A former champion skier 'driven to distraction' visited multiple Australian museums — and walked out with hundreds of dead butterflies in his pockets - ABC News
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A former champion skier 'driven to distraction' visited multiple Australian museums — and walked out with hundreds of dead butterflies in his pockets
With his marriage on the rocks and fearing his wife was having an affair, ex-champion skier Colin Wyatt decided to cope the only way he could think of.
He began stealing rare butterflies.
What unfolded over the following months in the late 1940s would become a bizarre search spanning multiple museums and crossing international waters.
It would also involve thousands upon thousands of tiny flying insects.
Hundreds of 'the best specimens' taken from museums across Australia
The first sign of trouble came in early 1947 — some 825 specimens of rare Australian butterflies had disappeared from the Melbourne Museum's George Lyell collection.
When Melbourne raised the alarm, other museums checked their own collections.
Adelaide Museum had found a door open several weeks earlier. When they checked, more than 600 specimens were missing.
A further 1,500 butterflies were taken from the Sydney Museum.
Many of them had been kept in cases in a small room not usually accessible to the general public.
The way they were stored made it difficult to easily notice one or two missing from a case.
"Only the best specimens" had been taken, according to media at the time, suggesting the thief had more than a passing knowledge of the creatures they were taking.
Suspicion fell on an entomologist who had approached museum staff on multiple occasions.
He had recently left Australia and returned to England, where he was originally from, taking with him multiple packages of "scientific specimens" in December 1946.
Australian police contacted Scotland Yard for assistance, along with officials at the British Museum.
Ultimately, their inquiries led them to a home in Farnham, Surrey, almost 60 kilometres from London.
A warning from the UK: 'Do not trust Entomologist'
The man who answered the door to Scotland Yard detectives was 38-year-old Colin Wyatt — a former skiing champion and Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) member.
He had been born in 1909 and hadn't been sent away to boarding school.
His lawyer would later tell a court this made him a "shy and delicate child" who was encouraged to take up collecting butterflies at eight years old.
He went on to represent Britain at the 1931 World Ski Championships, at the same time reportedly learning "seven languages, or so", before moving to Australia in 1939.
He married then-21-year-old Mary Barrett, and "for the first time found happiness" three months before his arrival in New South Wales, according to reports during his trial.
Security service documents from mid-August 1942 labelled him a person "on scrutiny".
At the time, he was working for the army's camouflage department.
"Wyatt, who claims to be, among many other things, an entomologist, 'is believed to have stolen some type [of] specimens from the British Museum, although there was not enough evidence to prosecute him'," military documents said.
"The Chief Entomologist [at the British Museum] sent a cable in the following terms: 'Do not trust Entomologist'.
"[The letter] did not suggest whether collector's mania or another motive was behind the suspected theft."
The letter sparked concerns — could Wyatt, working for the military's camouflage section, be trusted with confidential information?
"It is not suggested that the alleged incident at the British Museum brands Wyatt as a Fifth Columnist [traitor]," the document read.
"But it will be recalled that other matters … go to show that he is an individual whom one cannot state unequivocally to be free of reasonable suspicion."
Their concerns about his loyalty were settled shortly after, but there did not appear to be any concerns he might repeat the alleged museum theft.
There were other problems brewing.
As war continued, Wyatt's marriage became rocky. In late 1946 a judge ordered his wife to return to the family home "within 21 days".
"No trouble occurred between [Wyatt] and himself until early this year," wrote the Daily Telegraph.
"[This was] when he asked her not to go about so much with a Royal Navy visitor (who is not in Australia now, having left for Hong Kong).
"'My wife said,' he told the judge, 'that she thought she would go away … In the early stages, she said she wanted to sort things out. She has never come back.'"
The stress of his crumbling relationship, his lawyer would later tell the court, prompted him to return to his old hobby of collecting butterflies.
"He thought that his wife was doing what she ought not to have done, and that the war had broken up his marriage," the lawyer said.
"He therefore plunged back into the collecting of butterflies with redoubled fervour."
Collector 'did not care what happened' after stealing butterflies
He had gone to each of the museums and removed the butterflies "in a series of visits", he told the court.
"I am afraid my state of mind was such that I did not care what happened," he said.
"I took butterflies from the cases … and placed them in tins. Each tin would contain approximately 50 to 100 butterflies."
In Sydney, he approached the museum directly, offering to revise a copy of a book on butterflies written by the original collector.
This method got him access to the private rooms.
In Melbourne, he used a similar method to access the museum's butterfly cabinets during a weekend visit to the city.
At the Adelaide Museum, it was estimated it would have taken him several hours to select and take each specimen from its case.
Staff later told media they did not know when he had gained access and had no record of him visiting the collection.
They speculated Wyatt had hidden in the building and been locked in for the night.
When police searched the collection, they also found a single butterfly labelled "Brisbane Museum", along with others taken from a collection in Canberra.
"It used to keep my mind occupied in the evenings, arranging and classifying them," Wyatt said.
The fake locations and swapped labels on rare specimens
Ultimately, Wyatt would not be extradited back to Australia over the thefts.
He was fined 100 pounds, equal to 8,536.97 pounds ($16,425.66) in today's currency.
The real issue, officials said, came from his habit of rearranging and reclassifying the labels on the specimens, some of which were incredibly rare.
He had "removed, rewritten, altered or transposed the labels", wrote the Sydney Morning Herald.
"Normally, each label gives the locality where the specimen was caught, the date of its capture, and the collector's name.
"The real dates of some of the stolen specimens went back 30 years or more.
"Wyatt altered dates [and] on some labels altered the locality to read 'Iron Range, North Queensland' — a district which the entomologists have not been able to find on any maps.
"He also removed the collector's name in many cases, substituting his own name or the initials 'JB' or the name 'G Purcell'.
"The most harmful of his changes was to remove or transpose the labels on many 'type' specimens. A 'type' is the first specimen of a species to be collected, and is the one upon which the scientific description of that species is based."
Three entomologists — one from Adelaide, one from Sydney and one from Melbourne — were later forced to meet in a nine-day-long effort to sort through them.
"It will take years before the full extent of this confusion is known, and it may never be completely cleared up," the Sydney Museum staffer told media in September 1947.
Wyatt continued collecting butterflies throughout his life, going on to write multiple books and articles on travel and other topics.
He died in a plane crash over Guatemala in 1975.
At the time of his death his butterfly collection, according to author Otaka Kudrna, numbered more than 90,000.
"He was a lonely man, with only a few friends amongst many of his acquaintances," Kudrna wrote.
"I found him a nice and friendly person, in his own way, during the last years of his life, when we met on many occasions at irregular intervals.
"The very unkind stories spread about him by those who never forgive sins of other people, probably because they think that they never sin themselves, were — so far as I am aware — exaggerated and partly untrue."
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