Images courtesy U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts.
It’s worth a try, at least. A quarter century on, federal investigators still have little to go on when it comes to locating the $500 million worth of art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but a recently released video might help them track the loot down, if only they can identify the car in the video.
And that’s where we come in. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General approached us to see if we can put our heads together on the car.
A little background first: On March 18, 1990, two thieves dressed as Boston police officers tricked the night guards at the museum into letting them into the building, then handcuffed and duct-taped the guards and over the next hour and a half stole 13 paintings and other items – most notably a few Rembrandts and Johannes Vermeer’s “The Concert” – none of which have since been seen. Authorities believe the two thieves are now dead, and the statute of limitations on the theft has expired, but they say they’re no closer to locating the artwork than when they started their investigation.
The video comes from the night before the heist and shows an unidentified car backing up to the museum’s side entrance, then a man getting out of the car to chat with a security guard just inside the side entrance. Authorities have said they believe the video shows a dry run of sorts, and if that’s the case the make and model of the car could prove useful in locating the artwork.
That said, let’s start. The car appears to be a compact or subcompact hatchback, possibly a four-door. While it appears to have something affixed to the center bottom of the hatch glass, it doesn’t light up when the car brakes (and it’s in the wrong location), so it’s clearly not a Center High-Mount Stop Lamp, which became federally mandated in 1986, so we can tell that the car was built before then.
Outside of that, we have nothing concrete to go on, so let us know what you suspect the car might be in the comments below.
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