Robert Donati did not live to be questioned at length by federal investigators. He was found stabbed to death in September 1991—seventeen months after the theft. His murder remains unsolved.
The deaths of suspects who might have provided leads became a recurring feature of the Gardner investigation. Donati was the first. Others followed.
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## Reissfelder, DiMuzio, and the Question of Who Entered the Museum
In 2015, the FBI named two individuals as the primary suspects who had actually entered the museum on the night of the theft: George Reissfelder and Leonard “Lenny” DiMuzio. Both men were dead by the time they were publicly named.
Reissfelder died in 1991, the same year as Donati, of what was ruled a drug overdose—though retired FBI agent Kelly has described the circumstances as suspicious. DiMuzio also died in 1991.
The evidence connecting Reissfelder and DiMuzio to the theft included, most notably, details about the getaway car. Investigators concluded that a vehicle registered to or associated with Reissfelder was the car used in the theft—the same Dodge Daytona that a witness had observed parked near the museum’s entrance in the period before the theft. Reissfelder’s brother later told investigators that he had recognized *Chez Tortoni*, the Manet, as a painting that had hung above Reissfelder’s bed in the time after the Gardner theft.
The identification of the two dead men as the likely perpetrators resolved one question—who physically entered the museum—while leaving several others entirely open. Reissfelder and DiMuzio, if they were the thieves, did not act alone. Someone had provided a plan, a target, and presumably a mechanism for moving and ultimately profiting from the stolen works. And the works themselves had gone somewhere after the thieves died.