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Thieves robbed priceless jewelry from the Louvre this weekend in a brazen heist that involved an electric ladder, a glass cutter, and high-powered scooters. They were in and out of the iconic museum in 8 minutes. But in 2009, a 20-year-old United States citizen pulled off a robbery near London that rivaled the bold Louvre caper. His target wasn’t jewelry, though. It was birds.
The Natural History Museum at Tring, about 40 miles northwest of London, houses zoological marvels, including taxidermied mounts of extinct animals, rare books once perused by Victorian-era explorers, and whimsical fleas dressed in traditional garb that were purchased from Mexico around 1905. But Edwin Rist was interested in the museum’s birds.
Rist was a flute student studying at London’s Royal Academy of Music as well as an avid maker of handcrafted fly-fishing lures, having written a well-regarded book on the hobby at age 15. Like other enthusiasts, he had learned that rare feathers from birds, collected during the Victorian era, were highly prized and could fetch handsome prices. In 2009, Rist visited the museum in Tring posing as a photographer capturing images of the facility’s rare bird specimens for an assignment. He snapped photos of hundreds of preserved bird skins as well as the halls and doors of the museum. Later that year, he enacted a plan that had been months in the making: to steal some of the more exotic specimens the museum held to sell their feathers—or make elaborate flyfishing lures from them, which could demand even higher prices.
In June of that year, Rist performed a concert in London and then took a train to Tring. He broke into the Natural History Museum, toting a large suitcase, gloves, and a glass cutter. Rist made off with 299 bird specimens, mostly males of tropical species—quetzals, cotingas, and birds-of-paradise among them—with vivid feathers used to attract mates. Some of the skins had been collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin who constructed the theory of evolution through natural selection independently from the biologist who would become known as the father of that theory.
Rist initially got away with the crime. It wasn’t until a month after the robbery, when he was selling feathers on eBay to fund his purchase of a golden flute, that investigators caught the young American. The museum was able to recover 174 specimens intact, though Rist had removed the identification labels from most, decimating their scientific value.
Fined more than £125,000 (the amount he had made selling feathers), given a 12-month suspended jail sentence, and placed on supervision for 12 months in 2011, Rist later graduated from the Royal Academy. He now lives in Germany, has changed his name to Edwin Reinhard, and continues to play flute in orchestras there. His story inspired The Feather Thief, a 2018 true crime book written by Kirk Johnson. 
You can catch a glimpse of Rist/Reinhardt on his YouTube Channel HeavyMetalFlute.
Lead image: Charles J. Sharp / Wikimedia
