The Feather Thief

by Kirk Wallace Johnson

  If the search for the Tring’s missing birds had unexpectedly become my mission in life, it was fueled by a sense that justice had been thwarted: eighteen months of advance planning, at least tens of thousands of dollars in profit, irreparable damage to the Tring’s collection and future research, and not a single night behind bars for the perpetrator. For that, he had a diagnosis from Dr. Baron-Cohen and the precedent of the Bristol grave robber with Asperger’s to thank.

  In his report to the court, Baron-Cohen based his diagnosis in part on Edwin’s scores on the Adult Asperger’s Assessment, a diagnostic tool that he had developed. The assessment, which Edwin had taken on the advice of his lawyer, searches for symptoms like a “marked impairment” in eye contact, “stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms” like twisting one’s hands, and a failure to develop friendships. The questions in the assessment are meant to tease out whether the patient has a lack of “theory of mind”—an inability to infer the beliefs, emotions, and desires of others. People with Asperger’s generally have difficulty understanding social situations or predicting other people’s thoughts.

  Over the years, I’d spoken with a number of people who knew Edwin who thought the Asperger’s diagnosis was bullshit. Until his arrest, he’d been in a three-year relationship with his girlfriend at the Royal Academy. He seemed to have no shortage of friends, at school and in the fly-tying community. Those who mentored him in his early fly-tying years uniformly described him as charming. I had always maintained a healthy measure of deference to clinical experts, but now, as we entered the fourth hour of the interview, I was having some serious doubts.

  Edwin was a formidable interviewee. He didn’t seem to exhibit the classic symptoms of the disorder. In fact, he struck me as quite intuitive and empathetic. He seemed capable of sensing where my questions were headed, several steps in advance. If my brow furrowed even slightly in the middle of a questionable response, he would adapt on the fly and try a new approach. He was disarming and likable, but read me masterfully, rarely letting his guard down.

  “I’m just thinking about your master plan, gaming out all the possible scenarios in the months leading up to the break-in,” I said. “And now here you are, your fate depending on Sacha Baron-Cohen’s cousin.”

  “I mean, you can’t make this stuff up!” he laughed. “Like really! It’s not possible! It’s unbelievable. And at the time, you don’t see it as ‘Borat’s cousin is interviewing me to see if I’m retarded.’”

  “How did you see it then?”

  He hiked his voice up into a nasal register, as if to poke fun at his frame of mind during the diagnosis: “‘Ohhh . . . maybe I have a problem, and this guy’s a professional, okay, yeah.’

  “You go along with it,” he said, his voice returning to normal. “I mean, it’s not really scientific or medical in terms of the approach.”

  “It’s weird to say this in front of you,” I ventured, “but it doesn’t seem like you have Asperger’s. You’re making eye contact, for example.”

  “Em . . . ,” he started, shifting in his seat, “I mean, it’s been a question in my mind for a very long time. Because I have a diagnosis, apparently, by this renowned, knowledgeable individual, great professor and specialist in this stuff. . . .

  “I don’t want to say I’m grateful for it,” he continued, “but I am grateful for it, because without it, I probably would’ve spent two years or more in prison. I spent ages trying to recover from this, because I thought I had Asperger’s. Well, maybe I do. But I thought I was really, really mentally disabled for a while, and when you think these things, you become it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He told me that before the arrest, he’d never had any problems maintaining eye contact. And now, years later, he said, “I don’t have problems with eye contact. . . . It’s not an issue, I don’t actively think Eyes! Can’t do that!” But in the lead-up to his sentencing hearing, “I started thinking Eyes! I can’t look there!” He bulged his eyes and waved his hands comically.

  Before I could say anything, he said: “The other one was Ohhh autistic people, they sort of have tics, so I was sort of sitting in chairs, rubbing my hands together.”

  He made a strange panting noise and started rocking in his seat. “Just some body motion which is repetitive and autistic, and before you know it, you’re sitting in a chair rocking back and forth, not making eye contact . . . because those are symptoms.”

  He was smiling slightly. I leaned back, trying to mask my reaction to the statement that, with the prospect of prison looming, he’d become what he needed to be.

  My eyes darted down at my notes and then over at Marie-Josée, who had lost the battle against jet lag and was fast asleep. The antenna of the walkie-talkie was poking out from behind the couch cushion. I wondered if Edwin could see it from his vantage point. If her hand accidentally squawked the receiver, Klaus would burst in and ruin the interview.

  “With the Asperger’s diagnosis,” I asked loudly, hoping to wake her, “do you think you had a less-developed sense of right and wrong?”

  “Em . . . ,” Edwin replied, as Marie-Josée pried open an eyelid and noticed the walkie-talkie. “The thing is, anytime I say I have a less-developed sense of right or wrong, sounds sort of like I’m trying to weasel out of something. Em. I was young.”

  He caught himself: “Of course, many people have very, very strongly developed senses of right and wrong, even when they’re young, and others have to work on it. I think . . . I hadn’t been in situations to experience that.” He blamed homeschooling, in that when he misbehaved, he was in trouble only with his mother. “Let’s face it, everybody gets in trouble with their parents, and then it’s okay.”

  I struck a line through the rest of the Asperger’s-related questions on my list. I had my answer.

  “This is the way the legal system functions,” he said, sensing that I was a little jarred by the discussion of his diagnosis. “It’s the way that justice functions. Sometimes it’s very unfair for either the victims or the person who is guilty.”

  * * *

  –

  We stopped to eat the sandwiches I’d ordered; I hadn’t wanted there to be any excuse to leave the room. I didn’t want him to bump into Klaus or to admit something when the recorders weren’t running. I’d waited three years to get him in that room, and I was going to do everything I could to keep him from leaving until I found out about Long.

  The sun, with all the strength of a streetlamp in fog, gave out sometime around three in the afternoon. I jabbed a pen into my leg to wake myself up and decided it was time to talk about his friend in Norway.

  I began by saying that there were a lot of people who didn’t think he acted alone.

  “Before you say anything,” he cut in, “I have said this many, many times. . . . Long was not involved. In any way, whatsoever. I had sent him birds. He was the one who showed the birds at the fair. Which is why I think he was implicated in this. He didn’t sell anything. I didn’t sell him anything. He was not involved in planning. He was not the mastermind.”

  It was as though he’d read my mind. “How many birds did you send him?”

  “Three.”

  “How many?” I started sifting through a thick pile of pages, searching for the Tring’s spreadsheet listing the tally of missing skins.

  “Three. Two or three.” He was watching me intently. “I can’t remember if it was two or three.”

  “And how many did you sell yourself?”

  “I only sold two Indian Crows and two Chatterers.” His answers were becoming choppier. He corrected himself. “Three Indian Crows and two Chatterers, so five things in total, plus feathers.”

  This was, of course, wildly false: under interrogation, he had admitted to selling nine birds. Nineteen had been returned by his customers to the museum following his arrest.

  “The British Museum of
Natural History says two hundred and ninety-nine birds were stolen,” I said, searching through my papers, “and that there are sixty-four skins still at large.”

  “I find it impossible to believe the museum knows exactly how many birds they have at any given time regardless of how well they inventory them!” he interjected. “Maybe the Darwin finches . . . and possibly the Wallace birds. But the other birds, which are scientifically less interesting, I can’t believe they’re that focused on them!”

  “But isn’t that their whole raison d’être? Why is that so hard to believe, that they would have a list?”

  “Because once you make a list, why would you update it?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, momentarily flummoxed.

  “Why would you update it before you get burgled?” he asked.

  “But if they knew that in 2005 they had seventeen Flame Bowerbirds, and now, in 2009, there are none, why is that number in doubt? Are you suggesting someone else took them?”

  “I can’t suggest that because I have no proof, but I don’t find it improbable that people didn’t take things previously,” he told me. “It could be anyone who works there. The only reason they probably realized I was there was because I broke a window. . . . Had I taken two of each, I doubt they ever would have noticed.”

  I knew that Edwin hadn’t disputed the numbers when confronted with the list during the interrogation at the police station. I held up the Tring’s spreadsheet, and a wave of recognition flashed across his face.

  “This doesn’t strike me like a haphazard list,” I said, reading aloud the column headings of the spreadsheet: “‘Number of Specimens Missing in July 2009,’ ‘Intact Specimens with labels, without labels,’ ‘Number returned by Post,’ ‘Total Outstanding.’ They seem to know exactly what’s missing,” I said with a stern look.

  His voice, brashly confident a moment earlier, was now muted. “I would agree, it looks very, very thorough, and it looks very, very calculated, I guess.”

  Now that we could dispense with the attempts to muddy the numbers, I began to reveal all the evidence I had on Long, reading from printouts of their Facebook exchanges and forum posts where Long personally attested to the quality of certain skins, and laying out the timeline, which reflected a spike in sales shortly after the two returned from Japan.

  “Can you see why I don’t believe what you’re telling me about Long’s involvement?”

  “I see what you mean,” he said, wilted. “And. Und. Yeah. I. You know. It looks bad. Basically.”

  “So here’s the thing,” I continued. “If there are still sixty-four skins missing, shouldn’t they be returned? Where are they?!”

  “If someone has them, I really don’t know about it. And the question is, does one individual have them?”

  “But”—I paused, exasperated by his response—“aren’t you the person most uniquely positioned to answer that?”

  “In what sense?”

  “That you were the one who took them!”

  Edwin told me he’d never spent much time thinking about the missing birds. “I don’t have them,” he insisted. “And Long doesn’t have them. I don’t know who has them.”

  I was obviously annoyed: I didn’t see how this could be possible.

  “I think that detective woman was looking for my accomplice, or my driver,” he continued, “because she couldn’t believe the fact that I had taken a train.” He toyed with his tea bag as he spoke. “They had a very hard time believing the fact that an eighteen-year-old idiot with a suitcase and a rock could steal a suitcase full of birds from the Natural History Museum, walk out, walk forty-five minutes, get on a train, and leave.”

  “Which,” he added, “even as I think about it, is absurd!”

  “Do you think Long would talk to me?” I asked.

  “I mean, you can try. I can talk to him, and I can suggest that he meets with you.”

  I looked down at the recorder—its counter was approaching eight hours. Marie-Josée looked as though she was down for the night. It was time to call it quits. While Edwin seemed as alert as ever, I was drained.

  * * *

  –

  As he gathered his things, we made small talk about his life in Germany. I jokingly asked if his friends teased him for being a feather thief, but his face clouded at the word thief.

  “I try to refrain from certain words,” he said. “Thief is one of them. This is going to sound very strange, but I don’t feel like a thief. You know, to me, a thief is somebody who is down by the Rhine, waiting for you to look the other way, and picks your pocket, and the next day is back, looking for the next victim. Or somebody who makes a career out of breaking into homes, or who walks around and steals things from the school.”

  I decided against reminding him that he stole a TV from his school.

  “Personally, I don’t view myself as a thief. . . . I’m not a thief. In that sense. People can leave their wallet with me. I’m not going to take it. I can find somebody’s wallet, and if there’s an ID in it, I’ll give it to somebody who can look after it and return it later.”

  On his way out the door, he told me I could e-mail him with follow-ups anytime, but we both seemed to know that this was the first and last time we’d talk.

  After he left, I paid Klaus and collapsed into a coma-like sleep.

  * * *

  –

  Early the next morning, a light rain was falling as I shuffled down to the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Across the street, the proprietor of the Dene & Gör Döner kebab shop readied his place for a morning crowd that never materialized. He heaved the meat onto the spit, and I watched it spin until its color changed from pale flesh to rusty red. The sign in the rain-streaked window read IT’S BETTER THAN YOU THINK.

  I cycled through the highlights of the interview in a state of disbelief. I wondered if he had truly duped Dr. Baron-Cohen. Had he duped me? Edwin had told the truth about some things and lied about others. He didn’t seem very remorseful. Even though he’d sat through hearings in which museum curators spoke of the catastrophic blow to scientific research, he remained skeptical about the mission of the Tring, at one point laughingly referring to it as a “dusty old dump.” He compartmentalized, drawing a distinction between stealing from another person and robbing an institution like a museum.

  He spoke like someone who knew he had got away with it and who had help doing so.

  * * *

  –

  My phone buzzed with an e-mail.

  Hi Kirk. Got words from Edwin now. Interesting case, and interesting story about me. If you want an interview, then I’ll be available this summer.

  Best regards, Long.

  23

  THREE DAYS IN NORWAY

  “I keep thinking about one of Edwin’s answers,” Marie-Josée said after we got home to Los Angeles.

  “Just one?”

  “When you asked what color his suitcase was, he didn’t remember.”

  I paged through the transcript to his response: “I dunno. Suitcases are black, normally.” It did seem a little off.

  “Didn’t the police say the birds could fill up to six garbage bags?” Marie-Josée asked.

  “Who doesn’t remember the color of their suitcase?!” I exclaimed, still a step behind my wife.

  “Do you think two hundred ninety-nine birds would’ve fit in just one?” she continued.

  Seeing where her questions led—that multiple suitcases would suggest multiple people—I got out a medium-size suitcase. Having seen the window at the Tring, I knew he couldn’t have fit one much larger through it. Working together, we spent the next hour building a pile of fake birds. A rolled-up pair of dress socks formed a Blue Chatterer. She folded several dozen T-shirts and dish towels into the approximate size of an Indian Crow, and used her leggings to fashion Resplendent Quetzal tails.

  We
started packing. Marie-Josée, consulting the Tring’s spreadsheet, counted off each species. When the suitcase was halfway full, we were already at eighty birds. Of course, our experiment was hardly scientific—my washcloth Flame Bowerbirds might have been a bit large—but it seemed as though it would’ve been difficult to fit all of them in a single suitcase. I’d heard rumors that Edwin also used a backpack, but I had forgotten to ask him during the interview, and he was no longer replying to my messages.

  I looked up at Marie-Josée.

  “Do you think Long was there that night?” she asked.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’d never been so impatient for a plane to land. As the Norwegian Air flight inched across the ocean toward Oslo, the bloodhound in me ranged impatiently. I had him. Four years after I’d first heard of the theft, I would get the Tring’s birds.

  In the two years since I’d discovered he was Goku, Long’s involvement in the Tring heist had taken on almost Kurtzian proportions in my mind. After Edwin’s underwhelming defense of him during our interview, I had just about convinced myself that Long was behind it all, reimagining the key moments in the theft, this time adding the mysterious Norwegian to the mix. Had he cupped his hands to hoist Edwin over the wall? Had he followed him in with a second suitcase? Was he crouched in a bush with a walkie-talkie, updating Edwin on the security guard’s movements? Was he idling out front in a tinted BMW? Or had he called all the shots from some manor in the Norwegian countryside?

  Adele, who knew of my suspicions about a Norwegian, was waiting for my report. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I assembled more questions, each carefully crafted to pierce through any deception. I would nail him to the wall with a meticulously organized folder of printouts of the Wayback Machine forum posts, screenshots of his various sales, the transcript of my interview with Edwin, and Facebook comments and photos tying him to critical points in the timeline.