Ten years after the most baffling art theft of all time, there are still empty spaces on the walls where paintings once hung at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. They are melancholy reminders of the museum's darkest hour - 2 a.m. on March 18, 1990. This is a tough one. But hope springs eternal.
Artworks stolen long ago sometimes do turn up.
A Cezanne still life, snatched from a Massachusetts family in 1978, was recovered in 1999. And in November, three paintings taken from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in 1978 were left anonymously at a New York gallery. The artworks weren't insured for theft because the museum believed it would be too expensive. After the heist, theories abounded about who pulled it off. Some speculated it was ordered by an unscrupulous collector.