The joint was carefully cased. The crime was committed, the goods taken away, the thief vanished into the night.
With 300 dead birds. Not the corpses, but the plumage; that was the goal. This unusual crime is examined in the book The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.
Kirk Wallace Johnson wrote the book and joined us for this interview in 2018.