THE BUTTERFLY THIEF: Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia’s Greatest Museum Heist, by Walter Marsh
xAs the recent theft of jewelry from the Louvre shows, the public has a huge appetite for stories of museum heists, and in his intricate new book, “The Butterfly Thief,” the Australian journalist Walter Marsh offers up a delicious premise: the robbery of 3,000 priceless butterflies from museums in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.
As Marsh notes, Australian museums of the era were almost comically inept; tales abound of broken alarms and deaf night watchmen. One thief hid for hours in a box of kangaroo skins, then emerged at midnight to smash open cases of jewels.
The National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne was no exception: Its prized butterfly collection was stored in a subterranean “dungeon” behind a stout iron door whose imposing presence was undermined somewhat by its lack of a working lock. One day in 1947, curators there discovered, quite by accident, that several butterflies were missing from a storage drawer. At first, they assumed that it had been a crime of opportunity — that someone had swiped them, simply to sell.
But their throats tightened as they pulled open more drawers and realized the truth: This thief had exquisite taste, and had targeted and stolen only the best specimens. The robbery, in Marsh’s words, had required “stealth, attention to detail and a deep understanding of the world of entomology. And, it must be said, a certain artistic flair.”
Nervously, the curators contacted colleagues at other museums, who scrambled to check their own collections. They reported back grimly: Their collections, too, had been targeted. Before long, Marsh notes, “there was scarcely a natural-history museum in Australia that wasn’t a crime scene.”
A suspect soon emerged. Colin Wyatt was a classic gentleman-thief — a debonair 37-year-old with a red pencil mustache who made his living as a fine-art painter; he also loved Byron and was a champion ski jumper.
But his true passion was butterflies, and when confronted, Wyatt readily confessed to the thefts. Indeed, he prided himself on being a sort of Sherlock Holmes of lepidoptery, studying maps and using reason and logic to track his quarries. “Some might have considered him a dilettante, a fraud, a thief,” Marsh writes, “but even his harshest critics had to concede that he was excellent company” and undeniably stylish.
Surprisingly, scientists are still dealing with the fallout from Wyatt’s thefts. Not until 2016 did they discover that he’d stolen the so-called type specimen (the first scientifically described example) of the rare flame hairstreak, then used his painting skills to doctor a common butterfly and swap it in.
Frankly, Wyatt was a mediocre artist. But this butterfly-wing canvas was a masterpiece of deception. As Marsh concludes the book, “He left behind a tiny work of art that people would still be talking about nearly 80 years later.” That’s more than most artists can say.
Alas, reaching this denouement requires something of a slog. The book’s narrative feels thin at times, as Wyatt’s actual thefts are more summarized than laid out as scenes. And while Marsh deftly skewers Wyatt’s stated excuse for the thefts (stress from a crumbling marriage), he misses a chance to probe the true motivations for the crime. Aesthetic lust? A drive to possess? A kleptomaniac thrill? Surely there’s more to say about the psychological compulsions that drove Wyatt to betray friends and flee Australia with his gorgeous, ill-gotten goods.
A bigger issue is the book’s endless digressions into the lives of minor characters. To be sure, the paths that Marsh leads us down are often memorable — we sit in on séances, encounter a wallet made of human skin, see cameos by Mick Jagger and the Dalai Lama. I particularly enjoyed the aftermath of a V-1 bomb that rocked a museum in London during World War II: “The blast tore through the bird and upper mammals galleries, shattering so much glass that for years afterward, museum staff had to take extra care while handling specimens in case splinters of glass shook loose from the fur.” But amid these tangents (and tangents within tangents), the book’s title character disappears for dozens of pages at a stretch.
Perhaps the problem is that “The Butterfly Thief” aims to be two books at once: both a heist tale and an indictment of Western museums, whose rapacious collecting practices in that era included robbing the graves of Indigenous people and shipping their bones around the world. It’s an ugly legacy, one that museums still haven’t fully reckoned with, and Marsh highlights several shameful incidents.
In the end, then, perhaps the stories of Wyatt and the museums he targeted aren’t that different. (Marsh notes that, in accepting pilfered colonial goods, museums back then often functioned as “glorified fences.”) It’s a provocative idea, but gets lost within a fun but haphazard book.
THE BUTTERFLY THIEF: Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia’s Greatest Museum Heist | By Walter Marsh | Scribe | 359 pp. | $24
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