Episode 59
The Night Thirteen Masterpieces Vanished
Up nextBack to the full archiveThe documented facts
- Early on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, claiming to respond to a disturbance.
- They tied the two night guards in the basement. The guards were unharmed. In about 81 minutes, the thieves stole 13 works of art, cutting some canvases from their frames.
- Among them: Vermeer's The Concert and Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The haul is valued at about $500 million, the largest unsolved art theft in history.
- No arrests have ever been made. A $10 million reward has been offered for information leading to recovery, and the museum still hangs the empty frames where the paintings were.
The Draugr does not invent. He documents.
Episode 59 case file
The facts
- Early on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, claiming to respond to a disturbance.
- They tied the two night guards in the basement. The guards were unharmed. In about 81 minutes, the thieves stole 13 works of art, cutting some canvases from their frames.
- Among them: Vermeer's The Concert and Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The haul is valued at about $500 million, the largest unsolved art theft in history.
- No arrests have ever been made. A $10 million reward has been offered for information leading to recovery, and the museum still hangs the empty frames where the paintings were.
The evidence
- They tied the two night guards in the basement. The guards were unharmed. In about 81 minutes, the thieves stole 13 works of art, cutting some canvases from their frames.
- Among them: Vermeer's The Concert and Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The haul is valued at about $500 million, the largest unsolved art theft in history.
- No arrests have ever been made. A $10 million reward has been offered for information leading to recovery, and the museum still hangs the empty frames where the paintings were.
Sources
- Sources are being gathered for this file. The facts above are documented.
The words, as I spoke them.
Transcript
EP59: The Night Thirteen Masterpieces Vanished (Gardner Museum heist, Boston, March 1990) Adults only. No graphic content. Guards tied up, unharmed.
Two uniforms. One knock in Boston. And thirteen masterpieces that would never come home.
March eighteen, nineteen ninety. Boston. Two men dressed as police talked their way into the Gardner Museum after midnight, and tied the guards in the basement.
In eighty one minutes, they cut canvases from their frames. Vermeer. Rembrandt. The Concert. The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
The guards woke, still tied. Five hundred million dollars. Gone before dawn.
The FBI chased leads for decades. The frames still hang empty on the museum walls, waiting for paintings that never returned.
Leave a comment in the comment section if you would walk past those empty frames alone at night. Follow for a new true nightmare every day. Sleep with the lights on, if you can.
Dramatized for the telling. The facts above are documented; the narration is the Draugr’s retelling of them.
Wear the nightmare
The Dreaded wear the mark.
Enter the shop
