Empty frames representing stolen artworks in the Dutch Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Photographer: Philip Keith for Bloomberg BusinessweekThe Case of the Empty Frames Remains Art World’s Biggest Mystery
Cops, criminals, journalists, and art sleuths—they’ve all failed to find the $500 million haul of the Gardner Museum theft.
On the night of St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, Rick Abath was working the overnight shift as a security guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. While the rest of the city drank and partied and drank some more, he and another guard, Randy Hestand, took turns patrolling the empty rooms of what had once been the ostentatious home of a Victorian-era socialite who was really into art.
Their shift started at 11:30. Abath made the first rounds while Hestand hung out at the security desk. They were young, in their mid-20s, and didn’t have any formal security training. Hestand was a New England Conservatory student who liked to use the downtime to practice his trombone. Abath played in a rock band and was known to occasionally show up to work drunk or stoned. He had a scruffy beard and long brown hair that fell in a mess of Weird Al ringlets, and on this particular night he arrived wearing bright red pants and a tie-dyed T-shirt under his unbuttoned security shirt.