The Deadhead Who Opened The Door To Biggest Art Heist In History

The largest art theft in history, 500 million dollars gone and still unsolved, had one witness nobody could ever explain: the Grateful Dead fan working the museum door.

At 1:24 in the morning on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the 23-year-old night watchman buzzed them in. His name was Rick Abath, a musician and a Deadhead with a ticket to that night’s Grateful Dead show in Hartford sitting in his pocket. Eighty-one minutes later the thieves walked out with thirteen works, a Vermeer, two Rembrandts including his only seascape, a Manet, works by Degas. Because Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will forbids anything in the museum from ever being moved, the empty frames still hang on the walls today.

Two things kept Abath a suspect for the rest of his life. The same Palace Road side door the thieves used had been opened and closed once about twenty minutes before he let them in, and only he could have done it. And in the room where the Manet hung, the motion sensors logged only one set of footsteps that night, his. He passed two polygraphs, was never charged, and died in February 2024 at 57 with the question still open. Drawing on Scott W. Allen’s “Were They Ever Here at All?” and WBUR’s Last Seen reporting, the argument here is smaller than who took the paintings: the ticket in Rick Abath’s pocket is both the reason he may have opened that door and the closest thing he ever had to an alibi. The band opened that night with Shakedown Street.