One panel of a 600-year-old altarpiece is still missing
A thief stole two panels from the Ghent Altarpiece in 1934, ransomed one back, then died with the other's location a secret.
The Ghent Altarpiece, finished around 1432 by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, has been stolen from more times than any other artwork on record — looted by revolutionary France, carried off by Germany in both World Wars, and once seized on Hitler's personal order and hidden in an Austrian salt mine.
The strangest theft happened in peacetime. On the night of April 10, 1934, someone removed two panels from the cathedral in Ghent with visible care, leaving the rest of the altarpiece untouched. A ransom note demanded one million Belgian francs. The Bishop of Ghent refused to pay. Letters kept arriving anyway, eleven in total over several months, negotiating with a government that argued the panel belonged to the nation, not the church.
In a gesture the thief apparently meant as good faith, one of the two stolen panels was returned. The second, known as The Just Judges, never was. That November, a Ghent stockbroker named Arsène Goedertier told his lawyer on his deathbed that he alone knew where it was hidden — and that he'd take the secret with him. He did.
The cathedral hung a copy in the empty panel's place. Investigators X-rayed the building to a depth of ten meters looking for it. A detective in Ghent is still, nominally, assigned to the case, nearly a century on.