http://www.inlinewarehouse.com/CCM_U_Fit05_Hockey_Elbow_Pads_Sr_2011/descpage-EPUF05.html  bought a pair of these at play it Again today, $27 with taxes.  I was usin' lacrosse elbow pads before which were perfect but they kept too much heat in.. these are less weight and less padding on the inside of the arm which should help to ventilate.

Re: [Madness Writers] 5/31/2011 07:46:00 AM

booom

talked to my sgt baout the cruise. he said it should be possible. i
gotta wait a few weeks til im done with class (2 weeks, actually next
friday is the last day) and we'll talk, gotta talk to S2 (security
people for the army) and do some things but he said it should be
possible. sweet.

if all four of us go we all save $200 each on the ticket, thats $800.
still costs about 2000, but it'll be worth it.
all you and emily have to do is buy an airplane ticket to Tampa and
we'll get the rest. too easy.

looks like 500 for the tickets (for both tickets, 211 plus taxes for
one, thats pretty cheap)
http://travela.priceline.com/airlines/fareResults.do?session_key=5C0011AC5D0011AC20110531153414395400216885&plf=pcln&jarmkey=510011AC520011ACPLYqNuIhC0Go9iA7s4fCQC0893&INIT_SESSION=true

get there on time (ship leaves at 4pm Thur and i believe it arrives
back to port at 11am)

those books are probably all $0.01 on amazon with shipping, $3 each or something probably, gotta be cheap.

download "Kindle for PC" app.  It's free, 19 mb, and you can download free ebooks.. I'm donwloading now, I"ll check it out later.

I started playin' Deadspace last night, made it 5r minutes in and passed out.  Seemed like a doom 4 type game, nothing special, maybe iti s.

can't find these books.

http://btjunkie.org/torrent/1001-Books-You-Must-Read-Before-You-Die/43583c64ae62cd031752a7745b21d6b8fa56f2b7570f

http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Complete-Ebook-Pack/435864ad4d0508db43a01205459c309d89e8d1c7fbeb

might be some good books in there

some things

20 bucks to go golfing on fort gordon, with a GPS'ed souped up cart.
id rather walk, more time, but its low 90's all week, golf in the
morning or evening and walk, enjhoy the day

probably 15 or so withoput the cart, maybe less

50 for clubs i found on craigslist, hopefully heather picks em up if
they're still available.

army paid another 16,000 on my student loans. 20,000 and change
remaining. cant complain at all.

1600 on my private loan. if i pay 50 a month til the next army
payment i'll pay 600 plus the remaining 800 or so, ill save 200. guess
ill just do that.

ill owe around 5000 or so next summer, i should have it paid off by
then. get rid of it, be a free man.

find these books to download "The Man of Shadows"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-of-Shadows-ebook/dp/B004IE9XNO
5 smackers, might just buy it. cant find a torrent but you might be
able to. its for a book club, give me something to do. and heather,
too. read outside at the bpool or something.

and "Into Thin Air", havent evne looked yet but its gotta be available.

and "Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome" looked, cant find it. seems
to be only hardback. gonna go peruse it at barnes and noble or
borders sometime, book club meets up on Sunday, dont need to know
everything about the book cuz i guess they discuss it every month. it
looks pretty long.

good story so far, halfway through

 

Why did a small-town girl have her family brutally murdered?

by Pamela Colloff

I.

Charles Dickerson was the only officer on duty on March 1, 2008, when the call came into the Rains County sheriff’s office just after four-thirty in the morning that there had been a shooting at the Caffey residence. The Caffeys lived in a modest cabin set deep in the woods along a one-lane gravel road outside Alba, a rural community of 492 people halfway between Sulphur Springs and Tyler. Most folks around Alba and Emory, the nearby county seat, knew the family; Penny played piano at Miracle Faith Baptist Church, and her husband, Terry, was a home health aide and lay preacher. Their daughter, Erin, worked as a carhop at the Sonic. They also had two sons: Matthew, known as Bubba, who was in the seventh grade, and Tyler, a fourth-grader. The Caffey children—who had been homeschooled for three years—were shy and well mannered, though sixteen-year-old Erin was the least reserved. A slight, pretty blonde, she was known for her beautiful singing voice, which she showcased in soaring gospel solos at Miracle Faith on Sundays.

Dickerson headed east along U.S. 69 and turned down the road that led through the woods to the Caffeys’ house, following the crooked path as it rambled beneath pine canopies and over dry creeks, past a neighbor’s hand-lettered sign that read, "Acknowledge thine iniquity—Jeremiah 3:13." Daybreak was still a few hours off, and the road beyond the glare of his headlights was pitch-black. Dickerson strained to see a mailbox or a landmark that might orient him to his surroundings, but the houses were few and far between. At a bend where the trees thinned out, he spotted a murky orange glow in the distance. As he drove nearer, he could see that a house was on fire. Dickerson realized that he was looking at the Caffey home.

The cabin appeared to have been burning for some time; the structure was engulfed in flames, and the metal roof had begun to buckle under its own weight. Dickerson radioed his dispatcher to mobilize the county’s volunteer fire departments and sped down the road to Tommy Gaston’s house, where the 911 call had originated.

Gaston, a genial man with a head of white hair, was the Caffeys’ closest neighbor, and he looked relieved to see the sheriff’s deputy at his door. Just beyond him, sprawled across the living room floor, was Terry Caffey. He had been shot five times: once in the head, twice near his right shoulder, and two more times in the back. His face and upper body were caked with blood. Although it was a cold night, the 41-year-old was wearing a T-shirt, pajama bottoms, no shoes, and a single wet sock. He had stumbled and crawled five hundred yards from his home, where he had been left for dead, to Gaston’s—a journey that had taken him nearly an hour, all told. Along the way, he had fallen into a creek, where he had almost drowned, but he had kept moving, staggering toward Gaston’s house as the fire behind him grew more intense. There was so much blood that Dickerson could not tell where he had been shot. "They’re all gone," Caffey told the sheriff’s deputy, his voice breaking. "Charlie Wilkinson shot my family."

The ambulance was about to pull away from Tommy Gaston’s house when sheriff’s investigator Richard Almon, who had hurried to the scene, climbed inside. "I don’t think I’m going to make it," Caffey sputtered, straining to catch his breath. Almon crouched beside the gurney and asked him a few hurried questions. Charlie Wilkinson was his daughter’s boyfriend, Caffey told the detective, and he and his wife had recently demanded that Erin stop seeing him. Charlie had broken into the house and shot Caffey and his family as they slept.

Almon clambered out of the ambulance and shared what he had learned with chief deputy Kurt Fischer. In rural communities as small as Alba and Emory, there are no strangers, and Fischer shook his head when he heard Charlie’s name. His boys were friends with the clean-cut high school senior and had fished and gone four-wheeling with him many times before; in fact, Fischer told the detective, he had spotted Charlie’s car parked outside Matthew Waid’s trailer while driving to the crime scene. Waid was a few years older than Charlie, and Charlie and his buddies sometimes drank at his place and stayed the night.

All the lights were out in the rundown blue single-wide when Fischer and sheriff’s deputy Ed Emig pulled up outside. A teenager whom Fischer did not recognize groggily came to the door; he was unsure if Charlie had spent the night or not, but he agreed to let the officers in. Fischer walked from room to room, stepping over piles of dirty clothes and empty beer cans as he went, startling Waid and his girlfriend from their sleep. Fischer told them he needed to talk to Charlie Wilkinson.

As Fischer continued down the hall, he saw that a blanket covered the empty door frame of one bedroom. Pulling the blanket back, he shone his flashlight inside. He could see Charlie lying on a mattress, awake, wearing only blue jeans. A semiautomatic handgun lay on the floor beside him.

"Charlie—it’s Kurt," Fischer said. "Let me see your hands."

"What’s going on?" Charlie said. He hesitated, and Fischer thought he might reach for the gun.

"Let me see your hands," repeated the chief deputy.

He led Charlie outside in handcuffs and sat him on the porch; he read the teenager his Miranda rights and told him that he was being taken in for questioning. The Caffey family had been attacked and killed earlier that morning, Fischer informed him. Charlie hung his head and was quiet.

"Were you involved in this?" Fischer asked.

"No, sir," Charlie said, shaking his head. "I got drunk last night and passed out."

Deputy Emig went inside to get Charlie a shirt and his cowboy boots. As Emig carried them out to the porch, he noticed that they were spattered with blood. The officers put Charlie in the back of the squad car, where he stared out the window in silence as they drove through the woods toward Emory in the predawn gloom.

At daybreak, the fire was still smoldering. Volunteer firefighters had struggled for several hours to put out the flames, but the house had burned down to its foundation. Later that day, when the bodies of the two Caffey boys were pulled from the rubble, one firefighter, overcome with emotion, fell to his knees.

After Charlie was brought to the county jail, Fischer obtained a search warrant from the justice of the peace and returned to the trailer to collect any evidence that might tie Charlie to the crime scene. In the living room, he found a camouflage-colored purse with a driver’s license inside it belonging to Erin Caffey. He began searching the back bedroom where Charlie had been found. There was no overhead light, so he pulled a blanket off one of the windows to illuminate his view. Spent shell casings lay scattered across the carpet, and next to the mattress sat a box of ammunition. Fischer picked up a black-and-white Western shirt, and a used condom slipped onto the floor.

Near the closet, he lifted up a blanket that was piled on the floor and noticed a shock of blond hair. For an instant, he thought he had found a doll. He pushed the hair aside to get a better look and watched, dumbfounded, as two eyes opened.

A girl was sitting with her back to the wall, in a fetal position. Fischer drew his gun and commanded her to show him her hands, but she just stared at him.

"What’s your name?" Fischer asked.

"Erin," she stammered. Fischer recognized her from her driver’s license photo.

The chief deputy brought her into the living room, where Matthew Waid and his girlfriend sat on the couch. Fischer had already informed the couple that the Caffey family was dead. Waid stared at the girl in disbelief and confirmed that she was Erin Caffey.

"How did you get here?" Fischer asked her.

Erin stood wide-eyed in her pajamas, bewildered, as she surveyed the room. "I don’t know," she mumbled. "Where am I?"

II.

Erin’s pastor, Todd McGahee, once joked that if he had five more of her, he could fill his church on Sundays. Erin was cute and petite, with blue-gray eyes and a flirtatious smile, and she thrived on attention. Boys often came to Miracle Faith just to see her, and several of them credited her with bringing them closer to Jesus. At the Sonic on Emory’s main drag, she was the only carhop who delivered her orders wearing roller skates, and most afternoons, her admirers parked on whichever side of the drive-in she was waiting on. Yet despite her effect on boys, she struck people as hopelessly naive. "She gushed innocence," remembered a co-worker (who, like many teenagers interviewed for this story, asked to remain anonymous). "A lot of guys flirted with her, and she would just blush and smile and duck her head down and skate inside and tell me, ‘That guy wanted my number!’ And I’d say, ‘Did you tell him that your mom would be answering the phone?’"

Terry and Penny Caffey were protective—some said overly protective—of their daughter. Her homeschooling had begun when she was thirteen, after the family had moved to Alba from Celeste, a small town about an hour’s drive away. Terry and Penny had wanted to be closer to Miracle Faith, where they were then serving as the church’s youth ministers. Erin and her brothers had initially enrolled in their new public schools; she started the eighth grade at Rains Junior High, and Bubba and Tyler attended Rains Elementary. Then, that fall, an incident at the junior high had upset Terry and Penny: A girl who had been showing interest in Erin had kissed her in the hallway. The Caffeys abruptly pulled their children out of school a month into the academic year, and Penny began teaching them a Bible-based curriculum at home. She and Terry hoped that the individual instruction might benefit Erin, who had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and lagged behind her classmates. It was an isolated existence for an otherwise social girl whose life was largely circumscribed to Miracle Faith and her parents’ house, six miles from town.

Faith was the cornerstone of the Caffeys’ lives. They attended Bible study on Wednesday nights and church every Sunday and set aside several hours each week to rehearse gospel songs—with Penny playing piano, Bubba on guitar and harmonica, and Erin singing vocals. (Tyler, the youngest, preferred to play outdoors.) Terry and Penny had met at a revival meeting in Garland when she was 21 and he was 24, and their strong Baptist faith had always bound them together. Above their driveway hung a polished cedar plank with the inscription: "The Caffeys—Joshua 24:15." The verse, which Terry had committed to memory, was a reminder that they had chosen a righteous path: "If it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve . . . as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Their children also shared their devotion. Bubba used to witness to whoever would listen, and Erin cried tears of joy when she sang her Sunday church solos—so much so that sometimes she had to stop, mid-verse, to collect herself. "I know there’s no such thing as perfect, but in my book, they were," said Tommy Gaston, who was a frequent guest in their home and played in a gospel band with Penny.

When Erin turned sixteen, in July 2007, she got her driver’s license and an old Chevy pickup and started working at the Sonic. "She was so sheltered," said her co-worker. "It was like she was seeing the world for the first time." One day at a church fellowship meeting, Miracle Faith’s new youth director came upon Erin making out with a teenage boy. Several kids had already seen her sitting on a picnic table behind the church, kissing the boy while he eased his hand up her shirt. Erin had invited him over to her house before and considered him to be her boyfriend. But Terry and Penny, who separated the two teenagers that day at Miracle Faith, were deeply embarrassed by her behavior. "You’re not going to see that boy no more," Terry told her.

Charlie Wilkinson was not the most polished guy to take an interest in Erin. He always seemed to be broke, and he drove a beat-up 1991 Ford Explorer that had to be push-started. He was good-looking in an unassuming kind of way, with sandy hair and light-blue eyes, and he nearly always wore Wranglers, black cowboy boots, and an oversized black Western hat. (On MySpace, he went by the name Hillbilly.) He had met Erin at the Sonic a few weeks before the start of his senior year, having just returned home from boot camp at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with his Texas National Guard unit. Charlie would later remember the electricity of the moment when Erin had glided up to his car window to deliver his order. "Instant vibe," he said, snapping his fingers.

Charlie lived in the country with his father, his stepmother, a stepbrother, a stepsister, and a half-sister. His dad worked at a paper mill outside Dallas. His mother had moved to Del Rio after his parents divorced, and he saw her only once or twice a year. An avid hunter, he spent much of his time fishing and tracking wild hogs through the brush, and like most of his friends, he was proficient with a firearm. He planned to go on active duty after graduation. He had never been arrested, and at school, he had no serious disciplinary problems—but he was hotheaded, and other students knew it was easy to get a rise out of him. "Some guys would really tease him and pick at him until he would get angry," remembered a classmate. Charlie might strike his desk or storm out of the classroom when he was provoked, but he usually walked away from a fight.

Throughout the fall, Charlie visited the Sonic to see Erin. For Halloween, she dressed up as a fifties carhop, coasting around the Sonic in a homemade pink-and-white poodle skirt with a pink scarf knotted at her neck. Shortly after that he worked up the nerve to ask her out. She was instantly taken with him, and Charlie too seemed to be infatuated. "He was totally in love with her and considered her his soul mate," Dion Kipp Jr., a friend of Charlie’s, later told investigators. "Charlie talked about Erin twenty-four-seven." Though the Caffeys would not allow Charlie to take Erin out alone, the two teenagers still managed to spend much of their time together. Charlie dropped by the Sonic every afternoon during Erin’s half-hour break, and at night, he was a frequent guest at the Caffeys’ house. If Erin and her brothers built a bonfire in the backyard after supper, as they often did, he lingered by her side. At nine o’clock, the Caffeys made sure that Charlie was headed for the door—but after he said goodbye, Erin usually called him and talked to him until her ten o’clock phone curfew. (On the weekends, they had until eleven.) Charlie also began attending church at Miracle Faith. "What I knew of Charlie, he seemed like a nice boy," said Pastor McGahee. "I don’t think anyone worried about him and Erin at first. We thought it was just puppy love."

In December Erin asked her parents if she could return to public school. Her brothers had already reenrolled that fall after Bubba, who was thirteen, told them that he missed his friends, and the Caffeys—who were eager to free up time for Penny to earn some extra income—agreed to let Erin go back before Christmas. At school, where she enrolled as a freshman, she and Charlie were inseparable; they ate lunch together and walked down the hall hand in hand, and sometimes they slipped away to Erin’s pickup to fool around. Terry began allowing them to go out for dinner every now and then, with the assurance that Charlie would have Erin home no later than nine-thirty. Often they went to a friend’s house where they could be alone, and after Christmas, they had sex for the first time. One night not long afterward, Charlie pulled his car over on a country road, knelt on the pavement, and presented Erin with his grandmother’s engagement ring. It was a promise ring, he told her. Though it was not a formal proposal, he was declaring his intentions.

Penny noticed the ring on Erin’s finger a few days later at a church function and ordered her to give it back. Charlie was playing basketball outside the fellowship hall that afternoon, and Terry pulled him aside. "This is totally inappropriate," he told the boy, who shrugged. "You’re promising yourself to my daughter? Do you realize she is sixteen years old?" Terry had already begun to grow uneasy with how fast the relationship seemed to be moving. He did not care for Charlie, and he was not happy about how much time the high school senior was spending with his daughter. He had never gotten over Charlie’s nonchalant attitude when they first met; Terry had come home from work, and Charlie—his legs slung over the side of Terry’s armchair—had not bothered to stand up or shake his hand. "I don’t like that boy," Terry used to tell Penny. "If he can’t show me any respect, how does he treat our daughter?"

From then on, the Caffeys limited Erin’s time with Charlie to once a week, in their home, under their watch. Furious with her parents, Erin told her aunt that she planned on running away to be with Charlie when she turned seventeen. More and more she and her mother were at odds, and Erin once called Charlie in tears to report that Penny had slapped her in the heat of an argument. Then, in early February, Penny overheard Erin giggling one night past her phone curfew—Erin had sneaked her cell phone into her room to call Charlie. Penny informed her daughter that she was grounded. Erin’s car keys and phone were taken away, and for weeks, her parents drove her to and from school. Worst of all, as far as Erin was concerned, Charlie’s weekly visits to the house were suspended.

Killing her parents, Erin told Charlie, was their best option. She talked about the idea relentlessly. In school, she brought up the subject once or twice a day; during a lunch break in mid-February, a junior overheard her tell Charlie that killing her parents was the only way they could be together. Charlie, who turned eighteen that month, wanted to be with Erin, and he promised to do whatever it took to make her happy. His father used to joke that he had "lost puppy dog syndrome"—he tried to help whoever was down on his luck; Erin was someone he wanted to rescue. Charlie told several friends that he intended to kill her parents. Still, sometimes he seemed ambivalent about their plan. He only wanted to run away with Erin, he told a buddy. As late as two days before the murders, he gloomily admitted to the same friend that he wished he could just get her pregnant so the Caffeys would have no choice but to accept him. But Erin was insistent. She was too young to have a baby, she said, and as long as her parents were alive, she and Charlie would have to be apart. "She had him around her finger, pretty much," said a girl who was a senior at the time. "She could get him to do whatever she wanted. She asked for something, she got it."

At Miracle Faith, people sensed that something was wrong in the Caffey home. Penny was withdrawn for most of February, and she declined to go on a women’s church retreat, saying that she needed to spend more time with her family. At church functions, Erin was aloof and distracted. During a Valentine’s Day dinner that was hosted by her youth group, she stood idly by, too preoccupied to even fill water glasses. The pastor’s wife, Rebecca McGahee, was deeply troubled by her demeanor later that month, when she sang at her grandfather’s funeral. Terry’s father had died of a heart attack on February 21, and though none of the Caffeys had been close to him, they performed "Amazing Grace" in his honor. Terry and Bubba played harmonica, with Penny on piano. But Erin—whose jubilant singing often brought parishioners to their feet—turned in a listless, halfhearted performance. Her voice faltered, and her cousin, who did not have her natural talent, outshone her. Rebecca sensed that something was spiritually wrong with the girl. "Erin’s anointing had lifted," she said. "She couldn’t sing a lick."

On February 27, three days before the murders, the Caffeys demanded that Erin break up with Charlie. Earlier that day, Penny had stopped by the local library, at her sister’s suggestion, and gone online to look at Charlie’s MySpace profile, which had included comments about having sex and getting drunk. When Erin came home that afternoon, her father and mother were waiting for her in the living room. "It’s over," Terry told her. "You’re breaking up with him today. I mean, it’s over now." To their surprise, she did not protest. She had wanted to break things off with Charlie for a while, she tearfully confessed, but had not been sure how. Before the family left for Bible study, Erin promised that she would end things with Charlie.

III.

You’re Erin Caffey?" chief deputy Fischer asked the girl again. She nodded and looked as if she might throw up. In her flower-print pajamas, with her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, she seemed sweet and guileless. She glanced apprehensively around the trailer. She was disoriented, and Fisher thought that she appeared to be under the influence of some kind of drug.

"Can you tell me what happened?" Fischer asked.

"Fire," she said, her voice trailing off.

Erin was taken by ambulance to the Hopkins County Memorial Hospital, in Sulphur Springs, where she was given a full medical assessment. At the suggestion of Detective Almon, she was interviewed in the hospital’s trauma room by Shanna Sanders, the young, personable chief of police for the Rains Independent School District who was on a first-name basis with most of the high school’s students. Sheriff’s deputy Serena Booth sat in. At the time, Erin was believed to be a victim—a girl who, investigators presumed, had been kidnapped after the murders.

Gently, Sanders asked Erin what she remembered. In a timid, childlike voice that Sanders had to strain to hear, Erin spoke haltingly, offering few details. She seemed confused, repeatedly telling the officers that she was fourteen years old. She had woken up in a house full of smoke, she said. There had been "two guys with swords" dressed in black who had ordered her to get down on the floor. Though she was unsure how she had gotten to the trailer, she said, she did remember trying to call her "friend" Charlie and being unable to reach him. Then she drank "some stuff" that was offered to her at the trailer, and she could not recall anything afterward. She was teary at the start of the interview, but otherwise she showed little emotion. When Sanders asked if she had anything else to say, Erin whispered, "They’re coming after me."

Sanders and Booth would later reflect on the fact that Erin had not smelled like smoke, and Sanders regretted that she had turned away to give Erin some privacy when her maternal grandmother, Virginia Daily, had come to tell her that her father had, miraculously, survived the attack. But that morning, the two officers felt only pity for the soft-spoken girl who had just lost her mother and two brothers. They stayed with her for five hours until she was released from the hospital, then offered to accompany her and her grandparents to the intensive care unit at the East Texas Medical Center in Tyler to see Erin’s father. "You’re a tough little girl," Sanders told her.

Her story was already beginning to unravel, though, as Charlie was being questioned at the sheriff’s office in Emory. Detective Almon, a plainspoken Navy veteran with a blunt, intense manner, led the interrogation, while Texas Ranger John Vance assisted. At the outset, Charlie muttered, "I’m in a lot of trouble." Almon informed Charlie that he had been identified by a victim who had survived the attack and asked him to tell them exactly what had happened the previous night. If Charlie was startled by the news that he had left behind an eyewitness, he did not give himself away. Slowly, though, he began to parcel out information. Erin had called him the day before, Charlie said. She was, he recounted, "still pretty pissed off about her parents telling us we could not see each other." Once again, she told him that she wanted them dead. Charlie had urged her to just run away, but Erin had said, "No, kill them."

Around one-thirty the next morning, he told Almon, he and a friend had gone to the Caffey home. The friend, whom he initially refused to identify, was his hunting buddy Charles Waid, Matthew’s younger brother. The twenty-year-old needed money, and Charlie had promised him $2,000 if he would help him kill the Caffeys—cash that Erin had told Charlie he would find in a lockbox inside the house. They brought along Waid’s girlfriend, a bubbly high school senior named Bobbi Johnson, whose silver Dodge Neon they were driving. According to Charlie, Johnson did not know what the boys’ plans were but had insisted on coming with them. Charlie told the detective that when they first drove up, the Caffeys’ dog had barked so much that they decided to leave, but Erin called him on his cell phone afterward and promised to keep the dog quiet when he returned. And so with Waid behind the wheel of the Neon, they went back to the Caffeys’ house.

The threesome picked Erin up at the end of her parents’ driveway and rode around for an hour, talking about what to do. Charlie told the detective that he asked Erin several times to consider running away, but she was emphatic that she wanted her parents dead. Finally, they turned back toward the Caffey home and parked down the road. It was agreed that Charlie would kill Erin’s parents, and Waid would take care of the two boys so no witnesses would be left behind. "I ain’t got no conscience," Charlie said to the investigators about his decision to follow through on Erin’s wishes. "I joined the Army to do whatever needed to be done without thinking." As for her parents, he said, "I intended to kill them because I thought I was in love."

According to Charlie, the girls had stayed behind in the car while he and Waid went inside. They entered through the front door, which Erin had left open. Armed with a .22-caliber pistol and two samurai swords, they moved through the house with brutal efficiency. Charlie crept into Terry and Penny’s first-floor bedroom and fired at them until his gun jammed. He handed the gun to Waid, who fixed the .22 and fired two more shots. They left the room, and then Charlie came back and cut Penny’s throat to make sure she was dead. The sound of gunfire had woken Bubba and Tyler, who called out for their parents and then locked themselves in Erin’s room.

Charlie told the detective that when he and Waid were satisfied that Erin’s parents were dead, Waid instructed him "to go get the kids" because "little ones talk." Charlie had balked, and Waid, in return, threatened to leave. Charlie went upstairs and told the boys to come out of Erin’s room and go to their beds. "They were scared, and I could not stand to look at their faces," he said. Bubba tried to put up a fight by kicking Charlie, and when he did, Waid, who was still downstairs, raised the .22, aimed at the balcony where the brothers stood, and shot Bubba in the face. He fell to the floor and did not move again. Charlie, who had narrated the night’s events with stoic detachment, broke down as he recounted how Waid had then come upstairs and stabbed eight-year-old Tyler. "I could not do it," he said, covering his face with his hands. "Why did he have to die?" Yet Charlie said he thought he had also stabbed Tyler at least once.

After the killing spree, Charlie told the detective, he had carried a suitcase of Erin’s belongings, which she had previously packed, out to the car. She seemed happy, he remembered. She smiled and said, "I’m glad that’s over." He and Waid went back inside and retrieved the lockbox, which Charlie opened using the combination that Erin had given him. The take, along with the contents of Terry’s wallet and Penny’s purse, amounted to $375 and some change, he said. Then they used their pocket lighters to set fire to furniture and clothes and bedsheets. As they hurried down the gravel road away from the Caffeys’ home, the teenagers could see that the house was ablaze.

They drove down back roads for a while to blow off steam. Later that night, he told the detective, Waid dropped him and Erin off at the trailer, where they had sex. "I hope that God forgives me," Charlie added.

The investigation moved forward quickly on Saturday afternoon. Almon learned that Erin’s toxicology test—she had been screened for Rohypnol, GHB, and other drugs that can cause memory loss—had come back negative. She also showed no symptoms of smoke inhalation. Chief deputy Fischer picked up Bobbi Johnson outside the restaurant where she washed dishes, and he pulled Charles Waid over driving her car. Johnson, who had recently played a minor role in the Rains High School production of Oklahoma!, seemed to be in high spirits. At the sheriff’s office that afternoon, she played dumb with the officers until they told her they had Waid and Wilkinson in custody, at which point she admitted what she knew. Waid, who held out the longest, finally confessed under Almon’s relentless questioning.

Their detailed accounts of the night were consistent with Charlie’s. A former special-ed student with a heavy-lidded gaze, Waid showed no remorse, and he casually recounted how he had killed the two boys. Before the conclusion of the interview, he added a detail to the story that Charlie had left out. As they had driven away from the burning house, he said, Erin had cried out, "Holy shit, that was awesome!"

While the suspects were being questioned in the sheriff’s office in Emory, Erin’s grandparents were driving her to the hospital in Tyler, escorted by Chief Sanders and Deputy Booth. Just a few minutes into the drive, however, Sanders’ cell phone rang. It was Fischer, calling to inform Sanders that Erin had been implicated in the Caffey murders and she needed to be placed under arrest. For a moment, Fischer heard only dead silence on the other end of the line. Sanders passed the phone to Booth. "You want us to do what now?" Booth asked, incredulous.

Sanders pulled her squad car into a parking lot, and the Dailys followed. She informed them that she had been instructed to arrest their granddaughter in connection with the Caffey murders and requested that Erin step out of the car. Virginia Daily became hysterical and grabbed Erin’s face. "Did you have any part in this?" she demanded.

"No, Grandma," Erin told her, crying.

As a juvenile, Erin could not be taken directly to the sheriff’s office for questioning, and so she appeared that afternoon before a justice of the peace. "After everything we had heard, I was picturing a monster, for lack of a better word," said Sergeant Vance. "Here was someone who had dreamed up a scheme to murder her family and manipulated people into carrying out her plan. And then in walks this tiny, meek, blond-headed girl who couldn’t fight her way out of a wet paper sack." The judge informed Erin of her rights and asked if she would be willing to speak with investigators. She declined to meet with the Texas Ranger or Detective Almon, electing to make a written statement instead. The brief account, put down in her girlish handwriting, echoed what she had told Chief Sanders: There had been smoke and strangers with swords, and she could not remember much else. She was taken to the juvenile detention center in Greenville, where she was held on charges of capital murder.

Less than 24 hours after the murders, Waid, Johnson, Charlie, and Erin were all in custody.

IV.

Terry Caffey was discharged from the hospital several days later and went to stay with his sister in the town of Leonard, about an hour’s drive from Alba. For a man who had been shot five times and climbed out the window of a burning house, he could consider himself lucky; he had a broken nose, two fractured cheekbones, and minor nerve damage in his right arm. "I remember the nurse coming in and saying, ‘Mr. Caffey, you can go home now,’" Terry told me when I visited him this spring. "All I heard was the word ‘home.’ I thought, ‘I don’t have a home. I don’t have a family to go home to.’ And I remember weeping, just weeping uncontrollably.

"I laid on my sister’s couch for a few days, and that’s when the despair hit me. I decided that I was going to go back to my property and end my life. I was going to lay down and shoot myself right there on the spot where I lost my family. I wanted to die where they died. And then I decided, no, there’s been enough bloodshed. I’m going to take all of the pain pills they gave me—all the depression medication, the Xanax, everything—drink me a bottle of Jim Beam, put a hose in the tailpipe of my daughter’s pickup, run it up to the window, and just fall asleep and not wake up again.

"So two or three days I pondered on this. Somebody brought me a Bible and told me to read the book of Job. Well, I’d read the story countless times before, but I read it again and it was almost like I was there with Job. He lost everything, his whole family, all his worldly possessions, but he did not lose his faith, and God blessed him doubly. That turned me around and got me thinking that God might have a plan for me. He didn’t bring me through all that for nothing.

"I went back to our property as soon as I was better. There was nothing left but the subfloor and the metal roof. I spent days out there picking through the ashes. I would get on my hands and knees and just dig. I didn’t find much—a Hot Wheels car; a broken ceramic cup; a horseshoe-shaped belt buckle that the kids gave me for Christmas. I ended up buying me a used RV, and I moved it back up on my land. Everybody said I was crazy for going back, but it brought me healing. I put my RV right on the spot where my house once stood, and I stayed out there about four months. I was so stubborn, I thought, ‘I’ll be darned if somebody is going to run me off of our property. When I leave, it will be when I’m ready and when God’s ready for me to leave.’ Some nights it was pitch-black by the time I got home, and I had to work up the courage to get out of the car. I bought me a nine-millimeter pistol and I slept with it beside me."

Twice a week, Terry made the trip to Greenville to see his daughter. He could not ask Erin any of the questions he longed to know the answers to; her lawyer had warned him that their conversations were being recorded and anything Erin said could be used against her at trial. And so Terry sat opposite the only other surviving member of his family—the girl who investigators were telling him had wanted him and his wife and sons dead—and conversed with her about subjects as mundane as the weather. Terry found the visits agonizing, but he felt compelled to be in the presence of his only living child. His daughter looked fragile and anxious in her orange prison jumpsuit, and at the end of every visit, he made sure to tell her that he loved her. During the many hours in which they made polite conversation, he ventured only once to ask her a question of substance. It was a question that preoccupied him more than his doubts about her innocence. "Were me and your mom good parents?" he asked her as they sat on opposite sides of the Plexiglas divider. Yes, Erin assured him, blinking back tears. She couldn’t have asked for a better mom or dad.

Given the complexity that four capital murder cases posed for a small, rural county, the Texas attorney general’s office was asked to assist the Rains County district attorney in bringing the four defendants to trial. Assistant attorney general Lisa Tanner, a seasoned prosecutor who has sent four men to death row in her eighteen years as a trial lawyer, was assigned to the case. "This was not the most brutal or cold-blooded case I had ever prosecuted," she told me. "But when you took all the different factors and put them together—how young and seemingly normal the perpetrators were; how ruthless they were; how stupid they were; how cavalier they were; how utterly undeserving this family was—it was, without question, the most disturbing case I’d ever dealt with."

The crime also defied easy explanation. Though Charlie and Waid had been drinking that night, neither was using drugs. Erin’s desire to have her parents killed did not appear to be motivated by any mistreatment or trauma; her court-mandated psychological evaluation failed to point to any evidence of abuse in the Caffey home. Yet Tanner had no doubt that Erin had masterminded the crime. "The phone records really did it for me," she said. "When I saw the phone records, I realized that it didn’t matter if a single one of the other defendants testified against her. We were still going to be able to convict her of capital murder."

The phone records corroborated a pivotal point in Charlie’s account of the murders. "From 11:46 p.m. until 12:48 a.m. that night, Erin called him six times from inside the Caffey house," Tanner said, reading from the case file. "But the kicker was from 1:22 a.m. to 1:58 a.m., when she called him seven more times. That comported completely with what Charlie told us, which was that she kept calling and saying, ‘Where are y’all? What’s the holdup? Hurry up. Come back, and I’ll keep the dog quiet.’"

Tanner sat down with Terry Caffey and showed him the phone records this past June. She needed to explain to him why prosecutors were asking the court to certify Erin as an adult. (If certified, she would face the same punishment at trial as an adult, including life without parole—with one notable exception: Even when certified, a juvenile cannot receive the death penalty.) Tanner was in the difficult position of briefing the victim of a crime who also happened to be the parent of the perpetrator. "It was an awful thing to have to do, to lay out to a man that his daughter wanted him dead and was responsible for the deaths of the rest of his family," Tanner said. "I brought all of the relevant documents and pictures, and we went through everything. I showed him photos of the suitcase that Erin had packed and the burned-out lockbox that was open to the combination that she had given Charlie. I showed him the statement that a friend of hers had given to investigators about how Erin had wanted them to be killed. I told him about her and Charlie having sex afterwards, which was by far the hardest thing to have to tell him. Terry cried a lot and kept asking, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘I don’t understand. We didn’t see any of this coming.’"

And yet, after Terry had seen every last piece of evidence, he continued to visit Erin and never wavered in his support, standing beside his daughter at each court appearance holding her hand. For the many people who puzzled over his loyalty, there were many others, in the pews of Miracle Faith and elsewhere, who understood it as the scriptural imperative of unconditional love. Terry drew particular sustenance from a passage in Romans, chapter 12: "Bless them which persecute you," a principle that, in the end, informed his wish that his family’s killers be spared the death penalty. "My heart tells me there have been enough deaths," Terry wrote in a letter to the Rains County district attorney, Robert Vititow, this past fall. "I want them, in this lifetime, to have a chance for remorse and to come to a place of repentance for what they have done. Killing them will not bring my family back." He asked that Charlie Wilkinson and Charles Waid receive sentences of life in prison without parole. After consulting with the attorney general’s office, Vititow honored his wishes and offered them a plea deal. In November they each pleaded guilty to three counts of capital murder.

V.

At their sentencing hearings in January, Terry rose to address each of them in the courtroom. He spoke first to Waid, who remained impassive, and then to Charlie. "In time, God has shown me what it means to forgive," Terry said as Charlie’s eyes shone with tears. "Charlie Wilkinson, I want to say to you today, I forgive you. Not so much for your sake, but for my own. I refuse to grow into a bitter old man. If I want to heal and move on, I must find some forgiveness in my heart, and that has been the hardest thing I have ever had to do because you took so much from me."

Today Terry lives in a tidy brick house in Wills Point, about thirty miles southwest of Alba, just down the road from the cemetery where Penny and the boys are buried. He became an ordained minister in April, and he gives his testimony most weekends at local churches, using his family’s story as an object lesson in forgiveness. To the astonishment of many of his closest friends, he remarried last year. Terry found a good listener in Sonja Webb, a pretty divorcée he met in the course of his work as a home health aide. Webb was raising two sons on her own. She asked him to lunch last June, and they never ran out of things to talk about.

"Terry missed being a husband and a father," Tommy Gaston says. "He needed somebody to lay down beside him at night who he could tell his troubles to." They said their vows in October at Miracle Faith, just a few feet from where Terry’s wife’s and sons’ caskets had rested seven months earlier. Webb’s boys—Blake, who is seventeen, and Tanner, who is nine—bear a passing resemblance to Bubba and Tyler. Terry, who shares a warm relationship with his stepsons, says that, like Job, he has been doubly blessed for never faltering in his faith in God.

Once a month, Terry makes the three-hour trip to Gatesville, where Erin is incarcerated. At his urging, she received a lesser sentence than life without parole; he wanted to make sure that she had something to live for, he said. And so Erin accepted a plea deal—two life sentences to be served concurrently, plus an additional 25 years—which ensures that with good behavior she will be eligible for parole when she is 59 years old. Now that she has pled out and the specter of a capital murder trial is gone, their conversations are no longer restricted, and Terry is free to ask his daughter whatever he wants to know. Yet when I visited him, he seemed hesitant. "I’ve got so many questions, and I don’t want to hit her with them all at once," he said. He has, thus far, chosen to accept the story line she has provided him: She was planning on running away that night, but then she changed her mind. The phone calls, she told her father, were to dissuade Charlie from coming at all. It was Charlie who had wanted the family dead, and when he came to the house, she had been powerless to stop him.

"I think she thought Charlie was just blowing smoke," Terry said. "I don’t think she actually thought he would go through with it. I know my daughter. She cried one time when we were in my truck and I ran over a squirrel; she’s tenderhearted. No kid’s an angel, but I know what she is capable of, and I know she’s not capable of murder."

Erin told another version of her story to Israel Lewis, the mental health counselor who was hired to evaluate her for the defense. When she spoke to Lewis, Erin insisted that Charlie had a volatile temper; he had killed her family after she had broken up with him and then framed her. "I have worked with some good liars, but Erin was one of the best," said Lewis, who has nineteen years’ experience counseling juvenile offenders. "She seemed totally sincere and genuine, and I would have put my license on the line to say that she was telling me the truth. She spoke with tears in her eyes—‘God will save me. He knows I’m innocent.’ I cried every time I left her jail cell."

Only after learning the details of the criminal investigation did Lewis realize that Erin had been manipulating him. He continued to visit her at the county jail, but what disturbed him most, at the end of a year of counseling, was the realization that he could no more explain why she had wanted her family killed than on the day he had first met her. She remained a mystery. "You could not have paid her to say anything negative about her parents," he said. "I still long for the day when I know what was hurting her bad enough to make such a decision."

Erin declined my interview requests, but the three other defendants each agreed to sit down with me and revisit the early morning of March 1, 2008. They all gave similar accounts, with Erin serving as the driving force behind the killings. Johnson, who is serving a forty-year sentence, recalled how Charlie had repeatedly asked Erin to consider running away as the group had driven around before the murders. "Charlie kept saying, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’" Johnson recounted. "And she said, ‘Why are you asking me this? If you love me, you’ll do it.’" (Explaining her own inability to put the brakes on the plan, Johnson said, "I just wanted to go home, but Charlie said it was too late, that I was already involved. He said that if anybody said anything to anyone, that person would be taken care of. I was scared shitless.") Erin had seemed elated after the killings, Johnson explained, and said that she was "free." In fact, Johnson said, Erin had wanted to get out of the car to make sure that everyone was dead. And it was Erin who had insisted that her brothers be killed, according to both Johnson and Waid. The boys picked on her, Erin had said, and she didn’t want them to be left in foster care. "They were ridiculous reasons—not even reasons—just an excuse," Waid told me. "When we pulled away from the house, she was happier than a kid on Christmas morning."

One afternoon this spring, I visited Charlie at the Polunsky Unit, in Livingston, the imposing, maximum-security prison that is best known for housing death row. Now nineteen, he looked impossibly young for someone who will never step beyond the guard towers and concertina wire again. He wore a starched white inmate’s uniform, a buzz cut, and a doleful expression. He was frank about the horror of what he had done and made no excuses for himself. "If I was sitting on my jury, I would have stuck the needle in my arm," he told me. At the same time, he said, Erin was given ample opportunity to call off the plan. "It was her idea," he said. "If at any time she would have said, ‘Well, we’re not going to do it after all,’ it never would have happened."

He had no ill words for the people he had so viciously attacked. Of the Caffeys, he painted a nostalgic portrait. "You know them family pictures that they print in movies and stuff?" he said. "The old-timey ones with the white fence? When I was at their house, that was what the family was like. They were perfect." When I visited the subject of his role in Tyler’s murder, he grew quiet and studied his hands, his eyes slowly filling with tears. "I don’t really like to talk about that," he said.

It was when he spoke about Erin that his voice softened and grew sentimental. "I would have done anything for her," he said. "She was very smart. Very caring. I don’t know why she wanted it done, why it had to be like that, but she was a very nice person." Weeks after the killings, when he was being held at the county jail on $1.5 million bond, he had been devastated to learn from his defense attorney that Erin had, in fact, asked a previous boyfriend to kill her parents too. Sergeant Vance had interviewed the boy whom Erin was caught kissing at Miracle Faith, and he had told the Texas Ranger that Erin had spoken to him about her desire to have them killed—several months before she had started dating Charlie.

"It made me question a lot of things," Charlie said, his voice trailing off. "After months of pushing me and convincing me and all this, I got to thinking that maybe all I was was just a tool." He had not spoken to her since the morning of the crime, and he is barred from communicating with her ever again; he will forever have to wonder if she wanted her parents dead so that she could be with him or simply so that she could be free of her family’s control. "I don’t know what’s wrong with her head," he said. "She needs to have it looked at."

But Charlie was more bewildered by Erin’s behavior than bitter. Knowing everything he knew, I asked him, did he still love her? He thought for a moment before answering my question, and I studied his face behind the Plexiglas. "Once you love somebody, you can’t quit," Charlie said. "You always will."

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.
Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.
What factors don’t matter? Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.”
The study has yielded some additional subtle surprises. Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by 63. More broadly, pessimists seemed to suffer physically in comparison with optimists, perhaps because they’re less likely to connect with others or care for themselves.
More than 80 percent of the Grant Study men served in World War II, a fact that allowed Vaillant to study the effect of combat. The men who survived heavy fighting developed more chronic physical illnesses and died sooner than those who saw little or no combat, he found. And “severity of trauma is the best predictor of who is likely to develop PTSD.” (This may sound obvious, but it countered the claim that post-traumatic stress disorder was just the manifestation of preexisting troubles.) He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In contrast to the Grant data, the Glueck study data suggested that industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether the boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor, including family cohesion and warm maternal relationships. “What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”

i thought it was a decent article until I got to the last paragraph and it just kinda ends.

 

Stealing Mona Lisa

The shocking theft of the Mona Lisa, in August 1911, appeared to have been solved 28 months later, when the painting was recovered. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors suggest that the audacious heist concealed a perfect—and far more lucrative—crime.

by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler

May 2009

The four bare hooks on the Louvre wall that once held the Mona Lisa. From the Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works.

Excerpted from The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, to be published this month by Little, Brown and Company; © 2009 by the authors.

It was a Monday and the Louvre was closed. As was standard practice at the museum on that day of the week, only maintenance workers, cleaning staff, curators, and a few other employees roamed the cavernous halls of the building that was once the home of France’s kings but for centuries had been devoted to housing the nation’s art treasures.

Also on VF.com: How Jacqueline Kennedy brought the Mona Lisa to America. Read "The Two First Ladies," by Margaret Leslie Davis.

Photograph by Lewandowski/LeMage/Gattelet/Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.

Acquired through conquest, wealth, good taste, and plunder, those holdings were splendid and vast—so much so that the Louvre could lay claim to being the greatest repository of art in the world. With some 50 acres of gallery space, the collection was too immense for visitors to view in a day or even, some thought, in a lifetime. In the Salon Carré—the "square room"—alone could be seen two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, three by Titian, two by Raphael, two by Correggio, one by Giorgione, three by Veronese, one by Tintoretto, and—representing non-Italians—one each by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez.

But even in that collection of masterpieces, one painting stood out from the rest. As the Louvre’s maintenance director, a man named Picquet, passed through the Salon Carré during his rounds on the morning of August 21, 1911, he pointed out Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, telling a co-worker that it was the most valuable object in the museum. "They say it is worth a million and a half," Picquet remarked, glancing at his watch as he left the room. The time was 7:20 a.m.

Shortly after Picquet departed the Salon Carré, a door to a storage closet opened and at least one man—for it would never be proved whether the thief worked alone—emerged. He had been in there since the previous day—Sunday, the museum’s busiest. Just before closing time, the thief had slipped inside the little closet so that he could emerge in the morning without the need to identify himself to a guard at the entrance.

There were many such small rooms and hidden alcoves within the ancient building; museum officials later confessed that no one knew how many. This particular room was normally used for storing easels, canvases, and art supplies for students who were engaged in copying the works of the old masters. The only firm anti-forgery requirement the museum imposed was that the reproductions could not be the same size as the original.

Emerging from the closet in a white artist’s smock, the intruder might have been mistaken for one of these copyists—or, perhaps, for a member of the museum’s maintenance staff, who also wore such smocks, in a practice intended to demonstrate that they were superior to other workers. If anyone noticed the thief, he would likely be taken for another of the regular museum employees.

As he entered the Salon Carré, the thief headed straight for the Mona Lisa. Lifting down the painting and carrying it into an enclosed stairwell nearby was no easy job. The painting itself weighs approximately 18 pounds, since Leonardo painted it not on canvas but on three slabs of wood, a fairly common practice during the Renaissance. A few months earlier, the museum’s directors had taken steps to physically protect the Mona Lisa by reinforcing it with a massive wooden brace and placing it inside a glass-fronted box, adding 150 pounds to its weight. The decorative Renaissance frame brought the total to nearly 200 pounds. However, only four sturdy hooks held it there, no more securely than if it had been hung in the house of a bourgeois Parisian. Museum officials would later explain that the paintings were fastened to the wall in this way to make it easy for guards to remove them in case of fire.

Once safely out of sight behind the closed door of the stairwell, the thief quickly stripped the painting of all its protective "garments"—the brace, the glass case, and the frame. Since the Mona Lisa’s close-grained wood, an inch and a half thick, made it impossible to roll up, he slipped the work underneath his smock. Measuring approximately 30 by 21 inches, it was small enough to avoid detection.

Though evidently familiar with the layout of the museum, the thief made one crucial mistake in his planning. At the bottom of the enclosed stairway that led down to the first floor of the Louvre was a locked door. The thief had obtained a key, but now it failed to work. Desperately, as he heard footsteps coming from above, he used a screwdriver to remove the doorknob.

Down the stairs came one of the Louvre’s plumbers, named Sauvet. Later, Sauvet—the only person to witness the thief inside the museum—testified that he had seen only one man, dressed as a museum employee. The man complained that the doorknob was missing. Apparently thinking that there was nothing strange about the situation, Sauvet produced a pliers to open the door. The plumber suggested that they leave it open in case anyone else should use the staircase. The thief agreed, and the two parted ways.

The door opened onto a courtyard, the Cour du Sphinx. From there the thief passed through another gallery, then entered the Cour Visconti, and—perhaps trying not to appear in a hurry—headed toward the main entrance of the museum. Few guards were on duty that day, and only one was assigned to that entrance. As luck would have it, the guard had left his post to fetch a bucket of water to clean the vestibule. He never saw the thief, or thieves, leave the building.

One passerby noticed a man on the sidewalk carrying a package wrapped in white cloth. The witness recalled noticing the man throw a shiny metal object into the ditch along the edge of the street. The passerby glanced at it—it was a doorknob.

Inside the museum, all was serene and would remain so for quite some time. At 8:35 a.m., Picquet passed through the Salon Carré again and noted that the painting was gone. He thought little of it at the time, since the museum’s photographers freely removed objects without notice and took them to a studio elsewhere in the building. Indeed, Picquet even remarked to his workers, "I guess the authorities have removed it because they thought we would steal it!"

If anyone else noticed during the rest of the day that there were four bare hooks where the Mona Lisa usually hung, they kept it to themselves. Incredibly, not until Tuesday, when the Louvre again opened its doors to the public, did anyone express concern over the fact that the world’s most famous painting was missing from its usual place. When an artist set up his easel in the Salon Carré and noticed that the centerpiece of his intended work was absent, he complained to a guard, who merely shrugged. Like Picquet the day before, the guard assumed the Mona Lisa had been removed to the photographers’ studio. But the artist persisted. How soon would it be returned?

The guard finally went to see a photographer, who denied having anything to do with the painting. Perhaps it had been taken by a curator for cleaning? No. Finally, the guard thought it wise to inform a superior. A search began and soon became frantic. The director of the museum was on vacation, so the unthinkable news filtered up to the acting head, Georges Bénédite: Elle est partie! She’s gone.

"Paris Has Been Startled"

Lisa Gherardini, who married Francesco del Giocondo of Florence at age 16, would have been in her mid-20s when she sat for her portrait with Leonardo da Vinci in 1503. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa—or La Joconde, as she is known in France—for four years, but like so many of his works, the painting was never completed. However, it had already achieved fame by the mid–16th century, owing to the innovations that had gone into its production—particularly in material, brush technique, and varnish—and its subject’s famously coy smile, which is said to be the result of musicians and clowns the artist kept on hand to prevent her from growing bored.

When Leonardo traveled to France around 1517, at the invitation of King Francis I, the Mona Lisa left Italy, it seemed, forever. The artist died only two years later, and by the middle of that century the painting—purchased for a considerable sum—had entered the collection of the French monarchy. Louis XIV gave the Mona Lisa a place of honor in his personal gallery at Versailles. But his successor, Louis XV, sent the painting to hang ignominiously in the office of the keeper of the royal buildings. However, in 1797, La Joconde was chosen as one of the works displayed in the nation’s new art museum, the Louvre, which is where she remained—save a brief stay in Napoleon’s bedroom—until someone carried her off in August 1911.

The Louvre, after the Mona Lisa was stolen, May 1912. From Mirrorpix.

Paris during the Belle Époque—the "beautiful time" between the late 19th century and the outbreak of World War I—had become an international center for painting, dance, music, theater, and publishing. The construction of Gustav Eiffel’s tower for the 1889 world’s fair had made it the "city of light"—both literally and metaphorically. The city could boast many of the world’s foremost medical and scientific institutions of the day, and Europe’s most modern manufacturing facilities. The face of the future, many believed, could be seen in Parisian leadership in such brand-new fields as motion pictures, automobile manufacturing, and aviation.

This made the disappearance of France’s most treasured artwork all the more unbearable. In the days and weeks immediately following the theft, anyone carrying a package received attention—including, at one point, a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso, who, four years earlier, had purchased several small Iberian stone heads that were filched from the Louvre by the secretary of avant-garde writer Guillaume Apollinaire. (Apollinaire spent a few days in jail, but Picasso had the last laugh—he used the Iberian heads as models for his Demoiselles d’Avignon.) Police at checkpoints on roads leading out of the capital examined the contents of every wagon, automobile, and truck. Fearing that the thief would try to flee the country, customs inspectors opened and examined the baggage of everyone leaving on ships or trains. Ships that departed during the day that had elapsed between the theft and its discovery were searched when they reached their overseas destinations. After the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II docked at a pier across the Hudson River from New York City in late August, detectives combed every stateroom and piece of luggage for the masterpiece.

In the following days, from Manchester to São Paulo, the crime became front-page news. The Times of London declared, "Paris has been startled." The Washington Post claimed, "The art world was thrown into consternation." But perhaps The New York Times most accurately conveyed the enormity of the heist when it asserted that the crime "has caused such a sensation that Parisians for the time being have forgotten the rumors of war." Nowhere, however, did the media cry out louder than in France itself. "What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?" asked Paris’s leading picture magazine, L’Illustration, which offered a reward of 40,000 francs to anyone who would deliver the painting to its office. Soon the Paris-Journal, its rival, offered 50,000 francs, and a bidding war was on.

The theft continued to inspire newspaper stories for weeks; any report on the case, no matter how trivial, found its way into print. One of the most popular conspiracy theories suggested that a rich American had masterminded the theft. The favorite candidate was banking scion J. Pierpont Morgan, known for his avid, not to say avaricious, collecting habits, which frequently took him through Europe on buying sprees. When Morgan arrived the following spring in the spa town of Aix-les-Bains for his annual visit, the Mona Lisa had still not been found. Paris newspapers reported that two mysterious men had come to offer to sell him the Mona Lisa. Morgan indignantly denied the account, and when a French reporter came to interview him, the American wore in his buttonhole the rosette that marked him as a commander of the Legion of Honor—France’s highest decoration. He had recently been awarded it, causing some French newspapers to speculate that he had earned the decoration by offering "a million dollars and no questions asked" for the return of the Mona Lisa to the Louvre.

Early in September, after a brief closing, the Louvre was once again opened to the public, and an even greater number of visitors than usual came to gape at the four hooks on the wall that marked the place where La Joconde once hung. One tourist, an aspiring writer named Franz Kafka, visiting the Louvre on a trip to Paris in late 1911, noted in his diary "the excitement and the knots of people, as if the Mona Lisa had just been stolen." Some even began to place bouquets of flowers beneath the spot where the painting once resided.

What everyone wanted to know—and speculated on endlessly—was where the thief could have gone with what was probably the most recognizable artwork in the world. But the only clues were a fingerprint and the doorknob, which had been recovered by the police from the gutter outside the museum. The plumber who had opened the stairway door was asked to look at hundreds of photographs of museum employees, past and present. Every sighting or rumor about the painting’s whereabouts had to be checked out—and they came in from places as distant as Italy, Germany, Britain, Poland, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Japan. But by December, as the trail grew cold, the police had to shift their attention to another spectacular case. A gang of anarchist bank robbers had begun to terrorize Paris, audaciously fleeing their crimes in the first recorded use of a getaway car.

"Our Party Coming from Milan Will Be Here with Object Tomorrow"

A year after the Mona Lisa vanished, the officials of the Louvre were forced to confront the unthinkable: that she would never return. The blank space on the wall of the Salon Carré had been filled with a colored reproduction of the painting. Even that had begun to fade and curl, and many people now averted their eyes as they passed it, as if to avoid the reminder of a tragic death. So, on one December day in 1912, patrons discovered another painting hanging there: also a portrait, but of a man, Baldassare Castiglione, by Raphael.

Occasionally, stories appeared about sightings of the Mona Lisa, including one alleging that London art dealer Henry J. Duveen had been offered the painting. Duveen, however, avoided involvement by pretending that the proposal had been a joke. But another international dealer, Alfredo Geri, in Florence, was astonished by a letter he received in November 1913, more than two years after the painting had vanished. The sender, who signed himself "Leonard," claimed to have the Mona Lisa in his possession.

Leonard said he was an Italian who had been "suddenly seized with the desire to return to [his] country at least one of the many treasures which, especially in the Napoleonic era, had been stolen from Italy." (The fact that the Mona Lisa had come to France more than two centuries before Napoleon was born didn’t seem to dim the thief’s patriotism.) He also mentioned that, although he was not setting a specific price, he himself was not a wealthy man and would not refuse compensation if his native country were to reward him. Geri glanced at the return address. It was a post-office box in Paris.

Despite his suspicions, Geri took the letter to Giovanni Poggi, director of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Poggi had photographs from the Louvre that detailed certain marks that were on the back of the original panel; no forger could be aware of these. At Poggi’s suggestion, Geri invited the seller to Florence, but Leonard proved to be an elusive figure. More than once, he set a date for his arrival and then sent a letter canceling the meeting. Geri came to assume that it was all a hoax, until on December 9 he received a telegram from Leonard saying that he was in Milan and would be in Florence on the following day. The news was inconvenient, since Poggi had gone on a trip to Bologna. Geri sent Poggi an urgent telegram: our party coming from milan will be here with object tomorrow. need you here. please respond. geri. Poggi wired back that he could not arrive by the following day, but would be in Florence the day after that, a Thursday.

Geri prepared to stall. When a thin young man wearing a suit and tie, with a handsome mustache, arrived at the dealer’s gallery the next day, Geri showed him into his office and pulled down the blinds. Eagerly, he asked him where he was holding the painting. Leonard replied that it was in the hotel where he was staying. When questioned about the authenticity of the painting, Leonard replied, according to Geri’s account, "We are dealing with the real Mona Lisa. I have good reason to be sure." Leonard coolly declared that he was certain because he had taken the painting from the Louvre himself. Had he worked alone?, Geri asked. Leonard seemed to be hiding something. According to Geri, he "was not too clear on that point. He seemed to say yes, but didn’t quite do so, [but his answer was] more ‘yes’ than ‘no.’"

Nevertheless, the discussion got down to the reward. According to Geri, the thief boldly asked for 500,000 lire. That was the equivalent of $100,000 and quite a fortune, though some newspapers had estimated the painting’s value at roughly five million dollars. Geri, holding his breath, thought that he had better agree, so he said, "That’s fine. That’s not too high." They made a plan to meet the following day.

The next afternoon, after arriving 15 minutes late, Leonard was introduced to Poggi. To Geri’s relief, the two men "shook hands enthusiastically, Leonard saying how glad he was to be able to shake the hand of the man to whom was entrusted the artistic patrimony of Florence." As the three of them left the gallery, "Poggi and I were nervous," Geri recalled. "Leonard, by contrast, seemed indifferent."

Mug shots of Vincenzo Perugia, the man accused of taking the Mona Lisa. From Rue des Archives/The Granger Collection.

Leonard took them to the Hotel Tripoli-Italia, on the Via de’ Panzani, only a few blocks from the Duomo. Leonard’s small room was on the third floor. Inside, he took from under the bed a small trunk made of white wood. When he opened the lid, Geri was dismayed. It was filled with "wretched objects: broken shoes, a mangled hat, a pair of pliers, plastering tools, a smock, some paint brushes, and even a mandolin." Calmly, Leonard removed these one by one and tossed them onto the floor. Surely, Geri thought, this was not where the Mona Lisa had been hidden for the past 28 months. He peered inside but saw nothing more.

Then Leonard lifted what had seemed to be the bottom of the trunk. Underneath was an object wrapped in red silk. Leonard took it to the bed and removed the covering. "To our astonished eyes," Geri recalled, "the divine Mona Lisa appeared, intact and marvelously preserved." They carried the painting to a window, where it took Poggi little time to determine its authenticity. Even the Louvre’s catalogue number and stamp on the back checked out.

Perugia’s hotel in Florence. From Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.

Geri’s heart was pounding, but he forced himself to remain calm. He and Poggi explained that the painting had to be transported to the Uffizi Gallery for further tests. The painting was re-wrapped in the red silk, and the three men went downstairs. As they were passing through the lobby, however, the concierge stopped them. Suspiciously, he pointed to the package and asked what it was. He obviously thought it was the hotel’s property, but Geri and Poggi, showing their credentials, vouched for Leonard, and the concierge let them pass.

At the Uffizi, Poggi compared sections of the painting with close-up photographs that had been taken at the Louvre. There was a small vertical crack in the upper-left-hand part of the panel, matching the one in the photos. Most telling of all was the pattern of craquelure, cracks in the paint that had appeared as the surface dried and aged. A forger could make craquelure appear on a freshly painted object, but no one could duplicate the exact pattern of the original. There could be no further doubt, Poggi concluded: the Mona Lisa had been recovered.

Poggi and Geri then explained to Leonard that it would be best to leave the painting at the Uffizi. They would have to get further instructions from the government; they themselves could not authorize the payment he deserved.

The Uffizi was an awesome setting, and Leonard must have felt overwhelmed by their arguments. How could he doubt two men of such standing and integrity? He did mention that he was finding it a bit expensive to stay in Florence. Yes, they understood. He would be well rewarded, and soon. They shook his hand warmly and congratulated him on his patriotism. As soon as he left, Geri and Poggi notified the authorities. Not long after Leonard returned to his hotel room, he answered a knock at the door and found two policemen there to arrest him. He was, they said, quite astonished.

When a reporter telephoned a curator of the Louvre to tell him the news, the Frenchman, in the middle of his dinner, said it was impossible and hung up. The following day, December 12, 1913, the museum issued a cautious statement: "The curators of the Louvre … wish to say nothing until they have seen the painting." But when the Italian government made an official announcement confirming Poggi’s assessment, on December 13, the French ambassador made calls on the prime minister and foreign minister of Italy to offer his government’s gratitude. After disagreement within the Italian Parliament about whether the painting should be returned, the minister of public education put the argument to rest. "The Mona Lisa will be delivered to the French Ambassador with a solemnity worthy of Leonardo da Vinci and a spirit of happiness worthy of Mona Lisa’s smile," he announced. "Although the masterpiece is dear to all Italians as one of the best productions of the genius of their race, we will willingly return it to its foster country … as a pledge of friendship and brotherhood between the two great Latin nations."

After a triumphal tour through Italy, on January 4, 1914, the Mona Lisa resumed its old place on the wall of the Salon Carré. It had been gone for two years and four and a half months. In the next two days, more than 100,000 people filed past, welcoming back one of Paris’s most famous icons.

The Patriot

The young thief known as Leonard had been born Vincenzo Perugia, in 1881, in a village near Lake Como, in Italy. Having moved to France as a young man, the aspiring artist settled for work as a housepainter. Perugia had very briefly worked at the Louvre, from October 1910 to January 1911, and, it was discovered, even claimed to have helped craft the protective box that encased the Mona Lisa. By the time he stood trial for his crime, in Florence in June 1914, the thief’s hopes of receiving a reward for returning the painting to his native country had been finally dashed.

Alfredo Geri, on the other hand, collected the 25,000 francs that had been offered by Les Amis du Louvre, a society of wealthy art-lovers, for information leading to the return of the painting. The grateful French government also bestowed upon him the Legion of Honor, as well as the title "officier de l’instruction publique." Geri showed what were perhaps his true colors when he promptly turned around and sued the French government for 10 percent of the value of the Mona Lisa. His contention was based on a Gallic tradition that gave the finder of lost property a reward of one-tenth the value of the object. In the end, a court decided that the painting was beyond price and that Geri had only acted as an honest citizen should. He received no further reward.

Perugia, meanwhile, was growing depressed in jail. Guards reported that he occasionally wept. But by the time his trial began, on June 4, he was again calm and self-possessed, insisting that he had acted as a patriot. Since there was no question of guilt, the legal proceedings functioned more like an inquest intended to establish the truth, if such a thing were possible. Three judges presided in a large room in Florence’s stunning Romanesque Palazzo Vecchio, which had been remodeled to provide space for journalists from around the world. (The French government never attempted to extradite Perugia.) The designer of the room had placed on a cushion, in the middle of a semicircle, a massive silver hemisphere that symbolized justice. A cynical journalist remarked that it would not be prudent to allow the defendant to sit too close to this artistic treasure.

Perugia, now 32 years old, was handcuffed when he entered the courtroom at nine a.m. Nattily dressed in a suit and tie, he smiled graciously at the photographers. Like everyone else, the chief judge was curious to learn how this apparently humble man could have carried out such an audacious crime. Could Perugia describe what happened on August 21, 1911, when he stole the Mona Lisa? Somewhat eagerly, Perugia asked if he could also explain why he had committed the crime, but the chief judge told him that he must do that later. For now, he wanted a description of the act itself.

Perugia offered an abbreviated version that contradicted both his account to Geri and the Paris Prefecture of Police’s reconstruction of the crime. He claimed to have entered the Louvre through the front door early that Monday, wandered through various rooms, taken the Mona Lisa from its place on the wall, and left the same way. A judge pointed out that, during the pre-trial interrogations, Perugia had admitted trying to force the door at the bottom of the little stairwell that led to the Cour du Sphinx. Perugia had no answer for this, and the judge did not press him for one.

It is difficult to understand why Perugia changed his story, or even why he did not tell the full truth about how he had entered and left the museum, given the fact that he freely confessed to the crime itself. Perhaps he was afraid of implicating others, but certainly the motive that he had concocted for himself—that he was a patriot reclaiming one of Italy’s treasures—would have sounded better if he had been the sole actor in this drama.

When Perugia was asked why he had stolen the Mona Lisa, he responded that all the Italian paintings in the Louvre were stolen works, taken from their rightful home—Italy. When asked how he knew this, he said that when he had worked at the Louvre he had found documents that proved it. He remembered in particular a book with prints that showed "a cart, pulled by two oxen; it was loaded with paintings, statues, other works of art. Things that were leaving Italy and going to France."

Was that when he decided to steal the Mona Lisa? Not exactly, Perugia replied. First he considered the paintings of Raphael, Correggio, Giorgione, and other great masters. "But I decided on the Mona Lisa, which was the smallest painting and the easiest to transport."

"So there was no chance," asked the court, "that you decided on it because it was the most valuable painting?"

"No, sir, I never acted with that in mind. I only desired that this masterpiece would be put in its place of honor here in Florence."

A judge then interrupted to play one of the prosecution’s trump cards: "Is it true," he asked, "that you tried to sell the Mona Lisa in England?"

Accounts of the trial say that this was one of the few moments when Perugia lost his composure. He glared around the courtroom, clenching his fists as if to do battle with his accusers.

"Me? I offered to sell the Mona Lisa to the English? Who says so? It’s false!"

The chief judge pointed out that "it is you yourself who said so, during one of your examinations which I have right here in front of me."

Unable to deny that, Perugia claimed, "Duveen didn’t take me seriously. I protest against this lie that I would have wanted to sell the painting to London. I wanted to take it back to Italy, and to return it to Italy, and that is what I did."

"Nevertheless," said one of the judges, "your unselfishness wasn’t total—you did expect some benefit from restoration."

"Ah benefit, benefit," Perugia responded—"certainly something better than what happened to me here."

That drew a laugh from the spectators. The next day, the chief judge announced a sentence for Perugia of one year and fifteen days. As he was led out of the courtroom, he was heard to say, "It could have been worse."

It actually got better. The following month, Perugia’s attorneys presented arguments for an appeal. This time, the court was more lenient, reducing the sentence to seven months. Perugia had already been incarcerated nine days longer than that since his arrest, so he was released. A crowd had gathered to greet him as he left the courthouse. Someone asked him where he would go now, and he said he would return to the hotel where he had left his belongings. When he did, however, he found that the establishment’s name had changed. No longer was it the Tripoli-Italia; now it was the Hotel La Gioconda—and it was too fancy to admit a convicted criminal. Perugia’s lawyers had to vouch for him before the staff would give him a room.

ut most spectators had already moved on. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had recently been assassinated in his touring car in the streets of Sarajevo. Soon the nations of Europe would be at war, and Perugia’s crime—and the ensuing hysteria—would seem rather trivial by comparison.

The Mastermind

In January 1914, months before Perugia’s trial began, a veteran American newspaperman named Karl Decker was on assignment in Casablanca. While having a drink with an elegant confidence man who went by the name Eduardo, he overheard an interesting story that would shed new light on the disappearance of the Mona Lisa. Eduardo had many aliases, but to his associates he was known as the Marqués de Valfierno or the "Marquis of the Vale of Hell." With a white mustache and wavy white hair, he looked the part. He had, wrote Decker, "a distinction that would have taken him past any royal-palace gate in Europe."

Decker had crossed paths with Valfierno in a number of exotic places, and the two had developed a friendship. After the police arrested Vincenzo Perugia, Valfierno commented casually to Decker that Perugia was "that simp who helped us get the Mona Lisa." When Decker pressed him for details, Valfierno offered to confide his version of the events as long as the journalist promised not to publish them until he gave permission, or died. It was the latter event that allowed Decker to reveal what he had been told, nearly 20 years later, in 1932, in The Saturday Evening Post.

After years of success selling fake artworks, Valfierno moved his operation from Buenos Aires to Paris, where, he said, "thousands of Corots, Millets, even Titians and Murillos, were being sold in the city every year, all of them fakes." He added people to his organization, including a well-connected American whom he refused to name. Valfierno was selective in choosing those he wished to fleece, concentrating on wealthy Americans who could pay highly for "masterpieces" that had supposedly been stolen from the Louvre.

But Valfierno and his gang never took anything from the Louvre. "We didn’t have to," he said. "We sold our cleverly executed copies, and … sent [the buyers] forged documents [that] told of the mysterious disappearance from the Louvre of some gem of painting or world-envied objet d’art.… The documents always stated that in order to avoid scandal a copy had been temporarily substituted by the museum authorities."

Eventually, Valfierno peddled the ultimate prize: the Mona Lisa itself, in June 1910. Not the genuine painting, but a forged copy, along with forged official papers that convinced the buyer (an American millionaire) that, in order to cover the theft, Louvre officials had hung a replica in the Salon Carré. The buyer, unfortunately, had been a little too free in bragging about his new acquisition, which prompted the newspaper Le Cri de Paris to publish an article—a year before the actual theft—stating that the Mona Lisa had been stolen.

Still, it had been a disturbing experience, one that Valfierno was determined to avoid a second time: "The next trip, we decided, there must be no chance for recriminations. We would steal—actually steal—the Louvre Mona Lisa and assure the buyer beyond any possibility of misunderstanding that the picture delivered to him was the true, the authentic original."

Valfierno never intended to sell the real painting. "The original would be as awkward as a hot stove," he told Decker. The plan would be to create a copy and ship it overseas before stealing the original. "The customs would pass it without a thought, copies being commonplace and the original still being in the Louvre." After the Mona Lisa had been stolen, the imitation could be taken out and sold to a buyer who was convinced he was getting the missing masterpiece.

"We began our selling campaign," recalled Valfierno, "and the first deal went through so easily that the thought ‘Why stop with one?’ naturally arose. There was no limit in theory to the fish we might hook." Valfierno stopped with six American millionaires. "Six were as many as we could both land and keep hot," he told Decker. The forger then carefully produced the six copies, which were sent to America and kept waiting for the proper time to be delivered. Valfierno said that an antique bed, made of Italian walnut, "seasoned by time to the identical quality of that on which the Mona Lisa was painted" provided the panels that the forger painted on.

Now came what Valfierno thought was the easy part: "Stealing the Mona Lisa was as simple as boiling an egg in a kitchenette," he told Decker. "Our success depended upon one thing—the fact that a workman in a white blouse in the Louvre is as free from suspicion as an unlaid egg." Recruiting someone—Perugia—who actually had worked in the Louvre was helpful because he knew the secret rooms and staircases that employees used.

Perugia did not act alone, Valfierno said. He had two accomplices who were needed to lift the painting, with its heavy protective container and frame, from the wall and carry it to a place where the frame could be removed. Valfierno did not name them either.

The one hitch in the plan was that Perugia had failed to test the duplicate key Valfierno ordered to be made for the door at the bottom of the staircase. At the moment he needed it, the key failed to turn the lock. While he was removing the doorknob, the trio heard footsteps from above, and Perugia’s two accomplices hid themselves. The plumber appeared but, seeing only one man in a white smock, had no reason to be suspicious. He opened the door and went on his way, soon followed by Perugia and the other two thieves. At the vestibule, the guard stationed there had temporarily abandoned his post.

An automobile waited for the thieves and took them to Valfierno’s headquarters, where the gang celebrated "the most magnificent single theft in the history of the world." Now the six copies that had been sent to the United States could be delivered to the purchasers. Because each of the six collectors thought he was receiving stolen merchandise, he could not publicize his acquisition—or even complain should he suspect it wasn’t the genuine article.

Perugia was paid well for his part in the scheme. However, he squandered the money on the Riviera, and then, knowing where Valfierno had hidden the real Mona Lisa, stole it a second time. "The poor fool had some nutty notion of selling it," Valfierno told Decker. "He had never realized that selling it, in the first place, was the real achievement, requiring an organization and a finesse that was a million miles beyond his capabilities."

What about the copies?, Decker wanted to know. Someday, speculated Valfierno, all of them would reappear. "Without those, there are already thirty Mona Lisas in the world," he said. "Every now and then a new one pops up. I merely added to the gross total."

Characteristically, perhaps, reports of the date of Perugia’s death vary. It is known, however, that he died in France—an odd end point for a man who had once so vehemently asserted his Italian patriotism. Whatever secrets he knew about the theft were carried to the grave. The Decker account is the sole source for the existence of Valfierno and this version of the theft of the Mona Lisa. There is no external confirmation for it, yet it has frequently been assumed to be true by authors writing about the case. If indeed it is true, Valfierno had carried out the perfect crime.