Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [21]
The investigation soon spread its net over a wider area. Checkpoints on roads leading out of the capital examined the contents of every wagon, automobile, and truck. Fearing that the thief must be trying to leave the country, customs inspectors opened and examined the baggage of everyone departing on ships or trains. Then, ships that had left during the day that had passed between the theft and its discovery were identified and searched when they reached overseas ports. In New York City, detectives swarmed aboard the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II after it docked, and combed every stateroom and piece of luggage for the masterpiece.
Some thought the whole thing was a hoax, recalling that the satirical journal Le Cri de Paris had thrown the city into a panic the previous year by reporting that the Mona Lisa on view in the Louvre was a copy, hung there to hide the fact that the original had been stolen. That had proved to be the editor’s idea of a joke, but now people wondered if there had been some truth to the report, and whether this latest, actual disappearance would be covered up by the return of a “real” Mona Lisa. Not to be outdone, the editors of Le Cri de Paris now declared that the painting that had been stolen on August 21 was itself only a copy and that the genuine work was in the New York mansion of a millionaire identified as “J.K.W.W.” 10
“What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?” asked L’Illustration, which offered a reward of 40,000 francs 11 to anyone who would deliver the painting to its office, presumably so that it could gain the publicity of solving the case. 12 Soon the rival newspaper Paris-Journal offered 50,000 francs, and a bidding war was on, certain to attract dozens of people who wished only to collect the reward — or to attract attention to themselves. A waiter named Armand Gueneschan stepped forward, claiming to know where the painting was hidden. Supposedly it was in the hands of a rich nobleman who had financed the theft because he was obsessed with the image (not the last time this was suggested as a motive for the crime). Gueneschan offered to reveal the man’s name for 200,000 francs. However, after the police questioned the waiter, they concluded that he was either a liar or deranged.
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Premier Caillaux, recognizing the importance of the theft to the nation, appointed a well-known jurist, Henri Drioux, as juge d’instruction (examining magistrate) to conduct an official inquiry. Louis Lépine, prefect of the Paris police, Octave Hamard, head of the Sûreté, and Alphonse Bertillon had already inspected the scene of the theft and turned up a few clues, finding the discarded case and frame in the stairwell. Le Petit Parisien sarcastically reported “Mona Lisa Stolen.… We still have the frame,” 13 but on the glass of the protective case, Bertillon found a fingerprint. A few years earlier, he had been credited with being the first criminologist to solve a case by using fingerprint evidence, and some thought this latest discovery signaled the imminent arrest of the culprit. Unfortunately, Bertillon’s files, comprising three-quarters of a million individual cards, were indexed under his own physical identification system and not according to fingerprint type. The only way to determine the owner of this incriminating fingerprint was to find the person who had left it there. Bertillon and his staff painstakingly began to collect the prints of every employee of the museum, 257 in all.
There was good reason to think that the theft was an inside job. That was certainly the personal view of France’s undersecretary of state of beaux-arts, Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz. He had just finished a months-long struggle with museum employees who wanted to unionize — a battle that the employees had lost. The undersecretary thought a malcontented employee had taken the picture as an act of “personal vengeance” and predicted