Collections: Three short case studies that involve collecting and criminal intent

Ten years ago I read a newspaper account of a grisly murder on the Gunnison River, near the town of Delta, Colorado. Two men, homeless drifters who made their home at a river camp, got into a fight one night in a drunken dispute over clothing and money. One man bludgeoned the other to death with a burning log from a campfire. When the dead man’s friends reported him missing, sheriff’s deputies descended on the camp and found the killer still there, though the body was gone. They arrested the man based on evidence collected in the camp.

Here, according to local newspaper reports, is what deputies found: a cold campfire ring; trace drops of blood in the dirt around the fire ring; tree branches and leaves smeared with blood around the camp; a charred piece of human pelvic bone tossed in the bushes; burnt finger bones in the fire ring. The dead man’s head, charred to the skull, was found a few hundred feet downriver, floating along the riverbank. A search of the killer’s backpack turned up the dead man’s clothes. Faced with the evidence, the killer confessed. As far as I know, the tool used to cut up the body was never found.

The murder was sad and cheap and did not interest me, though the evidence list caught my attention. Virtually every critical item of evidence came from the natural world: blood, bone, dirt, plant material, clothing, and the crime scene itself, a clearing among cottonwood trees on a river.

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Eight years ago, Miles Harvey, a writer and former editor at Outside Magazine, published The Island of Lost Maps, a book about a professional thief who specialized in stealing old maps. The thief’s method involved a simple straight razor and an envelope or large book to hide the purloined map as he made his escape. Harvey’s book works as a detective story and exploration of the world of a compulsive collector.

A key scene in the last third of the book is Harvey’s description of the island of lost maps: “Just a mound of plastic bags, file folders, a zip-up art portfolio, and a U-Haul moving box, sitting in the middle of a vast conference table at the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia.” This was the loot agents had so far recovered in while tracking the thief across the country, in and out of museums, government archives and university libraries.

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Last week, on January 29, I picked up The New York Times and read about another thief, Daniel D. Lorello, an employee of the New York State Archives in the state capital, Albany, who collected and organized rare books and papers of historic value. Lorello’s crime was that he got caught selling archival documents on EBay. In fact, he confessed he’d been doing it for years, de-collecting if you will, the contents of the archives he helped manage over a 29-year career.

The document that brought him down was a letter by John C. Calhoun, a pro-slavery politician who in 1823 wrote a letter to the governor of New York State asking him to support Calhoun’s run for president against John Quincy Adams. Someone spotted the letter for sale on EBay and recognized it as the property of the state archives. State authorities successfully bid on the letter on EBay for $1,802.77 before police arrested Lorello. In his written confession, he wrote, “I estimate that I’ve taken more than 300 or 400 items in 2007 alone.”

John Quincy Adams went on to become the sixth president of the United States. Calhoun became vice president. Daniel Lorello, we assume, will spend a long time in jail.