Guard who buzzed in Gardner thieves years ago has died
Richard Abath was long scrutinized but stood by his innocence in famous art heist
Richard “Rick” Abath, the guard who opened the door to two thieves who robbed Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of masterpieces worth more than $500 million in 1990, died Friday at his Vermont home, according to his attorney.
“He died peacefully at home after a long illness,” Abath’s attorney, George Gormley, said during a telephone interview Tuesday. “Sadly, it’s the death of a good person who demonstrated that by living a good life that belied all of the suspicions about what his involvement was in this incident 34 years ago.”
Abath, 57, steadfastly maintained that he played no role in what remains the largest art heist in history and one of Boston’s most notorious unsolved mysteries. Yet, he remained under intense scrutiny over the decades by federal investigators who never ruled out the possibility that the thieves had help from someone with inside knowledge about security at the museum.
Abath was a 23-year-old musician working as a night watchman at the Gardner museum at 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, when he buzzed the door to let the thieves inside after they claimed they were police officers, investigating a disturbance. The thieves handcuffed and duct-taped Abath and the other guard on duty and left them in the basement while they spent 81 minutes pulling and slashing treasured works from their frames.
They stole 13 pieces, including three Rembrandts, among them his only seascape, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee;” Vermeer’s “The Concert;” works by Manet, Flinck and Degas; an ancient Chinese vase; and a bronze eagle finial atop a Napoleonic flag.
Nobody has ever been charged with the crime and none of the works have been recovered, despite a $10 million reward for information leading to their safe return and promises of immunity.
“For him it was just being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Gormley, adding that Abath believed he had to open the door to the pair claiming to be police officers. “His actions were completely appropriate and this became a curse that he was forced to live with.”
On Tuesday, Donna Hardwick, a spokesperson for the museum, released a statement saying, “We are very sorry to learn of Richard Abath’s passing. The
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum would like to extend our condolences to all his family and friends. Out of respect for his family we have no further comment at this time.”
She said the investigation aimed at recovering the stolen artwork remains active and ongoing.
Kristen Setera, a spokesperson for the FBI, declined to comment on Abath’s death, but said in a statement, “As far as our efforts to locate the stolen artwork, it’s a very active investigation and our focus is on recovering the art and returning it to its rightful place” at the museum.
Abath told the Globe in 2013 that he had been told directly by a federal investigator several years before, “You know, we’ve never been able to eliminate you as a suspect.”
Authorities have said the museum’s security protocol prohibited entry of unauthorized personnel, including police, but Abath said he was unaware of that. When the two men wearing police uniforms ordered Abath to step away from the back of the security desk, he complied — removing himself from the museum’s only emergency alarm that could have alerted police to the robbery. Abath said he followed orders to avoid being arrested, because he had tickets to attend a Grateful Dead concert later that day in Hartford.
Motion sensors that recorded the thieves’ steps as they moved through the museum indicated they never entered the first-floor gallery where Manet’s Chez Tortoni was stolen, according to the FBI and the museum’s security director, Anthony Amore. Only Abath’s steps, as he made his rounds before the thieves arrived, were picked up there, they said. The sensors also revealed that Abath briefly opened the side door to the museum on Palace Road shortly before he buzzed the thieves in at the same entrance.
“They wanted to know if I had taken the painting and stashed it somewhere,” Abath told Globe correspondent and author Stephen Kurkjian in 2013. “I told them, as I’ve said a hundred times before and since, I had absolutely nothing to do with the robbers or the robbery.”
Abath moved to Vermont in 1999. He graduated from college in 2010, according to previous reports in the Brattleboro Reformer.
Abath, who worked as a teacher, and his wife, Diana, lived quietly in Brattleboro, but were frequently approached by investigators and members of the media seeking interviews about the Gardner heist, according to Gormley.
He had been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury in Boston several times, Gormley said.
“It was just an irritation that you couldn’t escape,” said Gormley, adding that Abath and his wife were very protective of their privacy and shunned most interviews. “I think he rose above all of this and tried, and I think successfully to live a good and honorable life and did so in a community that accepted him for who he was and what he was formerly dragged into.”
Robert Fisher, a former assistant US attorney who oversaw the Gardner investigation from 2010 to 2016, said the heist “definitely had an impact” on Abath’s life and “brought him into the orbit of the FBI and an investigation that lasted for decades and is still ongoing.”
As one of only two eyewitnesses inside the Gardner museum at the time of the robbery, Abath was “a valuable resource” for investigators who frequently reached out to him with questions while reviewing the case, Fisher said. He described Abath as “a cooperative guy.”
“As you learn new things in any investigation, it’s helpful to reach out to people who were there,” Fisher said. “He was a piece of the puzzle.”