The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped! Read online

  The inquisitive (if uneducated) Bunton took to the stacks of the local library, where it appears that he read somewhat selectively. British history books treat the Duke of Wellington with reverence, as an unparalleled military officer and benevolent statesman, but Bunton came away distinctly unimpressed: “The man had been a tyrant” with nothing but contempt for the lower classes, a “flogger of men” and an overrated warrior. The lower classes the duke despised “won the battles for which he took the credit.” Having immersed himself in the history books, Bunton could find “not one iota of any humane act he had done.”

  And so, Bunton later told the police and eventually a jury, he determined that this historic figure, so destructive in life, should be exploited for benevolent purposes more than a century after his death. He crafted a carefully thought-out plan. He would kidnap and ransom The Duke, and since the money would go to charity, no one could seriously object. Moreover, since he would never personally handle the money, he would be in no legal jeopardy. The portrait of an overrated man would be returned to the National Gallery, thousands of elderly people would gain access to television, and no one would suffer at all.

  It is fascinating to see, in retrospect, that one man had Bunton’s number all along. Scotland Yard employed profilers, consulted psychics, and engaged in extensive speculation about the thief’s motives. An ingenious prankster? Cold-blooded professional? They never guessed the improbable truth. But in October 1961, two months after the theft, writing in the Nation magazine, novelist Richard Condon mused about the recent rash of art thefts (The Duke included) as follows:

  Perhaps the extraordinary price tags that have been placed on great art have affected some of the unstable. . . . Perhaps the more aberrant among them have begun to search their tilted minds to find some means of protest. . . . Perhaps they thought of the swollen prices of these paintings in terms of sums which could feed thousands, house thousands, educate thousands, clothe thousands and save thousands. . . . Perhaps it upset the unstable people so much that they began to steal paintings.

  Where Kempton Bunton was concerned, Condon’s impressive speculation missed with respect to one particular. While Bunton did indeed rage over the thought of what all that money squandered on art could do for the poor, he was not so much concerned about feeding, clothing, educating, and saving them but rather . . . allowing them to watch television.

  Bunton’s motive was no crazier than the course of action he allegedly pursued. According to his memoirs, as well as accounts he would give throughout his life, Bunton hitchhiked to London and made his way to the National Gallery (where he had never been) to case the joint. But, he claimed, as he wandered through the building, he discovered something that had not occurred to him: The invaluable art objects within were heavily guarded. On a more encouraging note, he saw that major construction was taking place outside and that, as a result, a ladder was strapped to scaffolding near the men’s lavatory. In addition to gleaning such physical details, Bunton also gathered human intelligence. He chatted up a security guard and obtained important information about who guarded what works of art when. He spent sixpence for the gallery’s floor plan, which provided further useful information.

  Still not quite ready for the heist, Bunton returned to Newcastle and told his wife that he had been fishing. Bunton was blissfully unaware that, if he waited just a few more days, his theft of the Goya would be fifty years to the day of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Serendipitously he did wait a few days, the theft did occur fifty years to the day of the theft of the Mona Lisa, and from the beginning it was assumed that the thief had what one expert on art theft called a “flair for history.” In fact, Kempton Bunton never even knew about the theft of the Mona Lisa, much less its date. That Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen fifty years to the day of the theft of the Mona Lisa was a complete coincidence in a case whose bizarre aspects would continue to accumulate.

  When Bunton returned to London, he made sure that the helpful situation with construction outside the National Gallery had not changed. He then formulated a precise plan, which included purchasing an old coat for a disguise and a toy gun in case he found himself confronted. Everything was in place except for one elusive detail: the absence of a getaway vehicle.

  On Sunday night, August 21, as he passed the time at a pub, pondering his crusade, a despairing Bunton practically gave up on the idea of the heist because he could not afford a car and could not imagine any alternative for transporting The Duke. At least that is what Bunton told the authorities (as well as reiterated in his memoirs), though the absurdity of this account might have tipped them off that something was amiss. He had purchased special attire and a crime “weapon” while lacking a means of transport? If such oddities failed to establish doubt about Bunton’s veracity, what he claimed happened next surely should have.

  As Bunton wrestled with his despair, he prowled around in a half-hearted attempt to find a car with a key carelessly left in the ignition. No luck. But while hanging out on a street corner cursing his fate, he spotted a car driven by someone clearly drunk. The drunkard parked outside a small hotel near where Bunton happened to be stationed, then staggered out of the car and crawled into the hotel, leaving the driver’s door partially open and the key in the ignition. Bunton jumped into the car and sped away. He drove straight to the National Gallery and parked outside the rear gates. He got out, then spent a few hours wandering around the street on foot, trying to embolden himself. At roughly 4 A.M., he took a swig of whiskey from a bottle he was carrying around; donned gloves, the old coat, and a taxi hat; wrapped a clothesline around his waist; and, armed with the toy gun, made his move.

  First he had to scale a wall to get into the gallery courtyard from the street. This he accomplished by placing a tarpaulin on the roof of his car, climbing atop the car, then putting the tarp on the wall and climbing on it. He found himself on top of a corrugated tin roof, where he lay and looked around. He thought he heard movement in the yard and saw a light. He feared that all his planning would be thwarted by a night watchman employed by the construction company. He lay still for at least fifteen minutes, by which time he decided that the noise and lights were, as he put it in his memoirs, “figures of my imagination.”

  He made his way into the yard, where he felt surrounded by total silence and vast space. After traversing what seemed like a series of courtyards, at last he arrived at the National Gallery’s lavatory window. As he sought to lift and open up the ladder, a loud noise made him freeze—someone had yanked the chain to flush the lavatory toilet. Bunton waited a little longer. He had earlier determined that 5 A.M. would be the best time to enter, and the flushed toilet jarred him into returning to that plan, which meant another half hour of delay. During that time, he noticed a “sort of ventilation shaft, probably in connection with the Gallery,” and thought that a professional thief might enter through that. But this distinctly unprofessional thief decided to stick to his original plan.

  When the time finally arrived, Bunton picked up the ladder and moved it under the lavatory window, despite finding it “intolerably heavy.” Thereafter “I remember being ultra careful in the operation.” He chose this hour because his intelligence gathering had led him to expect no resistance, but in case a guard should materialize (and someone had flushed the toilet just a little earlier), he had a contingency plan: The toy gun would “look very real to a guard, and ensure his silence, and persuade him to unlock one of the side doors to let me out.”

  The weapon may have helped, but Bunton found even greater comfort elsewhere. His “main ally” was the knowledge of his own benign intentions: “I did not look upon taking the picture as criminal, and what the hell if I did fail, it was no hanging matter, and at least the failure would bring attention to my aims.”

  Thus calmed, Bunton climbed the ladder, lifted the bar of the window, and pulled himself into the lavatory, where he “found myself standing on a toilet basin. It was now that some luck was
needed.”

  Listening intently, he could detect only a hissing sound, which he attributed to the boiler heating system. He walked outside the lavatory and into the gallery hallway, turned right, walked to the end of the corridor, turned left, walked down the foyer, and then walked up the half flight of stairs that left him facing The Duke of Wellington, surrounded by a rope barrier. He stepped inside the rope, removed The Duke, and reversed his tracks. It seemed like eternity before Bunton found himself back in the lavatory, where he told himself, “I must work fast. At any moment anyone could stumble upon me.”

  He removed the clothesline from his waist and tied it around the painting, which he proceeded to lower to the ground faceup. He then followed the same path himself and momentarily landed on the ground next to the painting. He picked it up and headed for his prearranged exit through the double gates at the rear of the gallery, abutting St. Martin’s Street.

  At this point, however, Bunton discovered a glitch in his well-crafted plan. The gates, which he expected to be secured by ordinary slip bolts that he would easily release, were padlocked. Through “madness or hypnotism” he had committed “a stupid oversight,” and panic began to set in. He and The Duke were trapped. Bunton had the presence of mind to search for an alternative escape route and noticed a low wall to his left. He climbed over it, only to find a higher wall impeding access to the street. He climbed that wall as well and from the top noticed a sign: “Car Sales.” He had attained the street—or at least he would once he lowered himself and his traveling partner. Panic had given way to calm, but the latter induced carelessness, as he “contemptuously ignored strands of rotten barbed wire.”

  He “half lowered, half fell to the ground,” turning an ankle in the process. He limped to his car, stood the portrait on its floor, and at last made his getaway on the still-deserted street, heading toward the lodge where he was staying. Except he got lost, prompting this self-assessment: “I remember a feeling of irony. I was blundering this job all through, and yet getting away with it.”

  Roughly one hundred yards from the lodge, Bunton saw a policeman step into the middle of the road to flag him down. Bunton felt panicky, asking himself “how in hell could they have started this Goya hunt already?”

  In fact, Bunton had attracted the officer’s attention for a different reason: “Goya was within inches of him, and uncovered,” but the cop’s interest in the car stemmed from the fact that it was heading the wrong way on a one-way street. The officer politely turned Bunton around, and that was that. Bunton soon arrived at the lodge and, after ensuring that no one was watching, whisked the painting up to his room and stood it behind a dresser against the wall.

  At long last, both Bunton and The Duke were safe, and it was presumably only a matter of time before the elderly could again afford to watch television. But Bunton still had work to do, starting with getting rid of the getaway vehicle. He returned it to the hotel at Kings Cross whence it came, in the hope that the drunk from whom he had taken it would reclaim it. He assumed that that in fact had happened, “and I don’t suppose that car owner ever realized that he was a gallon of petrol down.”

  Bad ankle and all, Bunton raced back to the lodge, took The Duke out of hiding, and looked triumphantly at his hostage. He was viewing the man Tennyson had eulogized as “in his simplicity sublime,” but Bunton saw only meanness and haughtiness. He repeats in his memoirs the same poetic message he gave the cops: “Wellington returned my stare with cold contempt.” Indeed, “I swear I saw his lips move, and the imaginary voice said, ‘Thou low born wretch, I’ll break thee for this.’”

  When he was done conversing with The Duke, Bunton began preparations for transporting them both. He decided that the frame was “too ugly and too large to be worth bothering about” and lightened his load by removing it. With the benefit of hardboard, brown sheets of paper, and Sellotape (a British brand of transparent adhesive tape), he covered the painting to secure it from scratching.

  As for what he did with the frame, Bunton told multiple stories over the years. He told the cops that he threw the frame in the Thames. At trial some years later, he claimed that he left the frame in a cupboard under the stairs in the house where he lodged. But in his memoirs, Bunton writes that he broke the frame into pieces and “distributed several parts around various building dumps.” In any case, with the unframed Duke of Wellington now safe from injury and detection, Bunton would embark on a three-hundred-mile journey north.

  A predictable intervening event, which surprisingly surprised Bunton, was the fevered reaction to the theft that swept London. He learned from media reports that airports and railways stations were being watched for suspicious parcels. Bunton despised this “outcry over a piece of old wood,” all the more so because it complicated his plan to return to Newcastle, where he was due in two days. He couldn’t very well stay put because of the “danger of myself and the Goya being somehow connected by going missing at the same time.”

  Bunton claims that he attached “glass with care” labels to the portrait, put it back behind his wardrobe, and took the train to Newcastle without his expected travel companion. A few days later he returned to the lodge in London and found his hostage safe and sound.

  It must be emphasized that the account of the theft and its aftermath just given is Bunton’s—the one he gave in his memoirs and, allowing for some nontrivial divergences (such as what happened to the painting’s frame), what he told on several occasions at the police station and in the courtroom. Indeed, apart from a brief period in 1969 when he recanted the entire story and declared his innocence, it is roughly the story he gave until he died in 1976 and the story that would be told many times in his obituaries and accounts of the crime thereafter.

  The reader should understand, however, that the presentation of Bunton’s account in this chapter is just that—his account. As we shall see, internal aspects of Bunton’s story, as well as external facts to emerge over the years, cast doubt upon the essentials of his narrative of the crime. But Bunton’s bona fides must be put on hold. To understand how the whole saga developed, we need to dip back before we can move forward.

  Chapter 7: THE RANSOM NOTES (COMS 2–5)

  From October 1961 to July 1962, nothing of great consequence happened related to the investigation of the missing Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, unless you count James Bond discovering its whereabouts. In an indication of the extent to which the theft struck a nerve with the British public, the makers of the first Bond movie, Dr. No, alluded to the theft and solved the mystery. Sean Connery’s Bond does a triple-take when he spots the duke’s portrait on an easel in the underwater Caribbean lair of the villain. (The convincing-looking replica was painted by the well-regarded production designer Ken Adams, based on a slide of the original obtained from the National Gallery.)

  In the world bordering fiction and nonfiction, newspapers were recipients of many strange missives. One dated June 7, 1962, and sent to the Evening Post declared, “I am the crank. My eccentric brother-in-law has the ‘GOYA.’ It is safe, slightly damp but otherwise intact. We came from London recently. Free Pardon. Will contact.” Signed Z.B.P.J. At the bottom was a little satanic message: “666.”

  Such letters were transparent phonies, but the next month brought forward what at least in retrospect could be considered the first major event of the year—a ransom note that seemed to have been written by the person who wrote the original ransom note ten days after the theft. This second half-crazed ransom note, posted at Lancaster and Morecambe on July 3 and sent to the Exchange Telegraph, read as follows:

  Goya Com 3. The Duke is safe. His temperature cared for—his future uncertain. The painting is neither to be cloakroomed or kiosked, as such would defeat our purpose and leave us to ever open arrest. We want pardon or the right to leave the country—banishment? We ask that some nonconformist type of person with the fearless fortitude of a Montgomery start the fund for £140,000. No law can touch him. Propriety may frown—but God must smile.<
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  The thief added a PS, explaining why he called this letter Com 3 when his previous ransom note—the one sent on August 31, 1961—was Com 1: “Letter to Reuters Feb 11 was 2nd Com.”

  The letter’s invocation of a fearless “Montgomery” was presumably a reference to Field Marshal Lord Bernard Law Montgomery, a decorated hero in World War II. It stirred Montgomery to issue a statement (released on his behalf by the National Gallery), noting his personal admiration for Wellington and pleading for the return of the “magnificent portrait of a great soldier.” Montgomery lamented that “the joke has gone on long enough.”

  All the evidence suggested that the joker who had penned Com 3 was indeed the same person who had written the original ransom note (Com 1) ten days after the theft. It was written in the same block letters, displayed the same weird and insouciant tone, and covered the same substantive ground—an assurance that The Duke was safe and a demand for £140,000 and a pardon for the culprits.

  Most importantly, both letters were apparently written by someone in actual possession of the painting, as this one included a label from the back of the canvas as a physical mark to confirm authenticity. The National Gallery nevertheless cautioned skepticism. A gallery spokesperson said, “Whether the label is authentic or not, we do not know” because the gallery had never photographed the back of the painting. But others in the know saw no need to hedge. After seeing the label displayed on BBC television news, the painting’s former owner, the Duchess of Leeds, declared herself “quite sure” that it was from the portrait. Better still was the testimony of Frank Le Gallais, whose Jersey firm had actually stamped the portrait with the label and who had verified the accuracy of the first ransom note’s description of the back of the painting. After seeing the BBC report, Le Gallais confirmed that “it is undoubtedly our label. The printing on it is my firm’s and the handwriting that of our removal manager.”