The sensor log confirmed that the thieves spent a concentrated period in the Dutch Room, a shorter period in the Short Gallery, and that one of them went to the first floor for the Manet. It confirmed the 81-minute timeline. It helped investigators reconstruct the sequence of events in specific detail. But it could not close the case.
The technological limitations of 1990 are part of the context. Digital record-keeping, networked surveillance cameras with remote backups, high-resolution imaging that captures facial features—these were not features of a museum’s security system in 1990. The Gardner had what was standard for the era, and the thieves were sufficiently aware of what existed to take the videotapes with them.
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## The Myles Connor Dimension
Myles Connor is one of the more colorful figures in the peripheral history of the Gardner theft. He is not a suspect in the sense of someone investigators believe entered the museum on March 18, 1990—he was incarcerated at that time, providing him with an alibi of a particularly concrete kind. But his claimed knowledge of the theft’s origins, and his history with the Boston art theft world, made him a figure investigators could not ignore.
Connor was a musician turned prolific art thief who had, by 1990, stolen from multiple museums and private collections across New England. His crimes were not distinguished by violence—he was known as a nonviolent thief with a particular eye for valuable works. One of his earlier thefts had been a Rembrandt from a Boston museum, a crime that he later claimed inspired the criminal network around Robert Donati to understand the value of stealing Rembrandt.