The Theft of the Just Judges

The case

On the morning of 11 April 1934 Ghent discovered a gap in the most famous painting in Belgium. The lower left wing of Jan and Hubert van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, finished in 1432, had been taken out of its frame during the night. The thief had removed the panel cleanly, without harming its neighbours, and tucked a note into the empty space in French: 'Taken from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.'

The panel was double-sided. Its front showed the Just Judges, a company of richly dressed riders approaching the Lamb; its back, seen when the altarpiece was closed, showed Saint John the Baptist painted in grey monochrome. The note was a deliberate jab. Several wings of the altarpiece had been sold to a Prussian collector in the nineteenth century, and the Treaty of Versailles had obliged Germany to return them in 1920 as reparation. Many Germans resented it, and the message seemed designed to point suspicion their way.

About three weeks later the Bishop of Ghent received the first of a series of anonymous letters signed 'D.U.A.', demanding one million Belgian francs. The government, which considered the painting a national treasure, refused to pay the full sum, but negotiations dragged on into October, with at least eleven letters passing between the extortionist and the authorities. To show good faith, the writer told the authorities how to collect a parcel from the left-luggage office at Brussels-North station. It held the Saint John the Baptist grisaille, the reverse half of the stolen panel. The Just Judges stayed hidden. At one stage a priest in Antwerp was used as a go-between and a part payment of 25,000 francs was handed over, but the talks broke down.

On 25 November 1934 Arsène Goedertier, a 57-year-old stockbroker from Wetteren and a former church sacristan, suffered a heart attack in Dendermonde. As he lay dying he told his lawyer that he alone knew where the Mystic Lamb was, and that the papers were in a drawer of his desk. He died before he could say more. In the desk the lawyer found carbon copies of the D.U.A. letters and an unsent final letter saying the panel was hidden where neither the writer nor anyone else could remove it without attracting public attention. The lawyer did not tell the police for about a month.

The investigators concluded that Goedertier was the extortionist and very probably the thief. No one was ever charged. Many writers have doubted that he could have done it alone. He was a small, middle-aged man who was said to see badly in the dark, and lifting a heavy oak panel down from a high altarpiece in an unlit cathedral and getting it out unseen looks like a job for more than one person, perhaps with help from inside the building. Who those helpers might have been has never been established.

The search has never really stopped. The cathedral has been X-rayed, walls and tombs have been opened, a car park floor in Ghent was dug up in 2008 on a tip, and amateur sleuths have pointed to dozens of hiding places, many of them based on readings of Goedertier's letters and sketches. The panel has not been found, and some believe it was destroyed long ago. In its place hangs a copy made by the restorer Jef Van der Veken, who gave one of the riders the face of King Leopold III so that no one would ever mistake it for the original.