The Gardner Museum Heist’s Basement Crime Scene (Part Two)
A Historical Examination of the Gardner Museum Heist’s Basement Crime Scene
Link to Part I
The crime scene photos of the other guard, Randy Hestand taken by the Boston Police have never been released for public view, but his confinement has been more consistently and straightforwardly described all along. He was brought down, seated beside an immovable object (a century old sink), fastened to a lead post holding it up, with a second set of handcuffs, and then advised in reassuring tones that the best course of action for him was to remain calm and wait for help to arrive in the morning. The guard managed to persuade one of the thieves to loosen his handcuffs.
The description of Hestand's confinement has frequently come to inaccurately describe the specific predicament of both guards in many published accounts. Since we have never seen the photos of the other guard, there is no basis of comparison. A guard who worked at the Museum at the time of robbery and was also Hestand's roommate at the time suggested on Episode Eight of the podcast Empty Frames, "Security Breach" that the physical and psychological trauma experienced by Hestand was considerably worse than anything suggested by or about the other guard, Rick Abath.
Gardner Security Director Anthony Amore described the second guard’s interaction with one of the robbers as follows: "He [One of the robbers] didn't speak much until he started apologizing. In fact when he handcuffed this person at first he asked if the cuffs were too tight. The guard said yes and he re-did them, which is amazing, and he kept saying 'get comfortable you're going to be here all night. We're sorry we're here. We're not going to hurt you, just keep your mouth shut.'” Amore told Tom Ashbrook.
There were practical considerations for this soothingly delivered advice, which Hestand received from one of the thieves. If the guard panicked, he might raise a ruckus or figure out a way to free himself.
If Abath also received similar advice, it has never been made public and is not part of any of Abath’s three first-person accounts of his treatment in the basement that have been made public. Was Abath’s cooperation ensured through different means or inducements? If Abath were involved there would be no point in giving him a pep talk.
Perhaps the earlier stories, which typically highlighted all of the tape on Abath’s head, raised questions since news stories of a more recent vintage are less specific. In a 2015 New York Times article, for example, Tom Mashberg reported that “they also found Mr. Abath and the second guard manacled in the basement, their heads bound with duct tape." The correct word her should perhaps be "wound" with duct tape, or maybe "bound to" duct tape.
What where there heads bound to? In the case of Abath his lower jaw, but not in a way that would keep him from yelling for help.
This vivid but not notably specific description, while roughly factual in Rick Abath’s case, does not, however, really address the question of whether Abath was sufficiently thwarted from sounding the alarm about the robbery to the outside world for six hours by his “manacles” (handcuffs) and duct tape.
The latter-day news reports suggest an equal level of incapacity of both guards, rightly or wrongly, as do the earlier more graphic and specific, though inaccurate media accounts. The lead FBI investigator on the Gardner Museum Heist, Geoffrey Kelly, and numerous others have further abbreviated their accounts of the guards; state of confinement in the basement to simply “they were tied up.” The opening sentence of a March 18, 2017 story in the Boston Globe includes the phrase “tied up the guards.” The reader can fill in the rest. Surely if the guards were not adequately secured, the story would have a different ending. That seems to be the shared premise of investigators, reporters, and perhaps nearly all readers.
Then, two months later, the Boston Globe became more specific again, perhaps because the article was specifically about that duct tape and those handcuffs. On June 12, 2017 the Globe reported: “The thieves wrapped duct tape around the hands, eyes, and mouths of the two guards on duty.”
Specifics are nice, but there are some problems when they do not conform to the facts.
For starters, the tape does not go around the mouth any more than the tape goes around the nose. The tape was wrapped around the entire circumference of the face and head. When you report that the tape went around the person's mouth and do not mention that the nose, the eyebrows and the forehead and the entire facial area, then readers will understand the meaning to be that the tape went around the mouth in a horizontal direction covering the mouth over so that the person cannot yell for help.
A google image search on [duct tape around the mouth] returns results that have duct tape covering the mouth in every instance. Perhaps no crime victim in history has ever been taped up quite like Rick Abath. That may be a clue in itself.
The Globe story also reports that the thieves wrapped duct tape around the guards’ hands. This too raises questions. There was no mention of tape on the guards’ hands in Kurkjian’s 2015 book, “Master Thieves,” though he did co-write this article. Tape on the hands has never been mentioned in the Boston Globe’s many previous articles about Abath and his confinement or in any other press account. Gardner Museum Security Anthony Amore did say the guards’ hands were both taped and handcuffed back in 2010 in an interview with Tom Ashbrook for WBUR's On Point. Still, it is a mysterious process, how the details on this have emerged, then disappeared beneath the surface of shared public knowledge for years, only to reemerge a years later with new embellishments.
The Boston Police photos show no evidence, of the hands being duct taped, although there is not really a clear view in the photo. And while Abath has discussed the duct taping and handcuffing process he underwent three times in public, he has never mentioned any duct taped being applied to his hands.
One way to get at the truth would be to examine the duct tape and handcuffs. Was there any duct tape residue on Abath’s handcuffs? Any shirtsleeve fibers? Hand or fingerprints? Or human hairs consistent with those found on the wrists or hands? We will most likely never know. The lead in the article with this newly updated description of Abath and the other guard’s plight in the basement was that the FBI had lost the evidence. The handcuffs and duct tape are missing.
The original Boston Police report could perhaps shed some light.
So what is the big deal about whether there was duct tape on Abath's handcuffed hands? It's that in the police photos Abath appears to have only been handcuffed and duct taped for a short time, maybe an hour. For him to be duct taped on his hands in addition to the handcuffs would likely require assistance from someone else (the robbers). So he would have had to have been duct taped for a much longer period than an hour since he was not found in the basement until six hours after the thieves left. Unless there had been another person in the museum, who stayed longer after the thieves left. We have only Abath's word that he only let in two people since he was the only one there when the thieves entered the building...
It would not rule out the possibility that Abath assisted in the robbery. But it would still mean that he had been tied up for at least six hours. In the police photos, however Abath looks neither like someone who had been handcuffed and duct taped for six hours starting at 1:30 a.m. like the other guard, nor re-taped up and re-handcuffed by the thieves at around 2:30 a.m. when the thieves left that area of the Museum for the last time.
Abath's complete lack of distress, dishevelment or signs of struggling against confinement in his appearance, if only to improve his own comfort level, despite suffering from “ADHD severe type” as he claims, was also an invitation for greater scrutiny and suspicion, although after 1990 Abath was not contacted by investigators for 17 years, he says.
Link to Part Three
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