man who was unwittingly responsible for Edwin’s downfall. At the 2010 Dutch Fly Fair in Zwolle, Holland, Boekholt had bragged about the Blue Chatterer he purchased from Edwin to “Irish,” an off-duty detective. He never replied to my messages.
I pressed on nevertheless, confronting those who had been named by the first two men on the list, who in turn coughed up more evidence and more names.
* * *
–
One of those names was Ruhan Neethling, chief financial officer of the Montagu Dried Fruit & Nuts Trading Company, which was based in a small town on the Western Cape of South Africa. Soon after hearing that he’d bought thirty thousand dollars’ worth of Birds of Paradise from Edwin, I found myself on the phone with the South African.
It was late in Montagu, but Neethling was generous with his time. He’d been a professional hunter, he told me, guiding Americans and others throughout his country looking for springbok, impalas, wildebeests, and kudu. In the early 2000s, he helped set up two game farms next to the Karoo National Park a couple of hundred miles from the coast, where hunters come to shoot stocked game. More recently, he’d worked as a financial controller for Coca-Cola in Papua New Guinea.
Neethling had developed a passion for salmon fly-tying much later in life than Edwin, but he quickly became obsessed. In his first year, 2009, he tied fifty-five flies. (A typical fly takes ten hours; this meant he’d spent nearly twenty-three full days sitting behind the vise). He excelled in creating “freestyle” flies that didn’t adhere to traditional Victorian recipes: his Elvis Has Left the Building fly sported the emerald coin-shaped feather of the King Bird of Paradise. Another, the Blue Uncharmed, was inspired by the mating display of the Blue Bird of Paradise. Both species were on the Tring’s list of missing birds.
While most tiers were wary of me and immediately became defensive, either insisting that they had nothing to do with Edwin’s crimes or requesting anonymity before agreeing to speak, Neethling didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned. When I mentioned that I’d heard he bought tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of Bird of Paradise skins from Edwin, he laughed warmly.
“No no no no no. . . . Why would I? I lived in Papua New Guinea! That’s exceptionally funny,” he said, like a father amused by his child’s confused question.
He claimed he’d gotten the feathers from hunters and Papuan tribal headdresses, after hopscotching around the smaller islands off the coast in search of skins and forging personal contacts with the Papuan community. “I actually had to look very hard to find people that knew people that could hunt them for me!” he said.
That’s not to say he didn’t buy some of the Tring’s birds. He readily admitted that Edwin had sold him a patch of Indian Crow for three thousand dollars and a full Blue Chatterer skin for six hundred. In late 2010, he told me, he placed an order for individual feathers but never received the shipment—he presumed Edwin was arrested before he had a chance to drop them in the mail.
“You must have been shocked when you found out,” I offered, referring to the theft.
“The fact that it happened, I don’t think is shocking at all,” he said. “Where something is scarce, people are creative.”
When I asked if he thought it was a pretty outrageous thing to do, it became clear that in his view, the crime wasn’t all that serious. “Right is right and wrong is wrong,” he said, but “it’s no more or less wrong than someone walking into a shop and stealing a pair of trousers.”
I asked what he’d done with the Indian Crow and the Chatterer.
“I probably still have some of his stuff,” he replied nonchalantly. But since he had already stripped the feathers from the skins, he said, he figured the Tring wouldn’t have much use for them.
Quoting him back to himself, I asked, “But if right is right and wrong is wrong, shouldn’t you return them to the museum?”
“I would, if the museum could tell me what they’re going to do with them and how it’s going to benefit the scientific community. I would return them.”
After a long pause, he added, “I’d want them to explain very clearly what they were going to use the feathers for.”
I was a bit taken aback. Why should the rightful owner need to prove to someone in possession of stolen goods that they deserved to get them back?
Having spent some time on Neethling’s Facebook page in preparation for our interview, I knew that he regularly posted messages from a strange millenarian group called the Second Eighth Week Ministries. When I asked whether his religious beliefs shaped his relationship to the natural world, he responded enthusiastically, “Oh! Yes! Definitely! Definitely!”
“So, does the concept of extinction of species trouble you?”
“Nope, not at all.”
“But why not?”
“Everything is going to go extinct in any case.”
“But isn’t this just nihilism?” I pressed. “Doesn’t it take away our responsibility to take care of what God gave us, if we think our planet will eventually be wiped out in the Rapture?”
“It totally takes it away!” he cried, as if I were finally seeing the light.
“And you’re fine wi
th that?”
“Your responsibility is to align your world with God’s world. His will is not for this dimension to exist into eternity. His will is not for this dimension to survive the next fifty years or whatever it is.”
Anticipating the answer, I asked him if he believed in evolution.
“Nope, not at all. Not even a single bit. The fossil records do not confirm evolution. You want to talk about belief systems? Evolution is a religion! It’s nothing more than that. It’s been conjured up! It’s a knowledge base that was given to man by the Fallen Watchers, which is a group of angels that did not agree with God.”
I asked him how he thought these birds had become so unique, if not through evolution.
To him, the answer was obvious: “God created them that way!”
It was after midnight in Montagu. I could hear South African crickets sawing away in the background. One last time I pleaded the Tring’s case, trying to convince him of the various ways their collection had helped humanity, such as confirming the rising levels of mercury in the oceans.
“Man is not going to save this earth,” he cut in. “He’s got no chance of saving this earth because God has written it to be destroyed. What these scientists are doing is, they are playing God. They are refusing to acknowledge that what preserves this earth is the power of God. Not the ability of man to read mercury levels!”
So Ruhan the hunter and dried fruit executive wouldn’t return anything to the Tring because the planet is already screwed, and museum curators are doing the work of fallen angels. I added his name to the Tring’s spreadsheet and crossed off two birds from the missing skins column: only sixty-two to go.
* * *
–
After locating another tier who admitted to buying a Blue Chatterer, a Dane by the name of Flemming Andersen, I thought I’d whittled it down to sixty-one—until he forwarded proof that it was among the nineteen birds returned to the Tring. I pressed on, convinced that someone out there was sitting on the main stash of the missing skins. I kept transcripts of my interviews, forum posts, and other scraps of information in a stack on the corner of my desk, but despite occasional discoveries, I knew the trail was going cold.
The Feather Thief Page 17