# 4 Cases So Disturbing… They Make No Sense | 222

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 5 May 2026, 45 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO8886148620.mp3

Join me for 4 disturbing cases that are too dark for Netflix. Episode 222 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence, serial killers, Hawaii, Ohio, Toledo, Ohio true crime

## Transcript

[0:00] When her two bosses unlocked the office on Manhattan Blvd. just
[0:03] after noon on August 4th, 1981, the radio was still ominously
[0:08] playing. Mail had been pushed through the
[0:10] slot and lay scattered on the carpet.
[0:13] A romance novel sat face down on Cynthia Anderson's desk, open to
[0:18] the only violent passage in the entire book, the scene where the
[0:23] female protagonist is taken against her will.
[0:27] As investigators dug into her case more, they would uncover
[0:30] one of the most disturbing and unusual set of circumstances in
[0:35] Ohio criminal history. Cynthia Anderson was 20 years
[0:39] old that summer, and she'd grown up in Toledo, the only child of
[0:43] doting parents. She had a steady boyfriend, Jeff
[0:47] Lemka, whom she planned to marry, and she also had a tight
[0:51] circle of friends from church and high school.
[0:54] She worked as a legal secretary at a small 2 attorney firm on
[0:58] East Manhattan Blvd. tucked into a strip mall storefront
[1:02] alongside other tenants. Her bosses, James Rabbit and Jay
[1:06] Feldstein, considered her bright, careful and unfailingly
[1:11] reliable. She also had a plan.
[1:14] And in two weeks, Cindy was going to leave the firm and
[1:17] start the next chapter of her life.
[1:20] She'd recently been accepted to a college, and Jeff, her
[1:23] boyfriend, was coming along with her for almost a year Before
[1:28] her. Last morning at work, though,
[1:30] something had been wrong, and the people closest to her hadn't
[1:35] quite known what to do with it. It started with the dreams.
[1:40] According to interviews her family later gave, Cindy had
[1:44] been having recurring nightmares since the previous year, vivid
[1:47] and consistent. A man wood forest his way into
[1:51] her home, take her somewhere and harm her.
[1:55] She told her mother, Margaret, about them more than once, but
[1:59] Margaret reassured her this was just her anxiety manifesting and
[2:03] it didn't mean anything more. Cindy had also told friends she
[2:08] sometimes felt watched, especially in the parking lot at
[2:12] the end of the day, although she could never point to anyone in
[2:15] particular watching her. Then the mysterious phone calls
[2:20] began. Cindy worked alone at the front
[2:23] of the law office during the mornings, and the calls came in
[2:26] while she was by herself at her desk.
[2:29] There was heavy breathing on the line, strange messages, and a
[2:33] voice that wouldn't identify itself.
[2:36] The calls disturbed her enough that her bosses noticed, and
[2:40] during the summer of 1981, the firm took two precautions that,
[2:45] in hindsight, sound almost prophetic.
[2:49] They told her to keep the front door locked at all times, even
[2:52] during business hours, and they had an emergency buzzer
[2:56] installed at her desk. That buzzer was also wired to
[3:00] alert the businesses next door if she ever needed help fast.
[3:05] There was something else, too, that seemed to be a clear
[3:08] indication that something more was going on here.
[3:12] About 10 months before that final August morning, someone
[3:16] had spray painted a message on a window across the street from
[3:19] the office on a building that faced Cindy's desk.
[3:23] It read I Love You Cindy by GW. For half a year, those words
[3:30] stared back at her every time she looked up from her
[3:32] typewriter. Eventually the building's owners
[3:35] painted over them, but a few weeks later the same message
[3:39] reappeared in fresh paint in roughly the same spot.
[3:44] Police never identified who this could be, and Cindy didn't know
[3:48] anyone with those initials. Nobody then or since has come
[3:54] forward to claim authorship of either painting, and the second
[3:57] appearance, by all accounts, frightened her more than the
[4:00] first. When it appeared again, it
[4:03] seemed to her that this couldn't just be written off as a weird
[4:06] coincidence. On the morning of Tuesday,
[4:09] August 4th, 1981, Cindy left her parents house and drove the
[4:14] short distance to Manhattan Blvd.
[4:17] She arrived at her normal time and went through the small
[4:19] ritual she did every day. She unlocked the front door,
[4:24] turned on the lights and the radio and the air conditioning,
[4:27] and prepared the desks for her two bosses who'd be coming in
[4:30] later. She sorted the morning's first
[4:33] batch of mail, and at some point she opened her romance novel and
[4:38] read a few pages on her break. Then, somewhere in a window of
[4:42] less than three hours, she vanished.
[4:46] Rabbit and Feldstein arrived around midday, expecting their
[4:50] secretary to greet them at the front desk.
[4:53] They found everything just as Cindy had left it, and
[4:56] absolutely nothing as it should have been.
[4:59] The office looked alive. The radio kept playing.
[5:03] A Toledo newspaper sat on the desk.
[5:06] The novel was open on her workspace, face down to the
[5:09] abduction scene, as if she'd looked up from it for a moment
[5:13] and never looked back. There was no sign of any
[5:17] struggle, nothing tipped over and no furniture out of place.
[5:22] The emergency buzzer, which the lawyers had installed, hadn't
[5:25] been pressed, and the phone remained in its place,
[5:29] undisturbed, indicating she didn't try to call the cops.
[5:33] Whatever had happened had been quick and, perhaps more
[5:36] importantly, quiet, since no one in the neighboring businesses
[5:41] heard a peep. Cindy's prints were on the door,
[5:44] on the desk, on the romance novel, and whoever else might
[5:48] have been in the office hadn't left, the kind of evidence that
[5:51] 1981 forensics could lift. But the door behind them had
[5:55] been locked from the inside, and Cindy had taken her purse and
[5:59] her keys with her. Yet her car was still in the
[6:02] lot. The doors locked.
[6:04] Either she'd walked out willingly with someone she
[6:06] trusted enough to leave her car behind, or someone had taken her
[6:10] against her will and then locked the office behind themselves.
[6:15] The Toledo Police Department went to work immediately trying
[6:18] to locate Cindy. Officers canvassed the
[6:21] neighborhood, tracked down former boyfriends, ran the
[6:25] harassing call lead, and interviewed anyone who'd ever
[6:28] made Cindy uncomfortable. They cleared Jeff almost at
[6:32] once, in part because his alibi held and in part because
[6:37] everyone who knew the couple agreed that the relationship
[6:39] was, by all visible measures, a happy one.
[6:44] They pulled the law firm's case files, looking for anybody who
[6:48] might have held a grudge against the attorneys or someone
[6:51] connected to them. Cindy's family, for their part,
[6:55] handed out Flyers and made appearances on local television
[6:59] stations, trying to drum up any tips.
[7:03] Then, in early September, about 5 weeks after Cindy vanished,
[7:07] investigators got their strangest lead.
[7:10] A woman called the police anonymously, and she was
[7:14] whispering, tense, plainly, quite frightened.
[7:19] She told investigators that Cindy was alive, being held in
[7:23] the basement of a White House. The White House, the caller
[7:27] said, was one of two on the same property, both owned by the same
[7:33] family. She claimed that the parents
[7:36] were out of town and their adult son was holding Cindy hostage.
[7:41] The caller wouldn't say where the property was, and she
[7:44] wouldn't give her name. And just like that, she hung up.
[7:49] Detectives tried to trace the call, but in 1981 there wasn't
[7:52] much they could do. With an anonymous tip from a pay
[7:55] phone or a private line, they followed up on every plausible
[7:59] White House lead they received afterward and obtained the
[8:02] warrants they could justify. None of them led to Cindy, and
[8:07] the mysterious Whispering Woman never called back.
[8:11] Over the next 4 decades, several names rose to the top of the
[8:15] suspect list and stayed there. The most enduring belonged to
[8:19] Anthony and Nathaniel Cook, two brothers who together account
[8:23] for 9 confirmed slayings across Northwest Ohio in the 70s and
[8:27] early 80's. The Cook brothers were operating
[8:31] in and around Toledo at the time Cindy disappeared, and their
[8:35] pattern of abducting young women fit her case enough to keep
[8:38] investigators interested. Both have denied any
[8:41] involvement, and neither has ever been formally tied to her
[8:45] by physical evidence. The cleanness of Cindy's scene
[8:49] also doesn't quite match the chaos they typically left behind
[8:52] either, which has LED some investigators to doubt their
[8:55] involvement. A second theory points in a very
[8:59] different direction. A convicted drug trafficker
[9:02] named Jose Rodriguez and his defense attorney Richard Kneller
[9:06] became suspects because Kneller had a working relationship with
[9:10] Cindy's law office. In 1981, Kneller had
[9:13] unfortunately begun to Fillmore of a Saul Goodman like role for
[9:17] Rodriguez, something that came as a shock to the local legal
[9:21] community. And just to be clear here, the
[9:24] relationship between Kneller and Cindy's firm was entirely above
[9:28] board and professional in nature.
[9:31] However, he rented space in the law office and, of course, met
[9:35] his clients there. The thinking advanced by some in
[9:38] law enforcement is that Cindy had overheard something she
[9:42] wasn't supposed to and that what she knew got her taken.
[9:47] At Rodriguez's 1995 trial on unrelated charges, an informant
[9:52] testified that Rodriguez had confessed to the abduction, but
[9:56] the court ruled the testimony unreliable.
[9:59] No charges have ever been filed in connection with her case, and
[10:02] both Rodriguez and Neller maintained that they weren't
[10:05] involved whatsoever. Then there are the smaller,
[10:09] weirder threads. The graffiti, the harassing
[10:12] caller, the dreams that had been gnawing at her for a year before
[10:16] she vanished, and the woman's mysterious call.
[10:20] None of them has ever resolved into anything whatsoever, with
[10:24] some believing these could just be coincidences or, in the case
[10:28] of the woman's call, a sick hoax.
[10:32] Her parents live the rest of their lives in vain, waiting for
[10:35] any word of what happened to Cindy.
[10:38] Her mother passed in 1983, less than two years after Cindy
[10:43] vanished, of a cancer that those closest to her believed had been
[10:47] hastened by grief. Her father kept Cindy's bedroom
[10:52] exactly as she'd left it for the next 27 years, holding on to her
[10:56] belongings in case she ever came back through the door.
[11:00] He passed in 2008, alone in the house Cindy had grown up in and
[11:05] grieving for his missing daughter.
[11:08] My personal theory is that Cynthia Anderson was likely
[11:11] targeted by an unidentified stalker, and that this person
[11:14] may have been someone close enough to lower her guard.
[11:17] The strongest reason is the pattern.
[11:19] Before she vanished, Cindy had recurring nightmares about being
[11:24] abducted, told friends she felt watched and received disturbing
[11:28] phone calls while alone at work. She was also frightened by the
[11:33] repeated graffiti facing her office window.
[11:36] That pattern feels less like a random abduction and more like
[11:39] fixation, and I think the locked door detail also matters.
[11:44] There was no sign of a struggle, the emergency buzzer wasn't
[11:47] pressed, and her purse and keys were gone while her locked car
[11:51] remained in the lot. That suggests she may have
[11:54] stepped outside willingly, at least at first, perhaps to meet
[11:59] someone she thought she knew and trusted.
[12:02] If the person was someone from high school, church or her
[12:06] broader social circle, that could explain how he got her to
[12:10] open the door despite being afraid.
[12:13] A stranger would probably have triggered panic, and we know she
[12:17] had the alarm there to press if she felt scared.
[12:20] Someone she believed she knew well could have created a brief
[12:23] moment of trust just long enough to get her outside.
[12:27] She may have even felt comfortable enough to get into a
[12:30] vehicle with him. And if that was the case, it
[12:33] explains why no one saw anything On the Leeward side of Kauai in
[12:42] the spring of 2000, a man walked up to a stranger working in her
[12:46] own yard, told her his name was John, and said he was homeless.
[12:51] Within minutes he launched A brutal assault on her and
[12:54] despite his best efforts, she fought back and survived.
[12:58] Sadly, 2 other women who were attacked in nearly identical
[13:01] fashion in the same 6 month window didn't.
[13:05] More than two decades later, his genetic material sits in a
[13:08] Hawaii crime lab, waiting for a match that for some reason,
[13:12] hasn't come. Kauai's West side feels remote,
[13:17] even by the standards of the Hawaiian Islands.
[13:20] The coastline runs in a long arc from Hanapepe and Waimea up
[13:24] through Kakaha and out to Polihal, where the road
[13:29] eventually turns to red dirt and fades into the dunes of the
[13:33] Nepali cliffs. The communities strung along
[13:36] that road are small, working class and largely Native
[13:40] Hawaiian and local Filipino. The tourists tend to be day
[13:44] trippers heading to the Canyon or to the remote beach located
[13:48] in the area. Anyone living there in 2000
[13:53] would have told you it wasn't the kind of place where
[13:55] strangers blended in for long, which is part of what makes the
[13:59] case so unsettling. In a span of less than five
[14:03] months that year, three women were attacked along that stretch
[14:07] of coast. They were all middle-aged,
[14:10] white, alone and stabbed by an attacker who committed the most
[14:14] heinous acts to them before or during the attacks.
[14:19] The West side of Kauai had something it hadn't had before
[14:23] and hasn't had since. A serial offender working a
[14:26] single narrow corridor of the island and apparently working it
[14:30] on foot. The first victim found was Lisa
[14:34] Bissell. She was 38 and lived in Hana
[14:37] Pepe. On April 7th, 2000, her body
[14:41] turned up in a ditch off the dirt Rd. that leads out to Polly
[14:44] Hale State Park. She'd been subjected to a
[14:48] disturbing form of assault, beaten and stabbed, and her
[14:53] throat had been cut. And while I don't usually get
[14:56] into that sort of granular detail on the crimes, given that
[15:01] this is a case that I believe can be cracked right now with
[15:04] the right attention on it, it needs to be said.
[15:07] Some of her belongings were later recovered along a road in
[15:10] Waimea. This suggested to investigators
[15:14] that she'd been grabbed there and either driven or made to
[15:16] walk the rest of the way out toward the dunes.
[15:19] The location matters. The road to Polyhale runs
[15:22] through old cane fields and fields in places like the end of
[15:26] the road in the literal sense, since there's nothing past it
[15:30] but ocean. Whoever left her there knew the
[15:33] area well enough to know she might not be found quickly.
[15:37] And while the medical examiner's findings were never released in
[15:40] full, the wounds described in court filings and police
[15:44] summaries point to an attack that wasn't impulsive.
[15:49] For a community of a few thousand people, Bissell's
[15:52] slaying was a Thunder clap. But because her death didn't
[15:55] immediately fit a known pattern, the Kauai Police Department
[15:59] investigated it as a one off. That assumption would last about
[16:04] six weeks. On May 22nd a 52 year old woman
[16:10] was working in her yard in Kekaha, about 10 miles up the
[16:13] coast from where Bissell's body had been found.
[16:17] A man approached her on foot and he told her his name was John
[16:21] and that he was homeless. She expected that he was going
[16:25] to ask her for money or food, but instead he attacked her
[16:29] where she stood. What followed is the only first
[16:33] hand account of this offender's methods that exists, and it's
[16:37] the reason the case has any forward motion at all.
[16:40] He indecently assaulted her, beat her, broke her arm, and
[16:44] stabbed her in the abdomen with such force that the blade
[16:47] snapped off inside her body. She was bleeding out in her own
[16:51] yard with a knife tip lodged in her.
[16:54] And yet somehow, through some miracle, she survived.
[17:00] She gave investigators a description, a name that was
[17:03] almost certainly an alias, and eventually a composite sketch.
[17:09] He was a man in his 30s or 40s, average build, deeply tanned
[17:14] skin, dark hair, the kind of face that could belong to dozens
[17:18] of men along that coast. Crucially, the fact that she
[17:22] survived rather than being discovered much later allowed
[17:27] the cops to collect his DNA. From that day forward, this
[17:31] predator wasn't a theoretical figure.
[17:34] He was a profile in a database waiting to be caught.
[17:39] The third attack came on August 30th of the same summer.
[17:42] A decomposing body was found at a remote campsite near Pakala
[17:46] Point, a stretch of beach popular with local fishermen and
[17:49] surfers, but not heavily trafficked otherwise.
[17:53] The victim was Darren, our Singer, 43 years old, originally
[17:58] from Maui. She'd been assaulted, stabbed in
[18:01] the throat, and beaten so badly that her face was barely
[18:05] recognizable to the officers who recovered her.
[18:08] By the time Singer was found, she'd been deceased for some
[18:11] time, which made forensic work harder, especially with the
[18:15] forensic science as it existed at the time.
[18:18] But the Kauai investigators had something they didn't have in
[18:22] April. They had the May Survivors
[18:24] offender profile to compare against.
[18:28] When Singer's case was processed, the genetic profile
[18:31] matched the same man who'd attacked the woman in Kekaha had
[18:36] attacked Singer at Pakala Point. And once that link was
[18:39] established, the Bissell case from April fell into place too.
[18:44] The pattern wasn't a hypothesis anymore.
[18:46] It was 3 brutal attacks, all on the same 15 mile stretch of West
[18:50] side coastline, all inside 1 summer.
[18:54] Hawaii had its first confirmed serial offender of the modern
[18:58] era working a small slice of one of its smallest inhabited
[19:02] islands, and almost no one outside Kauai ever heard about
[19:06] it. The Kauai Police Department by
[19:09] most accounts was severely overwhelmed and under qualified
[19:12] for a case of this magnitude. The department was small, the
[19:16] island was barely populated, and a case of this complexity was
[19:20] unprecedented locally. State investigators were called
[19:24] in and the FBI consulted, and a reward fund set up by a victim's
[19:29] family eventually grew into the 10s of thousands of dollars.
[19:33] Officers canvassed campsites, beaches and rural roads on the
[19:38] West side, knocking on doors and asking about transient men
[19:42] matching the sketch. Some of the residents who were
[19:46] interviewed had their own theories about a man they
[19:49] thought they'd seen, but most of those leads dissolved on closer
[19:53] examination. What they kept hearing was that
[19:56] the West Side had a lot of those men drifting about.
[20:00] The sugar cane industry in the region collapsed only a few
[20:03] years earlier, and the corridor between Hana Pepe and Polly Hale
[20:07] had pockets of homeless camps. A composite sketch, even a good
[20:12] one, wasn't going to be enough. And what they needed was the
[20:15] forensics to match somebody on file or somebody they could
[20:19] swab. Within months, attention turned
[20:23] to a man named Waldorf Wilson, a registered offender with an
[20:27] extremely dark history. He'd been convicted in 1983 of
[20:32] attacking and kidnapping of a woman on Oahu, served his
[20:35] sentence and been paroled in January of 1999, roughly a year
[20:41] before the attacks began. He'd moved to Kauai and was
[20:45] living on the West side in the corridor where all three women
[20:49] had been attacked. He allegedly bore a strong
[20:52] resemblance to the composite. He had the right kind of
[20:55] history, and on paper at least, the cops thought they got their
[21:00] man. And I say allegedly here because
[21:03] I can't find a picture of the man anywhere online to either
[21:07] confirm or deny this. The cops questioned him in
[21:10] September of 2000 and took ADNA sample.
[21:14] The lab compared his profile against the offender profile
[21:17] from the May survivor and the singer scene.
[21:21] The result, according to the investigation file as it's been
[21:24] reported in subsequent local coverage, came back
[21:27] inconclusive. It wasn't a clear exclusion, but
[21:31] it wasn't a match either. And that single word would do a
[21:34] lot of damage in the years that followed.
[21:38] To investigators, inconclusive meant they couldn't charge him
[21:42] even if they strongly suspected him.
[21:45] To Wilson, who was publicly named an island media as a prime
[21:49] suspect, it meant his name was permanently attached to three of
[21:53] the most notorious attacks in Kawhi's history.
[21:57] He sued the Police Department, the chief, and several news
[22:01] outlets for defamation, but the lawsuits were dismissed and the
[22:05] dismissals were upheld on appeal.
[22:08] If he committed these horrendous acts, that's an extremely
[22:11] bizarre move given that starting a civil suit opens up the
[22:15] plaintiff to mandatory cross examination.
[22:19] OK, so I'm a bit unclear as to why this case hasn't been
[22:22] cracked just yet, and I suspect that if it was a high profile
[22:26] case it would have been closed ages ago.
[22:29] We have all the genetic evidence we could ever need.
[22:32] Still secure in an evidence locker somewhere.
[22:36] Meanwhile, genetic testing has advanced at lightning speed in
[22:39] the quarter century since this crime occurred.
[22:43] A sample that wasn't sufficient to yield a conclusive result
[22:46] around the turn of the millennia may now be sufficient to do so.
[22:51] There's also the matter of genetic genealogy, which could
[22:55] potentially identify new suspects that haven't yet been
[22:59] identified or named in the investigation.
[23:03] Personally, I think this case should be bumped up to the
[23:06] absolute highest priority in terms of genetic testing so that
[23:10] justice can finally be had for the three victims.
[23:14] The fact that it hasn't been is honestly somewhat disturbing
[23:17] because the predator responsible for these attacks may very well
[23:20] still be alive. Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here
[23:27] with a reminder to hit the subscribe button and the
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[23:45] out the Patreon or the membership.
[23:51] It was just past one in the morning on March 18th, 1990 when
[23:56] two men dressed as Boston police officers walked up to the side
[23:59] entrance of a museum and pressed the night buzzer.
[24:03] They told the young guard inside that they were responding to a
[24:06] disturbance call and he let them in. 81 minutes later they walked
[24:12] out into the cold air carrying thirteen pieces of priceless
[24:16] art. These include a Vermeer the
[24:19] world hasn't seen since 3 Rembrandts, A Manet, a handful
[24:25] of Degas sketches, and a Chinese bronze cup older than the Roman
[24:29] Empire. The frames they cut the canvases
[24:33] out of are still hanging on the walls, empty, exactly as the
[24:38] museum's founder once required her collection to be preserved
[24:41] forever. To this day, it remains the
[24:45] largest unsolved property theft in history.
[24:48] Despite a $10 million reward, decades of FBI work, and tips
[24:53] funneled in from informants across three separate mob
[24:56] families, not a single one of those pieces has ever turned
[25:00] back up. Isabella Stewart Gardner was a
[25:04] Bostonian by marriage and a New Yorker by birth.
[25:08] An heiress with a sharp eye and a sharper personality, she spent
[25:12] the late 19th century traveling Europe and acquiring whatever
[25:16] caught her attention Vermeers, Rembrandts, Botticelli's,
[25:21] Titians. By the time she stopped, the
[25:24] collection rivalled some national museums.
[25:27] And when she built her own museum on the Fenway in 19 O3 to
[25:31] house it all, she did something deeply unusual.
[25:35] She dictated in her will that nothing in the building could
[25:38] ever be moved, sold, lent out, or rearranged.
[25:42] If a single object were changed, the entire collection was to be
[25:46] auctioned off and the proceeds given to Harvard.
[25:51] So when the thieves cut those canvases out of their frames in
[25:55] 1990, those frames legally couldn't be removed or filled
[26:00] with substitutes. The empty spots have been part
[26:03] of the permanent display ever since.
[26:06] Like wounds, the institution isn't allowed to dress that
[26:10] detail alone reshaped the way this case sits in public memory.
[26:13] Since most stolen art simply disappears from view here, the
[26:18] absence itself has been preserved as a fixture of the
[26:21] building to stay in accordance with the will of the founder.
[26:26] The two men working the overnight shift on March 17th
[26:29] into March 18th, 1990 were a 23 year old part timer named Rick A
[26:34] Bath and a younger colleague named Randy Heston.
[26:39] Abath was a long haired musician who'd graduated from Berkeley
[26:42] College of Music. He pulled night shifts at the
[26:45] museum because they paid the bills and gave him time to play
[26:49] in his band. He had a habit of opening the
[26:52] side door during his rounds to check it was secure and
[26:55] idiosyncrasy. That's going to matter later.
[26:59] Around 1:20 in the morning, the front desk's external buzzer
[27:03] rang. The voice on the intercom
[27:06] claimed there'd been a disturbance reported in the
[27:08] courtyard. Abaath looked at the security
[27:11] monitor and saw two men in Boston Police Department
[27:14] uniforms, one with a bushy mustache, the other clean
[27:18] shaven, both wearing officer caps pulled low.
[27:22] He buzzed them in, which technically violated standing
[27:25] protocol. The young guards weren't
[27:28] supposed to admit anyone, real cops included, without first
[27:32] contacting their supervisor. Abath admitted later that the
[27:36] two men looked legitimate enough that he didn't think twice about
[27:39] it. What happened next moved with
[27:43] the kind of practice deficiency that suggests these two thieves
[27:47] had rehearsed. They told Abath there was a
[27:50] warrant out for him and asked him to step away from the desk,
[27:53] which meant stepping away from the only alarm button.
[27:57] The moment he complied, they told him he was being arrested,
[28:01] walked him to the side and ordered him to call his partner
[28:04] over the radio. When Heston arrived, both guards
[28:09] were handcuffed, walked into the basement and bound to pipes more
[28:13] than 100 feet apart with their eyes, mouths and hands bound in
[28:18] duct tape. Then the real work began.
[28:23] The two men were inside the building for roughly 81 minutes,
[28:27] moving methodically through the 2nd floor galleries in the Dutch
[28:31] Room. They cut Rembrandt's only known
[28:34] seascape, a 1633 painting called The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,
[28:41] out of its heavy frame with a box cutter.
[28:44] They did the same to A Lady and Gentleman in Black, a Rembrandt
[28:48] portrait that had been part of the museum since the building
[28:51] opened. They unscrewed Vermeer's The
[28:53] Concert from the Wall and took a tiny Rembrandt self-portrait,
[28:57] etching about the size of a postage stamp.
[29:01] They also pulled down a landscape that was attributed at
[29:04] the time to Rembrandt and was later reassigned to his student
[29:07] Govert Flink. In the short gallery, they
[29:11] ignored a row of objects worth millions and instead took five
[29:15] Degas sketches off the wall. Bizarrely, in this room they
[29:20] also took a relatively worthless eagle off the top of a
[29:23] Napoleonic era flag. Down in the blue room, they took
[29:27] Manet's Shay Tortoni, slipping it out of a frame that turned up
[29:32] later. Sitting on the security
[29:33] supervisors chair rather than near where the painting had
[29:37] hung. And in a detail that's puzzled
[29:41] investigators since the morning of the theft, they took an
[29:45] ancient Chinese goo. This is a ceremonial bronze
[29:49] beaker from the Shang Dynasty, more than 3000 years old and of
[29:54] relatively modest market value compared to the paintings around
[29:58] it. They left far more valuable
[30:00] pieces nearby untouched, including a Titian, widely
[30:04] considered the most precious painting in the building.
[30:07] The selection was strange enough that experts have argued ever
[30:10] since about what this could mean.
[30:13] Some believe the thieves were following a specific list,
[30:17] others that they were artistic illiterates grabbing what looked
[30:20] easiest, or perhaps some combination of the two.
[30:25] By 2:45, the two men had loaded their haul into a vehicle parked
[30:29] outside and driven off into the dark.
[30:32] Abbath and Heston weren't discovered until the morning
[30:35] shift arrived shortly after 8. When the FBI arrived at the
[30:40] museum hours later, they found a scene that didn't quite hold
[30:43] together. The building's motion detectors
[30:46] had logged the thieves movements through the galleries in
[30:49] granular detail, but that same print out also showed footsteps
[30:54] in the blue room before the buzzer was ever pressed.
[30:58] A bath had walked through the blue room on his earlier rounds
[31:01] that night, but the timing of his patrol, combined with the
[31:05] fact that the empty Manet frame had been left on the security
[31:08] desk chair rather than at the scene, raised an awkward
[31:12] question. Some detectives questioned
[31:16] whether the Manet painting was already off the wall before the
[31:18] thieves walked in, which wouldn't look good for old Ricky
[31:22] Abbott. Investigators have circled that
[31:24] anomaly for more than 30 years without resolving it.
[31:28] Rick A Bath also did something apparently weird the night
[31:31] before. He led an unknown person into
[31:34] the museum and had a brief discussion with him.
[31:38] The feds actually kept this in their back pocket for 25 years,
[31:42] believing that A Bath may have had a role in the heist.
[31:46] Funny enough, though, when the tape was released to the public
[31:49] in 2015, it turned out that the quote UN quote unknown man was
[31:55] positively identified as the museum's deputy security
[31:58] director. A Bath maintained until his
[32:01] passing in early 2024 that he had nothing to do with the
[32:05] theft, and he passed multiple polygraph examinations, but the
[32:10] suspicion never fully went away. The thieves themselves left
[32:15] almost nothing physical behind, suggesting that these two were
[32:18] real professionals. A few strips of duct tape with
[32:22] hairs stuck to them were collected, but in 1990 the
[32:26] Bureau didn't have the DNA infrastructure to do anything
[32:29] useful with them. By the time the technology had
[32:33] caught up, the evidence had been handled too many times to yield
[32:36] a clean profile. It also appears that there's a
[32:39] good chance that this genetic evidence actually comes from one
[32:43] of the two security guards, in which case it wouldn't be
[32:46] useful. Regardless, within weeks of the
[32:49] theft, leads were drying up fast and the case quickly went cold.
[32:55] In the years that followed, the museum offered a $1 million
[32:59] reward for the safe return of the works.
[33:02] That figure rose to 5 million in 1997 and then to 10 million in
[33:07] 2017, which is where it sits today.
[33:12] The Massachusetts statute of limitations on the original
[33:15] theft ran out in 1995, meaning that the men who actually
[33:19] carried out the heist can no longer be charged for it under
[33:23] state law. Possession of stolen property
[33:26] remains a crime, but the Bureau has long signaled that it's far
[33:30] more interested in getting the art back than in prosecuting
[33:33] whoever's currently holding it. Despite this rather lenient
[33:38] policy to those responsible for the heist, none of that has
[33:41] shaken anything loose. There have been false leads,
[33:45] hoaxes and ransom demands, including an anonymous letter in
[33:49] 1994 that promised the return of all 13 works in exchange for two
[33:54] and a half million dollars. The museum was prepared to
[33:58] entertain it, but the writer went silent.
[34:02] There have also been scattered sightings reported over the
[34:05] years, but none of them could be confirmed, and none of the tips
[34:09] has produced a single recovered piece of fine art.
[34:14] In 2013, the FBI publicly announced that it had identified
[34:18] the men who carried out the theft and that they had been
[34:21] members of a criminal organization based in New
[34:24] England. The Bureau declined to name
[34:27] them, citing the ongoing investigation, but a series of
[34:31] leaks, sentencings and informant statements over the years has
[34:36] filled in much of the picture. The two leading suspects most
[34:40] often named in connection with the theft are Robert Donati, a
[34:45] Boston associate of the patriarchal crime family.
[34:48] The other was David Houghton, another associate with deep ties
[34:52] to the same underworld. Donati was found in the trunk of
[34:56] his own Cadillac in 1991, having met a violent end widely
[35:01] believed to be tied to either the heist or his broader mob
[35:04] involvement. Houghton passed of natural
[35:07] causes in 1992, so both were gone within two years of the
[35:11] theft. Investigators have also focused
[35:15] on Carmelo Merlino, who ran an auto Body Shop in Dorchester
[35:20] that the Bureau came to see as a hub for trafficking the stolen
[35:23] works. Merlino was caught in a federal
[35:27] sting attempting to rob an armored car depot in 1999 and
[35:31] passed in federal prison in 2005.
[35:35] He reportedly told associates he could deliver the paintings in
[35:38] exchange for leniency, only to fail to produce them when
[35:41] pressed. Robert Gentel, a Connecticut mob
[35:46] figure linked to the Philadelphia faction, was the
[35:49] last surviving person of interest.
[35:52] Federal agents searched his property repeatedly, and they
[35:55] found a list of the stolen artworks, with what appeared to
[35:59] be black market valuations scribbled beside them.
[36:03] But they didn't find any of the missing art, and the man himself
[36:07] passed in 2021, denying to the end that he ever had the
[36:11] paintings. This remained the case even when
[36:14] the Bureau offered to drop unrelated weapons charges in
[36:17] exchange for information. The most likely chain of
[36:21] custody, based on what investigators have pieced
[36:24] together, runs from the thieves themselves through Boston area
[36:28] mob connections. It then goes S through a New
[36:31] England associate named Robert Guarente, whose widow told the
[36:35] feds in 2010 that her husband had handed two of the paintings
[36:39] off to Gentel in 2003. Another theory which has now
[36:44] largely been discredited but was once popular, was that Whitey
[36:48] Bulger, the infamous Boston mob boss, was responsible.
[36:54] One of the reasons for this connection was the highly
[36:56] accurate police uniforms worn by the robbers.
[37:00] Let's just say that Bulger had what could euphemistically be
[37:03] described as a pretty close relationship with local law and
[37:08] federal law enforcement. Ultimately, though, the evidence
[37:12] doesn't seem to line up, and at the time of the heist, Bulger's
[37:15] outfit was in a heated rivalry with the Patriarcha crime
[37:18] family. Also, as usual, no high level
[37:23] Boston Crime Story would be complete without a mention of
[37:26] Bulger's organization and the Patriarcha family.
[37:31] Theories about where the works are currently sitting right now
[37:35] range from the plausible to highly speculative.
[37:38] The most grounded view is that they were used as collateral for
[37:42] underworld deals and were never sold openly because they were
[37:46] too famous to fence. Under this theory, they've
[37:50] likely been stashed somewhere and they're slowly deteriorating
[37:54] from the decades of neglect. A more romantic version has them
[37:59] sitting on the wall of a private collector's secret gallery.
[38:03] This is the so-called Doctor. No hypothesis, though most
[38:07] experts consider that scenario more popular in fiction than in
[38:11] life. The grimmest possibility is that
[38:15] the paintings were destroyed by whoever ended up holding them,
[38:19] either because the heat got unbearable or because they
[38:22] didn't understand how to store them.
[38:25] The Vermeer in particular, a panel more than 3 centuries old,
[38:30] wouldn't survive long in a damp basement or a humid storage
[38:33] unit. Investigators speaking to museum
[38:37] staff over the years have generally said they believe at
[38:41] least some of the 13 works still exist somewhere, but no one will
[38:45] say so with confidence. The longer the works stay
[38:49] missing, the more uncertain that increasingly faint hope becomes.
[38:57] A pedestrian on Michigan Ave. looked up on a December morning
[39:01] in 1996 and saw a body hanging 14 stories above the sidewalk.
[39:07] The man wasn't falling. He was suspended by an
[39:10] electrical cord tied to the leg of a desk inside the office
[39:14] above, swinging gently in the wind.
[39:18] He was wearing a bulletproof vest and in his pockets were
[39:21] brass knuckles, a can of Mace, 3 computer discs, and a folded
[39:27] note bearing the name of an Indiana militia group.
[39:31] His name was Eugene Izzy, and he was one of the most promising
[39:34] hard boiled crime novelists in America.
[39:38] Izzy grew up in Hegawish, a working class steel neighborhood
[39:42] tucked into the southeastern corner of Chicago.
[39:45] He served in the Army during the closing years of the Vietnam
[39:48] era, came home and went to work in the mills, the same mills his
[39:53] father had worked before him. By his late 20s, he was drinking
[39:57] heavily, married to a young woman named Teresa.
[40:01] And trying to write fiction in the few hours each night when he
[40:03] wasn't working. The mills shut down in the early
[40:07] 80s and as he found himself out of work with a family to support
[40:11] no degree and not many conventional options, he took
[40:16] that as a sign. And rather than going out to
[40:19] look for steady work, he used his new found free time to focus
[40:23] on his writing. In 1987, he sold his first
[40:27] novel, a lean Chicago Crime Story called The Take, and over
[40:32] the nine years that followed, he produced more than a dozen more.
[40:37] His books were brutal pieces of St. fiction, populated by
[40:40] hustlers, bookmakers, ex cons and dirty cops.
[40:46] Reviewers compared him to Elmore Leonard, though his voice was
[40:49] darker and more autobiographical, drawn from
[40:52] corners of the city he'd actually walked.
[40:55] By the early 90s, his name was showing up on national lists,
[40:59] and by the mid 90s he had moved his family into an apartment in
[41:03] the South Loop and was living comfortably on his fiction.
[41:08] In the autumn of 1996, Izzy was 42, sober for over a decade, and
[41:14] renting a small office on the 14th floor of 6 N Michigan Ave.
[41:19] He just signed with a new publisher and was deep into what
[41:23] he hoped would be his breakthrough thriller.
[41:26] His routine was steady. He'd leave the apartment around
[41:29] dawn, walk the few blocks to the office, write all morning, and
[41:34] come home in the afternoon to be with his family.
[41:38] On Friday, December 6th, he told Teresa he had to go to the
[41:41] office that night to meet a source, and she later said he
[41:45] sounded uneasy when he left. He didn't come home that night,
[41:49] and he didn't come home the next morning.
[41:52] Around 8:00 on Saturday morning, people walking down Michigan
[41:56] Ave. noticed something dangling from a window high above the
[41:59] street. At first they thought it was a
[42:02] mannequin or some kind of stunt, but then somebody called the
[42:06] police. The officers who arrived found
[42:09] Izzy suspended outside the building, an electrical cord
[42:12] knotted around his neck, the other end tied to the leg of a
[42:16] heavy desk. Inside his office, his feet hung
[42:19] about a dozen feet below the window sill.
[42:22] The office itself was undisturbed.
[42:26] There was no sign of forced entry, the furniture hadn't been
[42:29] overturned, and there was no blood.
[42:33] Izzy had no defensive wounds on his hands, either, and the whole
[42:36] scene looked, on first glance, like a man who'd done it to
[42:39] himself. But then things got strange.
[42:44] The cops examined his body and found that Izzy was wearing a
[42:47] bulletproof vest underneath his jacket.
[42:50] He was carrying a pair of brass knuckles, a canister of pepper
[42:53] spray, three 3.5 inch floppy disks, and a folded slip of
[42:59] paper with the name of a militia organization in Indiana.
[43:04] People who knew him said he'd never carried any of those items
[43:07] before that fall, and he'd recently bought the vest.
[43:11] He told friends and his agent that he was researching real
[43:14] militia groups for the new book, and that members of one of them
[43:18] had started threatening him by phone.
[43:21] He'd reportedly asked a federal agent he knew socially whether
[43:25] the threats were credible, though it's not clear if they
[43:28] were. Izzy told another writer he
[43:31] believed he was being followed, perhaps by someone from that
[43:34] group. The disks turned out to be the
[43:37] strangest piece of the scene. When investigators examined
[43:41] them, they contained the working draft of the unfinished novel
[43:45] Izzy had been writing for the last several months.
[43:48] The manuscript described a Chicago writer who becomes the
[43:51] target of a militia after publishing a book that exposes
[43:55] their operations. In the draft, the militia tracks
[43:59] him to his downtown office, ambushes him there, and stages
[44:04] his death to look like he hanged himself from a 14th floor
[44:07] window. That was the entire plot.
[44:11] The fictional writer's office was on a high downtown floor.
[44:15] The fictional staging used a cord and a window open from
[44:18] inside. Investigators reportedly puzzled
[44:22] over the parallels for weeks, and some read the draft as Izzy,
[44:26] telegraphing his own intentions. Others read it as a sketch of
[44:30] what he feared was coming for him, perhaps based upon some of
[44:34] the threats that he had received.
[44:37] But there were other factors as well.
[44:39] Investigators found no second set of footprints, no
[44:42] fingerprints that didn't belong, and no missing files in his
[44:46] office. Nothing showed that anyone else
[44:49] had been in the room, and the Cook County Medical examiner
[44:52] ruled that Izzy did this himself.
[44:55] Izzy's family rejected that finding immediately, and they've
[44:58] rejected it every year since. Teresa pointed out that he'd
[45:02] left no note, that he had a fresh contract for a new book,
[45:06] and that he loved his family. In the end, that's where the
[45:10] case stands. Technically not unsolved, but
[45:13] with numerous open questions that are difficult to rationally
[45:16] explain.

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