The Rembrandt Caper: They Didn’t Get Their Man

The saga of Arnold Austad, a 31-year-old Den-ton sculptor accused of stealing a Rembrandt etching from the Kimbell Museum in January, 1978, came to an appropriately bizarre conclusion last month, when a Fort Worth jury deadlocked 8 to 4 for conviction. Austad has maintained all along that the etching, “Landscape with Cottage and Haybarn,” was left in his car by a “weirdo hitchhiker” whom he’d driven to Denton. Kimbell director Richard F. Brown, who personally retrieved the etching from Austad’s house, testified that he had no reason to doubt Austad’s version of the events. Had Austad been acquitted, the museum was still prepared to pay him the $1000 reward it offered initially.

The most mysterious aspect of the trial was the appearance of the alleged hitchhiker, Richard Schott of Odessa. He was trotted into court, identified by Austad as the person who left the etching folded inside a Hustler magazine in Austad’s car, and then trotted out again. Neither side called him as a witness, presumably because no one was quite sure what would come out under cross-examination. In a deposition, Schott maintained that he didn’t steal the etching and that he wasn’t in Fort Worth on January 17, 1978, though there were apparently enough gray areas in his statements to make both prosecution and defense uneasy.

Faced with Brown’s testimony, Schott’s confusion, and a Byzantine chain of circumstantial evidence, the jury couldn’t reach a verdict. This probably satisfied the Kimbell, which was never eager to prosecute once it got the etching back, and left the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office in a quandary about whether to retry the case. Defense attorney Art Brender predicts that the case will hang a second time if it comes up. Paul Sorenson, one of the two prosecutors, says that the District Attorney’s office hasn’t decided what it will do, though he concedes that a new trial is a long shot.