The Ashmolean Museum at Britain’s
Oxford University was heavily guarded. Regardless at midnight on January 1,
2000, thief got into the building through a construction site adjoining the
museum, then scaled an outer wall and made his way across the roof. Smashing
through a glass skylight, he dropped a smoke grenade into the museum that
temporarily blinded the buildings guards and fogged up the cameras. Within 10
minutes, the burglar escaped with one painting, a Paul Cézanne landscape titled
Auvers-sur-Oise, valued at approximately $4.5 million. Museum security
personnel only discovered the theft after firefighters had searched the
facility and found the smoke grenade.
Cézanne’s masterpiece remains
missing today, and no suspects have been named in the case that journalists
quickly dubbed the “Y2Kaper.” Authorities suspect that the painting was “stolen
to order” for some illicit collector who derives satisfaction from possessing a
stolen treasure, even when it cannot be displayed outside a tight circle of
intimate friends.
