The Case of the Broken Window
Edwin Rist was a young flautist whose hobby was making fly-fishing lures. Alfred Russel Wallace was one of the 19th century’s leading naturalists. Their worlds collided when the bird skins from Wallace’s valuable Birds of Paradise collection were stolen f
On June 24, 2009, the Natural History Museum deputy security guard was halfway through his round when he noticed shards of glass near the base of the building. 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 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.
He feared the worst as he nervously unlocked the cabinets containing the Tring’s treasures: the Galapagos 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.
Mercifully, nothing seemed to be missing.
A relieved consensus was forming. It appeared their culprit had poked his head in, looked around and, finding nothing of obvious value, left empty-handed.
And so, no systematic audit of the Tring’s collection was ordered. Even if it had been, with a small staff, and over 1500 cabinets housing 750,000 specimens, a complete audit would take weeks.
Dr Robert Prys-Jones, the museum’s collections manager, was relieved. A brief police report was written up, and the case of the broken window was considered closed.
THE GLOW OF EDWIN RIST’S successful heist was fleeting. He now had one of the greatest private collections of birds in the world, but he had to keep it a secret.
In the days that followed, he was consumed with paranoia and guilt. He started sensing people were following him. Were the police already on his trail?
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.
Nothing had changed. He wasn’t giving up his hobby: the haul made him ache to start tying again, but the rest of his equipment – the vice and bobbins and tinsel and threads – was back in New York.
He still needed a new flute. And the demand for a new supplier of feathers within the f lytying community, which had recently named Edwin ‘Fly Tyer of the Year’ in a forum, was intense as ever.
Before long, the fear and guilt receded.
He returned to the plan, beginning with an inventory. He carefully placed each specimen on his desk, unfurling the 60-centimetre-long tails of the Resplendent Quetzals and 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 really 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 16 different species and subspecies. All the obstacles he had faced over the past decade of tying flies – trudging to estate sales and antique shops in the vain hope of finding a bargain, calling zoos in search of moulted feathers – all of it vanished beneath the pile of birds around him.
Edwin had an unrivalled supply of product in a market not dissimilar from the drug trade – crowded with self-professed feather addicts, whiteand blue-collar, young and old, near and far. One of the main goals of the heist was to obtain materials to last him a lifetime of tying.
He decided to sell some individual feathers on the forum and eBay, and at the same time reach out privately to a few people who he knew might be able to afford a full skin.
Laying out each skin on a dark piece of fabric, he trained his camera on the portions that would be most prized by his fellow tyers, concealing the labels tethered around the birds’ legs, the words MUS.BRIT. stamped in the corner.
Using tweezers, he began plucking the rich, orange feathers from the breastplate of an Indian Crow. Once he’d removed the breast feathers and matched them into pairs, he tossed the skin into a large cardboard box by his wardrobe. He started on the next one, and before long he had a small pile of bagged feathers. With only six feathers not much larger than a pinkie fingernail, a single baggie might fetch $100.
With his departure for summer break imminent, Edwin packed the birds and packets of feathers into a
large cardboard box, scattered mothballs inside to protect his collection from any interested insects, and stowed it in his wardrobe. Everything he wanted to sell was ready for distribution when he returned. So long as he snipped the tags from the skins before sending them off, no one would connect them to the Tring.
As he boarded his f light home, weeks after the heist, nobody was looking for him. No one at the Tring even realised anything was missing.
“A Very Unusual Crime”
On the morning of July 28, 2009, when Mark Adams showed up for work at the Tring, he had no idea how bad his day was going to get. While guiding a visiting researcher down the fluorescent-lit hallways into the bird collection, Adams pointed out
various avian families and genera along the way. Pyroderus scutatus is here, he said, as he opened a cabinet. But when he pulled out a tray of Red-ruffed Fruitcrows, known to fly tyers as Indian Crow, all but one of the skins were gone.
Heart racing, he yanked out another tray. Empty. Another tray. Empty. All that remained of the species was one adult female skin tucked right at the back.
The Tring’s staff checked ot he r br ig ht l y coloured members of the Cot inga fami ly in nearby cabinets and discovered more empt y drawer s . Scores of Blue Chatterers were gone. They f lung open the cabinet doors to the Trogon family, which includes a Resplendent Quetzal, and found them empty. They expanded their search to include the Birds of Paradise and realised that dozens, including five of Wallace’s, had vanished. Only the dull-coloured females were left behind.
They rang the Hertfordshire police to inform them that the case of the broken window needed to be reopened.
Over the next couple of weeks, 1500 cabinets were opened and thousands of trays pulled out, as the devastated curators took stock of the loss: 299 birds from 16 different species. It became clear that whoever did this was after exotic birds with iridescent plumage.
At first the question seemed almost comical to Detective Sergeant Adele Hopkin as she headed over to the museum.
Before get t i ng the call, she’d never heard of Alfred Russel Wallace and had lit t le sense of the importance of the Tring’s collection. She did, however, understand that the invest igat ion was already hampered by the length of time it had taken for the museum to realise it had been burgled. CCTV surveillance footage was held for 28 days. It had been 34 since the break-in.
The thief’s motive wasn’t clear, nor were his methods. Had the birds been taken all in a single night or over several months, or even years? It had been a decade since the last full inventory of the collection. Was it a single perpetrator or more than one?
Adele wondered if it was an inside job, but she quickly ruled out the
HEART RACING, HE YANKED OUT ANOTHER TRAY. EMPTY. ANOTHER TRAY. EMPTY
possibility. Interviews with the museum’s staff revealed how crushed they were by the theft.
She asked the museum staff to point out the window that had been broken.
It was about 1.8 metres off the ground. A tall enough person could hoist himself in. Crouching down, amid the broken glass, she found a bit of a latex glove and a glass cutter. On one of the shards, she found a drop of blood. She bagged up the evidence and sent it off to the national forensics laboratory.
The loss of so many irreplaceable skins, which would create a significant gap in the scientific record, was a deeply embarrassing blow.
That it had apparently been so easily accomplished made things worse.
Making the theft public would mean risking their reputation, but the museum’s directors reasoned that it was worth risking embarrassment to try to recover the skins. Plus, Adele needed leads.
Beyond finding the culprit, she had another urgent mission: it was vital that she recover the birds with their biodata labels intact. Finding them without their tags would create an impassable void for researchers, as few meaningful inferences could be drawn from a skin without knowing the date and geographic details of its collection.
With Adele’s assistance, the museum drafted a press release announcing the theft.
“It is very distressing that we should have been deliberately targeted in this manner,” Richard Lane, the Natural History Museum’s director of science, lamented in the release. “Our utmost priority is working with the police to recover these specimens to the natural collect ions so that they can be used by future generations of scientists.”
Adele’s superv i sor, Detect ive Inspector Fraser Wiley, was quoted as saying, “We are appealing for anyone who may have seen any suspicious activity around the museum in the time around when the break-in was, before it or subsequently.”
The BBC and the Telegraph ran brief articles, and Nature.com and the Association for Academic Museums and Galleries posted about it, but the release found its widest distribution in the various online
IT WAS VITAL SHE RECOVER THE BIRDS WITH THEIR BIODATA LABELS INTACT
f ly- tying forums: FlyFisherman. com, FlyTyingForum. com, and Edwin’s favourite onl ine haunt, ClassicFlyTying.com.
Hot birds on a cold trail “Somebody stole birds from a museum!’” Edwin’s brother Anton exclaimed on the other end of the line. “It’s on the forum!”
Edwin had just returned to London. He hurried to his computer and found the press release. A statement f rom Detec t ive Inspector Fraser Wiley caught his eye: “We would ask any collectors of such specimens to keep a watchful eye out in case they are of fered anything resembling them.”
With a formal investigation under way and a public call for leads, Edwin knew that it was too late to return the birds to the Tring with a simple apology. He considered stowing the birds away for years, selling them only after the police stopped searching. Or he could go ahead with his plan, making sure he supplied a good enough cover story for each sale. How bright were these people anyhow, he reasoned,
if it took them a full month to realise they’d been robbed?
In October, shortly after starting his third year at the Royal Academy, Edwin purchased 1100 small Ziploc bags, ideal for sorting individual feathers. He also ordered 500 medium-size bags, for storing patches of feathers sliced from the skin. On November 12, he logged on to ClassicFlyTying. com, navigated to the ‘Trading Floor’ section, and created a new post: “Indian Crow Feathers for sale, Buying new flute!”
“The time has come for me to upgrade my instrument,” he wrote, “and I am selling some crow feathers to help this along.” In describing his wares, he used P.S. for the Latin binomial Pyroderus scu
tatus: “There are two subspecies, P.S. Scutatus, and P.S. Granadensis. All are super A quality. I have limited numbers of Granadensis so first come, first serve! There is no limit on the number of feathers you can buy at a time.” The post included high-resolution photographs of the black-and-orangetipped feathers.
The response was ravenous. The
following day he ordered more Ziploc bags, these ones large enough to ship full bird skins. Two days later he logged back in to announce that only a limited number of Indian Crow feathers remained.
On November 28, Edwin uploaded a photo of the small turquoise Blue Chatterer to eBay.co.uk, using an account he’d registered a couple of months prior to his first visit to the Tring: Fluteplayer 1988. When news of the auction hit the forum, there was a surprised reaction.
Angler Andrew: From Britain as well, I’ve never seen one on eBay from Britain. Anyway there’s about 10 mins left and still no bids. Man if I won the lottery! Monquarter: Hmm the seller
is ‘Fluteplayer 1988’. Edwin
Rist sold some Indian Crow to pay for a new flute recently. Coincidence? Maybe however I suspect the seller is Mr Rist so it should be good quality and from an honest seller. mitch: anyway I wish him well and hopefully gets his flute before Christmas. Cheers. Meanwhile Adele was still waiting for the forensics results from the bit of latex glove, the drop of blood, and the diamond-blade glass cutter. She was sceptical a match would come back. A more experienced burglar, the kind with prints already on file, would have been careful about removing incriminating evidence. She contacted the National Wildlife
Crime Unit, which is charged with enforcing anti-trafficking laws. The police unit specialised in gathering intelligence on wildlife crime, working closely with the UK Border Force, which maintained a team trained in identifying protected species at Heathrow Airport. Adele asked them to be on the lookout: if an agent discovered someone with a bunch of exotic birds, she wanted to be the first to know.
AROUND THIS TIME ‘MORTIMER’, a dentist and avid fly tyer from the US, landed in London from an eight- hour layover on his return from a fishing expedition in Africa. He took a cab to the Jurys Inn, where he found Edwin waiting in the hotel restaurant.
Edwin didn’t seem concerned about displaying his wares. He ordered a beer and laid out a handful of species his customer had expressed an interest in by email. As Mortimer inspected the skins, Edwin told him he was helping a pair of aristocratic collectors sell their collection as a way of funding his studies. Mortimer, unsure of their legality, was wary of returning to the airport with the birds, so he put a hold on three of the choicest skins: a Flame Bowerbird, an Indian Crow, and a Blue Chatterer. He sent Edwin a cheque for $7000. When the package arrived Mortimer found a US Fish and Wildlife Service inspection sheet inside, which meant either that Edwin had forged documents or that the federal agency had opened it mid-shipment, examined the birds, and waved them along.
Edwin found that his buyers weren’t asking questions. He knew that their addiction to these birds meant they wouldn’t ask questions to which they’d rather not know the answers. For those whose consciences demanded it, though, he offered fabricated stories regarding each skin’s provenance. Some had been discovered in overlooked c o r n e rs of antique shops, others scooped up at a provincial estate sale. His Birds of Paradise had come from a friend in Papua New Guinea as part of a trade.
AS 2010 APPROACHED, THE SEARCH FOR THE THIEF WAS SHORT ON LEADS
AS 2010 APPROACHED, the search for the thief was short on leads. The curators had come to the conclusion that the stolen specimens had probably already been broken up and separated from their tags and were no longer of scientific value.
THE THIEF WAS RIGHT under their noses. One of the working theories was that a fly tyer was behind the theft. Any Web search for the species in question would have yielded a number of hits at ClassicFlyTying.com, including discussions of Edwin’s bird skin sales on eBay. His forum posts had used the Latin names for each species, the very names now affixed to empty cabinets at the Tring.
The two previous major thefts at the
Tring had been perpetrated by known visitors to the specimen stacks. Had the latest thief also come to the museum prior to robbing it? Around 350 scientific visitors were likely to have entered the vault during the previous calendar year: if their culprit had staked out the museum under false pretences, surely his or her name would be in the visitors’ book.
The name Edwin Rist was there, on a page dated November 5, 2008. If they had run an online search for ‘Edwin Rist’, they would have found a number of websites connecting him to salmon f lies and his eBay listings. But six months after the robbery, they were still in the dark.
Adele’s day-to- day work – tackling domestic abuse cases, breaking and entering, and other robberies – continued apace. If the Tring’s curators ever turned up a good lead, she’d investigate, but for the time being, the case moved into the unsolved bracket.
AT THE DAWN OF THE NEW YEAR, everything was coming up aces for Edwin. Whenever he needed cash, he’d post some feathers on eBay or the forum, which would sel l in less than a day. A quick trip to the post office, and the money would pour in; repeat as necessary.
On March 6, 2010, he packed a number of skins he was open to selling if the price was right and headed up to the Spring Fly Fishing show in Newark, a few hours north of London. Dave Carne, who had recently sent Edwin $ 3500 for a cape of feathers from a prized subspecies of Indian Crow, was excited to finally meet him in person. Carne had been tying salmon flies since he was 13.
At the show, Carne saw Edwin sell a full Blue Chatterer skin to Jens Pilgaard, a Danish blacksmith. Pilgaard also sold fly-tying materials as the proprietor of Fugl & Fjer Fluebinding – Danish for Bird &
WHENEVER EDWIN NEEDED CASH, HE’D POST SOME FEATHERS ON EBAY
Feather Fly-tying. As the Dane tied a fly in front of a small audience of admirers, Edwin approached him with his skins. “Why are you selling this?!” Pilgaard asked, as he and his audience marvelled at the quality of the feathers. When Edwin replied that he needed money to buy a new flute, the Dane bought a breast patch of Indian Crow, a Flame Bowerbird cut into a few pieces, and a Blue Chatterer skin. The bill came to about $6000.
Fluteplayer 1988
If there was one specific moment when Edwin’s plans began to unravel, it was in late May 2010, at the Dutch Fly Fair outside the city of Zwolle, east of Amsterdam.
The festival was held in crisp white pagoda tents on the shores of the Drontermeer Lake west of the town.
In the main tent, where dozens of tyers from around the world convened to demonstrate their skills on an elevated stage, a Dutch construction engineer named Andy Boekholt was at work on a salmon fly, using hard-to-get feathers.
Also present was a man from Northern Ireland. ‘Irish’ was two decades into a career in law enforcement. He had operated undercover during the worst years of ‘the Troubles’, narrowly surviving multiple bombings and shootings. To keep sane in those dark times, he had taught himself to tie, starting with simple shrimp flies used to catch sea trout. He didn’t share the community’s obsession with rare birds.
Irish wandered through the tent until he arrived at Boekholt’s booth and its Victorian cabinet containing 20 slender trays, originally designed to store antique microscope slides. Boekholt pulled them out one by one, revealing hundreds of flies with many thousands of dollars’ worth of rare feathers tied into them.
When Irish and Boekholt started talking about hard-to-get feathers, the Dutchman couldn’t resist showing off one of his latest purchases, a flawless full Blue Chatterer skin. To Irish, it didn’t look like the birds, with their legs and outstretched wings, that occasionally popped up on eBay after being prised out of a Victorian hat: its eye sockets were stuffed with ancient-looking cotton, and the wings and feet were tied closely to the body.
“Where did you get this?” he asked casually. Nearly a year earlier, he had seen reports about the Tring heist, so when he saw the Dutchman’s museum-grade skin, his suspicions flared.
“Some kid in England named Edwin Rist.”
When he got home, Irish logged onto ClassicFlyTying.com and began clicking through the items being sold on the Trading Floor. The night before the Dutch Fly Fair, a listing had gone up: “Flame Bowerbird male full skin for sale.” The post had already amassed 1118 views. He discovered several other links on
the forum to eBay listings of Birds of Paradise, in which forum members mentioned that the skins were located in England. Irish found that most of the auctions were posted by the same seller.
He rang the Hertfordshire Constabulary and told them to look into the eBay username ‘ Fluteplayer 1988’.
The message made its way to Adele, who petitioned eBay for the legal name and address of the person holding the account ‘Fluteplayer 1988’.
When the name Edwin Rist came back, she ran him through their system and discovered he was a student at the Royal Academy of Music. When she shared this information
with Mark Adams and Robert PrysJones at the Tring, they confirmed that someone by that name had visited the museum eight months prior to the theft.
Adele wasn’t easily excited, but this was the best lead she’d had since the case was assigned to her. She dialled the school administrators to locate Edwin but discovered that she had just missed him: he had boarded a plane back to the States for the summer break only two weeks earlier and had moved out of the apartment eBay had on record.
Thirteen months had passed since the burglary. And now they were 14 days too late?
She wa s concerned about the fate of the skins – the more t ime passed, the more likely they were to be separated from their tags, rendering them worthless to the Tring.
She would have to wait until Edwin returned on his own and hope he hadn’t travelled with the skins.
WHEN THE ROYAL ACADEMY of Music’s autumn term commenced on September 13 – the start of Edwin’s fourth and f inal year of study – Adele was still trying to determine his exact whereabouts. She couldn’t get a search warrant authorised without a valid address, and she was still waiting for the school to notify her once Edwin registered his new off–campus address.
Meanwhile Edwin was back and moving product. In an email to his network of customers, he announced his September 2010 offerings, including a Blue Chatterer with ‘full plumage’ for $1000, excluding shipping. A few weeks later he was sending messages to Jens Pi lgaard, hoping to sell the Dane some Birds of Paradise.
Perhaps in anticipation of a new wave of sales, he logged into eBay and updated his account with his new address.
Shortly thereafter eBay responded to Adele’s request for a current address for her suspect: a flat in Willesden Green, an 18-minute ride on the Underground from the Royal Academy.
The last online listing of Edwin’s feathers on ClassicFlyTying. com went up on November 11, 2010. ‘ A Mix pack for sale’ was posted, with an image showing nine pairs of feathers neatly arranged on a dark canvas backdrop. Beneath each pair,
IT WAS THE BEST LEAD SHE’D HAD SINCE THE CASE WAS ASSIGNED TO HER
the subspecies and available quantities were typed in a white bold font.
THAT NIGHT, EDWIN and his girlfriend went to bed on the early side – he had a rehearsal the following morning and wanted to be at his best. His dream of playing for the Berlin Philharmonic wasn’t far from his reach: he would soon graduate with a degree from one of the world’s best conservatories, positioning him for auditions with the finest orchestras. He already had an invitation to audition with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He had just turned 22.
Early on the morning of November 12, 2010, Adele and two of her colleagues drove down from the Hemel Hampstead police station to London, their GPS set for the address of Fluteplayer 1988. If she had had only his name, she would have been sceptical that Edwin, an American music student without any prior record, was her man. But she had his eBay records, which included listings of exotic birds and purchases of mothballs, Ziploc bags, and a diamond-blade glass cutter. She knew he’d visited the Tring. She was pretty certain.
EDWIN OPENED THE DOOR, AND ASKED, “IS SOMETHING WRONG?”
A little before eight in the morning, Edwin’s doorbell rang. He was awake, trying not to disturb his sleeping girlfriend as he got ready for his rehearsal. At first he ignored it. He wasn’t expecting any packages and was a bit pressed for time. But now someone was banging on the door. “Who is it?” he asked.
“It’s the police,” Adele said. “Open the door.”
Five hundred and seven days after he broke into the museum, Edwin opened the door, glanced at Adele, and asked, “Is something wrong?”
Behind Bars
When Adele told him they were there to investigate the Tring robbery and had a warrant to search his apa rtment , Edwin confessed immediately. He knew they would find the birds.
He led them to his room. 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.”
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. They unplugged his laptop and seized his camera and passport.
In that moment, Edwin finally succumbed to the shock of what was happening. Despite all his planning, he had never imagined this.
Adele called up the Tring to tell the curators the good news. 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. The thief was behind bars.
MARK ADAMS ARRIVED 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.