The Butterfly Thief: Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia's Greatest Museum Heist

In a scientific true-crime caper stretching around the globe, The Butterfly Thief pieces together the bizarre story of a string of audacious twentieth-century burglaries at Australia's biggest museums, and their decades-long impact on the world of science.

In January 1947, a chance discovery rocked the world of natural science: over 3,000 rare and precious specimens of butterflies had vanished from Australia's most prestigious museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Alarmingly, the missing insects included many priceless 'holotypes'--the first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared.

On the other side of the world, New Scotland Yard detectives and entomologists from the British Natural History Museum descended on a house in Surrey, England, where they found a haul of over 40,000 butterfly specimens. The culprit was a British ex-soldier, former champion skier, painter, semi-professional yodeller, and amateur lepidopterologist named Colin Wyatt.

Years later, after Wyatt's interrogation and trial, the return of the butterflies to Australia, Wyatt's re-emergence as a writer and adventurer, and his death in a 1975 plane crash, the very institutions that rejected him clamoured to acquire his vast illicit collection.

Drawing on unpublished dossiers, case files, and on-the-ground reporting, The Butterfly Thief features a fascinating array of characters--including Nazi spies, spiritualists, and scoutmasters--and poses contemporary questions about colonialism and theft currently facing museums around the world.