Stealing the Mystic Lamb

by Noah Charney

  Six days later, when word of Goedertier and the ransom notes had leaked to the press, Dr. de Cock was asked about his late friend by a journalist for the Flemish daily newspaper De Standaard. He said:[Goedertier] was a very eccentric man. Arsène Goedertier was no ordinary man. He had his own particular way of doing and thinking that was very peculiar. He certainly never seemed insane to me, but he would never have been accused of being a normal person. He dove into everything, doted on the most trivial of matters, to the point where we [his friends] sometimes had to separate ourselves from him, because he would go on ad nauseam if something interested him, explaining endlessly.

  An enigmatic way to describe one’s deceased friend, suggesting that even those close to Goedertier were at a loss.

  The only promising lead that seemed free of conspiratorial subterfuge came after the placement of Attorney de Heem’s placard. De Standaard published their first of many articles about the theft on 27 July 1935. The next day they published a second article, written by the paper’s editor in chief, Jan Boon. It referred to the placard hung in May and included the following:During the 3rd week in the month of June, therefore last month, the Judges panel would have been found, in particular circumstances still unknown today, in the left-hand portion of a public Ghent building. The panel was extracted in the presence of four people. We are making an appeal to the conscience of the witnesses there present, in order that they take all necessary steps for the Mystic Lamb to be reestablished in all its glory at the cathedral. In the happiness of this discovery, its return will make all forgotten and erased. If one persisted to drag things out, we would be forced to reveal all the names and facts to the public.

  It was a reverse blackmail. The newspaper threatened to reveal the names and facts about the theft, particularly the panel’s removal from a public hiding place, if the panel were not returned.

  But why wouldn’t the newspaper’s editor simply take his information to the police? Why not let the officials handle matters? Probably he lacked confidence that the officials would follow through appropriately, or he believed they were involved in the conspiracy. Or was it all a bluff?

  The published threat was never followed up. It may indeed have been one of many false leads that sprung up in the months, and years, after the theft. On another occasion, anonymous letters were sent to a variety of Belgian journalists, telling them to gather at the cathedral, where the hiding place of the Judges would be revealed—the anonymous host never showed up on the night prescribed.

  The police gave up officially in 1937. Their closure of the case included the following conclusions: 1. Goedertier stole the painting.

  2. Goedertier hid the “Righteous Judges” panel.

  3. Goedertier composed and sent the ransom notes.

  4. On his deathbed Goedertier tried to atone but died before he could relate sufficient information to recover the panel.

  5. Goedertier acted alone.

  In police files, the panel was—and still is—labeled “lost.” In art terms, lost means that the work may have been destroyed or damaged, or simply that its location is unknown. In police terms, it indicates that the authorities have given up trying.

  An array of theories, ranging from the plausible to the wildly conspiratorial, would come from a number of “weekend” detectives—amateurs fascinated by the case. In several instances such investigators were able to make progress where the suspiciously ineffectual official investigation fell short, often noticing glaring oversights missed, or overlooked, by the police. In the end, one theory, regarding a failed investment group, appears the most plausible in a case that is still unsolved and very much alive to the people of Belgium to this day. The various theories are worth examining, because even the most imaginative succeeded in advancing the case.

  The first conspiracy theorist regarding the Righteous Judges was the fantasy novelist Jean Ray (the pseudonym of John Flanders). In 1934, mere months after the theft took place, he noted an important clue, and yet another one overlooked by the police, either intentionally or through incompetence. Goedertier had rented the typewriter de Vos found at his home, the one that matched the type on the thirteen letters of ransom from D.U.A., under a false name: Arsène van Damme. He pointed out that the initials of this false name, A.V.D., when reversed, could look like D.U.A. Was it a real break in the case, or was Ray looking too hard for an answer that would fit?

  Journalist Patrick Bernauw was intrigued by the unsolved crime and began his own informal investigation in the 1990s. Bernauw suspected that Goedertier may have been the ransomer and mastermind but not the thief. He also found the manner and sudden nature of Goedertier’s death suspicious. Might Goedertier have been murdered? After the heart attack, Goedertier was lying prostrate on a couch at his brother-in-law’s house. Georges de Vos spent fifteen minutes alone with Goedertier, during which time he expired. The police did not conduct an autopsy as, at the time, a natural heart attack seemed the obvious cause of death.

  Bernauw thought that Goedertier may have been murdered, perhaps by de Vos or perhaps by two men whom Bernauw suspected had done the stealing on Goedertier’s behalf: Achiel de Swaef and Oscar Lievens. Both had been born in the town of Lede, as had Goedertier. Childhood friends, all three sported nearly identical moustaches and goatees; Bernauw likened them to the three Musketeers. De Swaef and Lievens died suddenly within a few years of Goedertier’s death, and both were suspected of having been German spies. No homicide inquiries were made into any of the deaths.

  Another weekend detective contemporary to Bernauw who wrote a book on the Judges theft, Maria de Roo, claimed that Lievens was the man with the pointy beard who returned the John the Baptist panel via the Brussels rail station luggage check. She argued that he was the only one who ever confessed to the theft—to a blind man from the town of Schellebelle, near Wetteren, shortly before he died. De Roo also said that Lievens died in his home outside of Schellebelle “with an egg in his left hand, the phone off the hook, and the walls spattered with blood. As cause of death, an ‘ulcer’ was listed.” The source of de Roo’s information is not stated.

  Bernauw noted two things Goedertier had said, which Goedertier’s wife recalled after the fact. These quotations were never considered by the police. If real, then they are indeed telling.

  Though Goedertier’s wife claimed that she had no idea whether her husband was guilty, she never denied that he might have been. According to her, he had made two comments that could have been relevant to the case:1. “If I had to go looking for the panel, I would look on the outside of Saint Bavo.”

  2. “What’s been displaced is not stolen.”

  It had been suggested that the panel was hidden somewhere in plain sight, in the Ghent city center, on the left-hand side of a prominent building. For the sake of convenience of theft, transport, and the return of the panel after a ransom payment, the panel may never have left the premises of Saint Bavo Cathedral. The Judges may have been removed from its frame and simply hidden elsewhere inside or outside the cathedral. This would explain why no trace of the panel was found in or around Goedertier’s home.

  The second quotation could explain Goedertier’s rationalization of the crime. He didn’t steal the panel. He simply displaced and hid it on the premises, where it was still on the property of its owner, the bishopric. This may be why Goedertier had sent away the priest Father Bornauw, saying that his “conscience was at peace.”

  Larger questions are raised, however, if the above hypotheses are a legitimate possibility.

  What was the motive for the theft? Even in the time of recession and with his company bankrupt, Goedertier had plenty of money. The ransom was for a sum insufficient to help a government or the king.

  Why the inept, laissez-faire police investigation, leaving a group of lawyers to run their own inquiry for a month before the police began theirs? The ransom negotiations were run in an acceptable manner, thanks largely to Attorney de Heem, but afterwards none of the leads was convincingly follo
wed up.

  Why the seeming lack of enthusiasm from the bishopric? Why the pressure from the government for the case to be settled, but no governmental offer of aid?

  Most importantly, where is the panel now? If it was hidden and then removed by those “four individuals” when no ransom was forthcoming, where was it taken and by whom?

  The mysteries of the theft of the Judges remain unsolved.

  Several of these points would be contested by a brilliant investigator, chief of the Ghent police from 1974 to 1991, Commissaire Karel Mortier. His dynamic investigation, which he undertook privately, as the case was officially closed, was the first to operate without the murk of conspiracy and ulterior motive.

  Commissaire Mortier, a man whose kindly face is offset by dramatic, inverted-V eyebrows that make him look forever in stern thought, pursued the case as a hobby, out of fascination. The tantalizing final letter, suggesting that the panel was hidden somewhere prominent, where no one could retrieve it without attracting public attention, was a lure too great to resist.

  Mortier studied the case from 1956 onwards but began his investigation full-time in 1974. His search for the lost panel led him to look for the case file of Heinrich Köhn, a Nazi art detective sent by Josef Goebbels to find the Judges as a gift for Adolf Hitler. The file was thought to have been lost, but Mortier found it in the possession of Köhn’s widow, back in Germany. The file indicated that it was the Nazi occultist and leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who most fervently spurred the Righteous Judges investigation. When Köhn failed to locate the stolen panel during the Second World War, he was punished by being sent to the Eastern Front. Yet even with Köhn’s file in hand, after years of pursuing a seemingly endless stream of false leads, Mortier finally gave up. He wrote four books about his investigations, the most recent in 2005. To date none are published in English translation. Although the mystery remained unsolved, Mortier reached some dangerous conclusions as to why this was so.

  He noted that only one justification could explain the slipshod police work, defiance of standard procedure, and roadblocks placed in the path of anyone else, himself included, who sought answers: There was a conspiracy to hide the truth.

  Commissaire Mortier gathered a dossier of convincing evidence. Potentially the most fruitful was an account taken down by police in 1947 but strangely ignored, perhaps because the case was officially closed or perhaps for the same reasons that the investigation was mishandled in the first place. It seems that there was an eyewitness to the theft, one who not only saw a light in the Vijd Chapel but saw two thieves and their get-away car—and recognized them.

  Caesar Aercus, a small-time crook from Dendermonde, Belgium, was arrested thirteen years after the Judges theft. In a plea-bargain attempt, he revealed what he saw on the night of 11 April 1934—an account that Mortier and others believe but that was oddly dismissed by police at the time.

  In the dead of that April night, Aercus claimed to have seen a black car loitering suspiciously along Kapittelstraat, the street that runs parallel to the nave of Saint Bavo. A portly man in a dark hat and overcoat waited beside the car, pacing nervously. Suddenly a second man emerged from the shadows of the cathedral with what Aercus described as “a plank” tucked under his arm—or at least something plank-like, as it was covered in a black sheet. It was 12:30 AM. The second man put the plank in the backseat of the car and climbed in the passenger’s side. The first man attempted to start the car, but it would only sputter and cough.

  It was then that Aercus, who had been lurking on the opposite side of Kapittelstraat, crossed the street and offered to help. He had, after all, some experience with cars and thought he could get the engine started. He also recognized at least one of the two men—the portly one who had been waiting by the car. Aercus referred to him, at first, as “Den Dikke,” which translates roughly as “the fatty.” Aercus’s offer of engine assistance was waved away, and the car finally grumbled into ignition. The two men and their black-shrouded plank drove off. Aercus was left to return to the activity that brought him to Kapittelstraat in the first place—he had been stealing cheese from the shop across the street.

  Aercus was the cheese thief whose activities were considered sufficiently diabolical that Chief of Police Patijn left the scene of the Righteous Judges theft in order to pursue him. When Aercus was finally arrested for another crime (he got away with the cheese theft, presumably by eating the incriminating evidence), he tried to amend his plea bargain, claiming not only that he recognized Den Dikke, as he had first stated, but later adding that he recognized the second man, as well. Now that Aercus was in jail, he tried to parlay his recognition of Den Dikke into a shorter sentence and identified him as one Polydor Priem, a Belgian smuggler who had lived in the United States and maintained criminal contacts there.

  Aercus’s recollection must be taken with a shovel full of salt: It was, after all, a plea bargain attempt, and the convict had incentive to provide useful information that would put him in a good position to negotiate. The word of a career thief like Aercus, whose professional and personal life was knotted with deceit and double-cross, might reflect grudges or opportunism.

  Even so, either this follow-up to the investigation was curiously ill-handled by the police, or their work was obstructed. Though the 10 June 1947 police document noted Den Dikke, who Aercus claimed was the mellifluously named Polydor Priem, it failed to note the name of the second man whom Aercus said that he’d recognized.

  It was only during Commissaire Mortier’s private inquiry that the full extent of the strange investigative procedures undertaken on all sides came to light. In addition to this key eyewitness account, which attests to the involvement of multiple thieves, Karel Mortier made the following discoveries about the Judges case:1. All of the files relating to the theft had disappeared from the city archives.

  2. All of the files relating to the theft had disappeared from the cathedral archives.

  3. Ghent ecclesiastical authorities obstructed journalistic attempts to revisit the case.

  4. Even the Nazi officer Oberleutnant Heinrich Köhn, with his persuasive interrogation methods and with the backing of Himmler and Goebbels, found no definitive leads when he tried to investigate the theft during the Second World War.

  5. The files on Köhn’s investigation disappeared from the city archives, though some aspects of them were uncovered by Mortier. He learned that it was Canon van den Gheyn who accompanied Köhn on his investigations. It was to Köhn that Goedertier’s widow spoke of her husband’s fascination with the Maurice LeBlanc character, the gentleman art thief Arsène Lupin, in particular with one of the novels in which he features, called The Hollow Needle. Köhn, as well as the four investigating magistrates, had been especially interested in the contents of Goedertier’s library.

  6. If the Goedertier family’s insistence that Goedertier only tried to ransom the panel to help a prominent Belgian in need were true, then perhaps the cover-up was an attempt to preserve the integrity of that prominent Belgian turned criminal?

  7. The police never even interviewed Goedertier’s lawyer, Georges de Vos, the most obvious person with whom to begin the investigation. Who’s to say that Goedertier’s melodramatic deathbed whispers to de Vos actually took place, with de Vos as the only witness? Mortier called the botched police investigation “a caricature.”

  8. No authorities seemed to have noted that Goedertier was a short, fat, physically weak man. It is highly unlikely that he could have lifted and carried the panel alone. Who else was there?

  9. No one had connected the fact that Goedertier suffered from an eye disease that made it difficult for him to see in low-light conditions. He could not have navigated sufficiently in a dark cathedral by himself, to avoid tripping over pews, much less steal a painting.

  10. On 9 February 1935 Goedertier’s brokerage office officially declared bankruptcy and closed. Before the building was cleared out, Goedertier’s brother, Valere, and his widow, Julienne Minne, searched i
t thoroughly, suspecting that the panel might be hidden there. They found nothing.

  11. The servant of Canon Gabriel van den Gheyn’s aunt was stealing art from the area around Ghent in the months leading up to the theft. Could he have been involved?

  Despite these key observations, Mortier could not solve the mystery. His best guess was that the Judges had been hidden somewhere behind the medieval wood paneling that runs throughout Saint Bavo Cathedral. In 1996, with a half million francs in funding from the Ministry of Culture, Mortier and a team of technicians began searching the inside of the cathedral with x-ray equipment. But after little more than a week, the tests yielded nothing, only a portion of the vast cathedral had been searched, and the funds were already running dry. The investigation was halted.

  Many of the theories that have risen from this crime sound far-fetched. But such is the nature of unsolved mysteries, the documents and files for which have disappeared. Bernauw, perhaps the widest-read scholar of the Judges mystery, believes that Goedertier and the two accomplices he named, de Swaef and Lievens, were acting as Nazi agents. Hitler came to power in 1933, mere months before the Judges was stolen. The Lamb was one of Hitler’s top targets in his sweeping theft of Europe’s finest artworks, as will be discussed in the next chapter.

  One of Hitler’s motivations was the desire to right the perceived wrong of the wing panels having been forcibly repatriated to Belgium from their display in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum through the Treaty of Versailles. Bernauw believes that there is a link between The Mystic Lamb and the famous relic of the Holy Blood that has been kept in van Eyck’s hometown, Bruges, since it was brought from the Holy Land by Thierry d’Alsace, the Count of Flanders, in 1149. Knights Templar are also depicted, Bernauw thinks, in the Knights of Christ panel of the altarpiece. There may have been, he suggests, an actual object or document hidden inside the physical panel on which van Eyck painted the Judges. Bernauw’s theory posits that Goedertier and the thieves were killed after they stole the panel and delivered it to a Nazi agent. Though the involvement of de Swaef and Lievens is far from certain, the possibility of Nazi murder is very real. Georges de Vos, the only man privy to Arsène Goedertier’s last words, died unexpectedly on 4 November 1942 in a Ghent cinema—shortly after speaking with the Nazi art detective Heinrich Köhn, telling him what he knew of the lost panel.