The Case of the Empty Frames

For 30 years, experts have tried and failed to solve the most expensive, and possibly strangest, art heist in history

- Claire Suddath

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, who played in a rock band, later acknowledged that he occasionally showed 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.

The Gardner Museum didn’t have security cameras in its galleries, just motion detectors that recorded Abath’s movement as he made his rounds. At one point, an alarm on the fourth floor went off, but when Abath checked, nothing seemed to be amiss. He finished his tour of the museum around 1 a.m., then switched places at the security desk with Hestand, who went off on his turn to patrol.

Abath was still relaxing behind the desk at 1:24 a.m. when two Boston police officers approached a side entrance and asked to be let in. “I could see that they had hats, coats, badges,” he said in a 2013 interview with a Boston Globe reporter. “So I buzzed them in.” (Abath didn’t respond to emails, Facebook messages, or letters asking for an interview for this story.)