Empty Frames

Empty Frames is a podcast about one theft that has never been solved, and about the people still turning it over. The crime is the March 18, 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Episodes carry a recited account of it: two men dressed as police officers admitted by security after claiming to answer a disturbance call, 81 minutes inside, 13 works taken, Vermeer, Degas and Rembrandt among them. The intro notes the heist has been categorized as the largest and most frustrating of all time. Much of the show runs on interviews. In 'S3E21 - Geoffrey Kelly on Thirteen Perfect Fugitives', the length of the robbery is treated as evidence: nobody stays in a museum that long, the argument goes, without knowing there were no dead man switches, that proximity alarms near some paintings alerted only internally, and where the security tapes were kept. That reasoning points toward the guard Rick Abath and the moment the fake officers were buzzed in. Abath returns in 'S3E20 - New Gardner Suspect & More', where a guest describes him leaving his Vermont life to give interviews that were incriminating and off the narrative. The talk there fixes on who worked which night, since Abath was the only guard common to the robbery and to a night a mysterious person arrived, and one of the interviewers admits the suspicion is getting easier to say out loud. 'S3E22 - Eric Ulis's Hunt For the Stolen Artwork Continues' starts with a speaker claiming a very good idea of where the artwork was buried. It then follows the money around a man named Brian: a week in Jamaica he paid for, a move to Los Angeles about ten weeks after the heist, income the speaker has not been able to pin down. Brian's emails mention meeting Whitey Bulger, a claim that arrives without context from a man the speaker calls a prolific liar, which is not the same as calling every word false. The talk is speculative, and openly so. Guests bring personal stakes too; one calls the case a very personal subject and says they love the museum. Not every episode stays in Boston. 'New // Louvre Heist' reaches back to the Mona Lisa theft, when Pablo Picasso was among those questioned, and the conversation has fun imagining his answer: why steal that painting when he had plenty of his own. 'Bonus // Ruby Red Handed' talks with Maria about a documentary on Hollywood memorabilia stolen from a museum in rural Minnesota, a case first suspected to be a local prank, and about a billion-dollar black market in art, antiquities and memorabilia. 'Bonus // The Million Dollar Car Detective' turns to a stolen car, with guests describing its restoration in France by a second-generation mechanic and an interview with one of the thieves who confessed to the FBI. Numbered season-three episodes sit beside entries marked Bonus or New, so browsing by title pays off. Any numbered Gardner episode makes a fair starting point, since each carries the recited account of the night before the argument begins.