The Feather Thief

Johnson describes Edwin’s sentencing day. His crimes carried a maximum sentence of around 10 years. The prosecutor knew about Edwin’s Asperger’s diagnosis. However, he believed that Edwin understood the consequences of his theft. In fact, the prosecutor argued that greed and money motivated Edwin to steal the bird skins.

He supported this argument with over two dozen pieces of evidence, including the Word document titled “PLAN FOR MUSEUM INVASION” (142). The prosecutor also read a report from one of the museum officials which detailed how the crime resulted in a loss of scientific knowledge. He hoped that this report would underscore the severity of Edwin’s actions to the judge. Given the amount of evidence, the prosecutor felt confident with his argument and did not believe the diagnosis would sway the judge. Based on precedents from other British case laws, especially the case of Crown v. Gibson, however, the judge did not sentence Edwin to prison.

Johnson begins to shine a light on the lack of justice for the Tring bird skins. He starts by noting that Edwin was able to graduate. Moreover, he also had an audition with an orchestra in Germany. Edwin also only had to pay a fraction of the value of the stolen skins. Police seemed uninterested in pursuing charges against any other individuals that Edwin had named during Adele’s interrogation.

Many fly-tiers who had purchased specimens from Edwin were considering bringing personal lawsuits against him. The reason being that these fly-tiers returned their specimens to the museum. Edwin’s father helped facilitate these returns. He hoped that doing so would lessen the severity of Edwin’s sentence. Edwin’s father promised to compensate fly-tiers for their loss. He only fulfilled this promise with a few of the fly-tiers.

While life was good for Edwin, the same could not be said for the Tring bird skins. Johnson notes:

There were still a lot of birds missing, though. Of the 299 stolen, only 102 intact birds had been recovered with their labels attached. Seventy-two more had been seized from Edwin’s apartment without any labels, and another nineteen skins—all missing their tags—had been mailed to the museum by customers who were either named by Edwin or were compelled by conscience to return them. And while the curators at the Tring had numerous Ziploc bags with individual feathers, 106 birds were still missing (152).

These statistics reinforce Johnson’s belief that justice had not been served. As he goes on to document, Johnson spent the next six years trying to get justice by finding the missing skins.