Does that mean that they actually don’t know their names? Or was it just that the statute of limitations for major art theft had expired and the culprits likely couldn’t be prosecuted anyway? Sounds like a job for Serial. In 2013 the FBI announced that it knew the identities of the thieves-who were apparently members of a mid-Atlantic organized crime gang-but that it would be “imprudent” to reveal their names as long as the investigation was ongoing. Since then, the Gardner Museum heist has inspired books, documentaries, and endless speculation. Despite the fact that the thieves didn’t bother to conceal their faces, they were never apprehended and the art was never recovered. On March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers bluffed their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, immobilized the two guards on duty, and made away with $500 million worth of art. OK, this one doesn’t involve any dead bodies, but it’s entertaining and fascinating all the same. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist Case. But it’d make for a great radio story all the same. But real life never resolves quite as neatly as novels do James writes that “the guilt of Fred Neulander becomes less clear as one gets more perspective on the crime.” Granted, the Neulander case is rather flashier than that of Adnan Syed, whose murder conviction Serial explored in its debut season. A local ne’er-do-well claimed that the rabbi had hired him to murder his wife, and the jury believed him Rabbi Neulander was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison, proving once again the old noir adage that crime never pays. Eventually, suspicion fell on her husband, Fred Neulander, a prominent rabbi who was having an affair with a local radio personality. Neulander was beaten to death in her New Jersey home. “I would argue that there is no other case in American history,” writes James, “which has so many fictional elements as does the murder of Carol Neulander.” In 1994 the affluent and upstanding Mrs. In his great book Popular Crime, Bill James argues that the true-crime cases most likely to attract significant media attention were those featuring the sorts of “fictional elements” best suited to a mystery novel: bold characters, intricate planning, prominent participants, layers of deception.
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