"The investigation is quite active," said Joan Norris, a spokeswoman for the museum. "The FBI is still pursuing leads, we are in touch all of the time. It is a real collaborative effort. Just this week I've spoken to Bill {McMullin, FBI special agent} two or three times."
McMullin said that the investigation "is still very much alive and we don't intend to drop it." He said the FBI has been checking leads in this country and in South America, Europe, and Asia. "But so far there have not even been any sightings of any of the works," he said.
Hopeful statements have been made frequently since two men who pretended to be Boston police officers got into the museum about 1 a.m. March 18, 1990, tied up the guards, disabled the alarm system and made off with the art works.
But since none of the works have been reported seen, and now the most viable theory is that the heist was done so that some art lover could have the items for private enjoyment.
Museum officials said at the time of the robbery that although the stolen items were worth not less than $200 million on the international market, the items were not the most valuable in the collection housed in Mrs. Gardner's 89-year-old museum.
If the theory that the art works were stolen for a private collection is correct, the art lover may be possessed of as idiosyncratic and eccentric a taste as Mrs. Gardner is said to have shown.
The items stolen from the Gardner are three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet, a Flinck, five paintings by Degas, and a beaker from the Shang Dynasty, the museum's oldest possession.
For more than a year after the heist, the media kept coming back to a former Swampscott man, Brian McDevitt, as a possible suspect.
It was reported that he had attempted to rob the Hyde Museum in upstate New York in 1981 using methods similar to those used by the two robbers of the Gardner, and that he had a history of deception.
The FBI interviewed McDevitt intensely, but later pointed out that there were dissimilarities between the Hyde and the Gardner robberies. He has never been charged.
Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper
