The de Kooning Job: Teachers Turned Thieves
1/1/202631 min
In 1985, a priceless painting vanished from a university museum in Arizona. The FBI had no leads. 32 years later, it turned up behind a bedroom door in a suburban New Mexico home. Turns out the retired couple living there may have pulled off one of the most audacious art heists of the 20th century.
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First 90 secondsDavid Van Auker· Soundbite0:00
[crickets chirping] Campsite Media.
Speaker 10:03
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Lou Schachter· Guest0:05
What is this?
David Van Auker· Soundbite0:06
So what do you want me to say?
Alison Otto· Guest0:07
Yeah, what's going on here? Like, why- Oh, it's just a chameleon.
Josh Dean· Host0:11
Chameleon.
Speaker 50:11
Chameleon.
Lou Schachter· Guest0:12
Chameleon Weekly. Oh.
Josh Dean· Host0:13
[laughs] [phone beeping] On November 29th, 1985, the day after Thanksgiving, two people, a man and a woman who seemed to be young retirees, entered the University of Arizona's Museum of Art in Tucson shortly after opening. This isn't a heavily traveled museum on the busiest of days, but at that hour on a Friday, there was virtually no one there. The woman, who had glasses and wore a scarf over her hair, stopped to talk to the security guard on duty about a painting that hung on the museum's stairs, while the man, who had dark hair, glasses, and a mustache, wandered off. Not too long after, maybe five, at most 10 minutes, the man came back down from wherever he'd been, met up with the woman, and they both left. It was a very short museum visit. It wasn't until the guard on duty took his next walk through the museum's exhibits, the most routine of duties, because nothing ever changes in a museum, and was frozen in his tracks by something shocking. One of the museum's most valuable paintings, Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre, was gone, cut out of its frame and not with great care. Snaggy fragments of the canvas were still there, attached to the wood frame.