Gardner Museum Heist Reports

Have We Heard The Last From Gardner Heist Security Guard Rick Abath?

It was over a year ago when reports first surfaced that Gardner Museum security guard and Gardner heist robbery suspect Rick Abath had died on February 23, 2024.

Abath, the man who admitted to opening the outside door to the museum and allowing the thieves to pass through a security checkpoint called "the man trap" and into the museum after hours, had largely stayed out of the public spotlight in Gardner heist news coverage for nearly a decade.

Although Abath remained an active Facebook and Twitter user in his later years, frequently posting about national politics and his favorite rock bands, the Gardner heist eyewitness—who had previously given interviews about the case with CNN, NPR, and Stephen Kurkjian of The Boston Globe—remained silent about the crime that came to define his life. From the release of the Gardner heist eve surveillance video in 2015 until his death last year, he refrained from making public statements about the case.

The last time Abath posted on his Facebook page was in August 2023, six months before his death. His final post was a new cover photo—one that did not include him. Interestingly, this post was made on August 9, 2023, the 28th anniversary of Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia's death.

News reports stated that Abath had died after a long illness. Was his last Facebook post a subtle acknowledgment that he, too, was soon heading to that great big Dead Show in the sky?

A well-known aspect of Gardner heist lore was Abath’s deep connection to the Grateful Dead and classic rock. You might say it was his brand.

"I was just this hippie guy," he told NPR in 2015. He was, after all, the security guard who wore a tie-dye T-shirt beneath his unbuttoned, untucked uniform the night of the robbery.

Abath claimed he complied—perhaps too readily—with orders from the thieves dressed as police officers because he had tickets to a Grateful Dead show in Hartford, Connecticut, that very night. He didn’t want to risk doing anything that might land him in jail.

Over the years, Abath had attended numerous Grateful Dead concerts. He had even followed the band while they were on tour, according to fellow security guard Marj Galas in an interview. But the Berklee School of Music dropout wasn’t willing to risk missing another show—actually, two more shows, as the Grateful Dead were playing the following night as well at the Hartford Civic Center. Abath had tickets to both concerts. Despite calling the Gardner heist "the most traumatic event of my life" 25 years later, Abath said that he still managed to attend both shows.

His final Facebook post did not feature his likeness but instead depicted an amusement park ride called “Himalaya.” A staple of amusement parks like Six Flags and traveling carnivals since the 1970s, the ride is a cross between a roller coaster and a carousel. In some parks, it even features loud rock music as it spins around, like a vinyl 45 record.

Jerry Garcia, in a way, had a connection to the Himalayas as well. Fifteen years after his death, the Jerry Garcia Foundation released a compilation CD, Annapurna’s Song: Music of the Himalayas. One track, “Clouds,” by Indian musician Sanjay Mishra, featured Garcia on guitar. Recorded in 1994, it was one of the last in-studio efforts of Garcia’s legendary career. The CD cover featured a watercolor painting by Garcia himself, called Himalayan Landscape.

What a long, strange trip it was for Rick Abath. But is he truly finished? Have we heard the last from him? Or is there something still waiting to surface posthumously, like some of Garcia’s Himalaya-themed has done after his death?

Abath had long tinkered with writing a book about his Gardner heist experiences. Calling his book Pandora's Laughter, Abath shared some pages with reporters and later with the public on Facebook.

As in his interviews, Abath continued to insist in his written recollections that he “had absolutely nothing to do with the robbers or the robbery” and that he had been duped into letting them inside the museum.

For its part, the FBI was unequivocal in supporting Abath’s claim, particularly after he stopped making public statements about the Gardner heist after 2015.

In June 2023, a segment of the podcast Inside the FBI began with the statement: “In March 1990, art thieves conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum…”

They "conned their way” in, officialdom declares. Abath was tricked, they suggest.

Later in the podcast, the FBI’s Geoff Kelly, who headed up the Gardner heist investigation for 23 years said: “On March 18th of 1990 right after St. Patrick's Day festivities were winding down in Boston, subjects posing as Boston police officers rang the night bell for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, claiming they were responding to a disturbance.”

It sounds plausible, but that is just not what Rick Abath told the Boston Police officers, the first time he told his story, when they interviewed him the morning after the robbery. According to the official Boston Police report written by Patrol Officer Trent Holland:

The victim [Abath] states that “after gaining entry the suspects told the victim they were responding to a call for the kids outside the museum.”

And there were indeed “kids outside the museum,” shortly before the thieves entered the building. A small group of teenagers lingered on the sidewalk near an apartment building on Palace Road for a short before driving off. Two of those teenagers, when they heard about the Gardner heist went to the Boston Police Station in Dudley Square (recently renamed Nubian Square), and presented themselves as eyewitnesses. But neither was ever interviewed by the FBI, they both said.

One of the witnesses, Justin Stratman, said on the 2020 Netflix documentary, This Is A Robbery, “We're goofing around, we'd had a couple of beers, and I noticed that this car has its running lights on.”

The other witness, who came forward, Nancy Clougherty, said: “I asked my friend Justin, I was like ‘Hey, can you give me a piggyback ride?’ I jumped on his back, and we started walking down the street [Palace Road near the museum].”

The teenagers were located in an area on the street, just south of the Museum, a spot that was not covered by the Museum’s outdoor security camera. So the “kids on the street” would not have been visible to the guards on the video monitor inside the security station, and it is unlikely they would have been aware of their presence on the street.

But the FBI’s, Geoff Kelly, and the FBI's surrogates in the media, have gone along with Abath’s revised version of what happened that night. As Abath told CNN: “They said, Boston police, we got a report of disturbance on the premises. So I buzzed them in.”

Interesting how the official narrative drops the "on the premises" part of Abath's updated story. There was a disturbance, somewhere. This version does not contradict either of Abath's stories. But it doesn't change the fact that Abath said he discussed the "disturbance," after they came in, not before they came in.

In his final interview about the Gardner Heist case in March of 2015, Abath makes no mention of what the cops said by way of explanation for wanting to come inside the Museum. He just said: "That night two cops rang the doorbell. They had hats, badges. They looked like cops, and I let them in."

Somewhere along the line, Abath’s updated uncorroborated claims not only went unchallenged, they became a staple of the official narrative.

Geoff Kelly in 2005, and 2023, and Richard DesLauriers in 2013, as well as Amore in 2017 all said the thieves claimed they were “responding to a disturbance,” while leaving out the “on the premises” part, ducking the location of the disturbance, which is one part of Abath’s story that he changed.

In Abath’s first interview in 2005 Boston Globe reporter Stephen Kurkjian quoted him as saying: “Speaking through the intercom at the museum’s side entrance, the men told him there had been a ‘disturbance on the grounds’ of the museum, and that they had to investigate.”

But in Kurjian’s book, following the FBI’s lead he wrote, “'Police,' one of the two men said, turning to look at the closed circuit television that hung over the door embellished with dialogue he has the fake cops saying "We’re here about the disturbance.”

Funny thing was, once the thieves were inside, and before they asked Abath to step out from behind the desk and away from the only alarm connecting the museum to the police station, the fake cops were not acting like police responding to a disturbance, they were acting like thieves according to Abath's own account.

Kaye: Rick says he had no doubt it really was the Boston police at the entrance.
Abath: "They were standing there in their pants and coats and badges and they looked like policemen, buzzed them into the museum.
And one of them came right over to my desk. And one of them kind of stood in the alcove right there, just looking around, which didn't seem particularly odd to me," although it was in fact very odd for a policeman responding to a disturbance. Then Abath said: "And he came up to me, the one guy, and they asked me -- he asked me if I was alone. And I said that, no, my partner in was off doing a round. He said, get him down here. So, I called him on the radio.

In this CNN interview he claimed the fake-police claimed they were there because of a disturbance on the premises. But once when they came in, they didn't do anything about responding to any disturbance. By Abath's own account, one of them just stood in the alcove 'looking around.'
Kaye: "Within seconds, Rick's partner joined him at the security desk. "Within seconds." The Boston police report says the other guard Randy Hestand said it was ten seconds. You have this guard fifteen minutes into his rounds of the galleries, of this four story building, and Abath coincidentally contacted him, when he is only ten seconds away.

What a lucky turn of events for the criminals. Since the guard is only ten seconds away, and not on the third floor as Stephen Kurkjian falsely claimed on CNN's How It Really Happened, there was no point in Hestand asking why Abath wanted him back at the security station. By the time he gets an answer, he could be in the security station. With Hestand being so close when he is contacted by Abath the thieves were better assured of the element of surprise, and they could know the precise moment when Hestand should be showing up.

But how could they know?

In interview footage that appeared in an episode of CNN's How It Really Happened, Abath can be heard saying "There were motion detectors and so while one person was walking through the museum they would be setting off motion detector alarms.

Abath and the thieves could know where in the museum Hestand was, and where he was heading, and could time the request for him to return to the security station to the most advantageous time for subduing Hestand without a struggle.

Hestand told the Boston Police that "after about twenty minutes into his round, he was "just walking down the rear stairs to [the] first floor at that time, Rick called him on the radio saying, 'Randy will you please come to the desk?' Ten seconds later, Hestand arrived and saw two men wearing police uniforms."

So Abath and the thieves had the capability to track the other guard Hestand's movement through the motion sensor readout, and would have been able to hear him on the stairs, particularly if someone was standing by listening for his arrival.

Next "the cop that was dealing with me turned to me and said, 'don't I know you? Don't I recognize you? I think there's a warrant out for your arrest. Can you step out from behind the desk?'" Abath told CNN.

In his first interview Kurkjian said that Abath " remembers thinking the officers might have been pursuing an intruder who had scaled the museum’s 7 1/2-foot iron fence."

Well if they were there about an intruder, or a disturbance, they sure did not give any indication of that to in the minutes he spoke with the thieves prior to stepping away from the panic button, by his own admittance.

The fact that Abath changed his story in fundamental ways and in other cases makes no sense, not only calls into question whether he was actually tricked by the thieves at all, it also calls into question why the FBI presents Abath’s account as an established fact, despite the inconsistencies in his telling of it.

“I totally get it. I understand how suspicious it all is," Abath said in 2013. The FBI’s public pronouncements and actions on the case with respect to Abath would seem to indicate that unlike Abath, they don't seem to grasp "how suspicious it all is," But more likely, since FBI said in 2013 that they know who the Gardner heist thieves are but will not name them, that one of the thieves the FBI will not name is Rick Abath.

We can only hope that there will be more information from Abath that he was reluctant to reveal during his lifetime.

Abath’s wife has a Doctorate in Education and is an “author” according to her LinkedIn profile. Although I could find no book by her, perhaps her book is yet to be completed or published. Perhaps Diana Abath will bring some badly needed sunlight onto the murky Gardner heist story.

Until a day comes when there more information about Rick Abath's involvement comes to light. the FBI will have little or nothing to say about him. Their surrogates in the media will try to cover up details about Abath’s evident role, as much as possible, without looking completely ridiculous. If they say anything at all about him.

In the news story about Abath’s passing in the Boston Globe, Robert Fisher, a former assistant US attorney, who oversaw the Gardner investigation from 2010 to 2016, (and who is now a defense attorney at Nixon Peabody, defending rich clients in the same federal court where he was once a prosecutor) said that “as one of only two eyewitnesses inside the Gardner museum at the time of the robbery, Abath was ‘a valuable resource’ for investigators who frequently reached out to him with questions while reviewing the case, he described Abath as ‘a cooperative guy.’”

Valuable resource? Fisher himself challenged Abath’s explanation for why he opened the outside door of the museum’s service entrance twenty minutes before he claims he was tricked into letting the thieves inside. “I don’t recall when I did it but it was something I did regular. To test the alarm, Abath can be heard saying in the Episode 2 of the podcast “Last Seen. “We’d pop the door open, you know, and let it close,”

But Fiser said in the Netflix Documentary This Is a Robbery that, “to date, I've never seen what a guard opening the outside door looked like on video. I was never able to find it on the previous six days.” The previous six days would have included at least one day, the night before the robbery, that Abath definitely worked since the FBI released a video showing him working that night.

Jon-Paul Kroger, a museum security supervisor, who trained Abath “insists that the computer printout was checked every day by security supervisors and that if Abath had been opening the side door on a routine basis, the supervisors would have quickly detected it as a security breach and stopped it.”

Offering explanations that Abath’s supervisor described as “making no sense,” and are contradicted by video a taped record, is only “valuable” in the sense of giving cause for greater suspicion and scrutiny of him.

Cooperative? In 2009 the Museum’s security director Anthony Amore suggested Abath was not cooperative. “The Herald reviewed documents indicating that the lightly trained 23-year-old watchman left a trail of procedural violations and puzzling behavior before, during and after the crime,” Tom Mashberg reported in 2009, adding “he is a pivotal witness in the world’s greatest art theft, and has declined to assist in the investigation numerous times during the past 19 years. Asked if he was frustrated by Richard A.’s lack of recent cooperation, Amore said, ‘Well, he’s a key witness to a monumental crime.’”

"We can't know if Abath was involved as an inside man on the Gardner heist," declared Gardner heist, media surrogate Kelly Horan, whom Isabella Steward Gardner would have personally detested and who was the lead reporter and producer of the error filled and deliberately misleading by her own admission, WBUR and Boston Globe podcast Last Seen about the heist.

If we have the will, we certainly can know if Rick Abath was involved, But a Rick Abath tell-all would ease and hasten the process of the public finally learning key elements of the truth about the Gardner Museum heist.

Will it happen? I believe that it will.

By Kerry Joyce

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