Wow! eBook
The Butterfly Thief: Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia’s Greatest Museum Heist
Author(s): Walter Marsh (Author)
- Publisher: Scribe US
- Publication Date: November 18, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 368 pages
- ISBN-10: 1964992206
- ISBN-13: 9781964992204
Book Description
A scientific true-crime caper stretching across the globe, The Butterfly Thief pieces together the bizarre story of one of the largest, most systematic, and baffling museum heists in the records of natural history.
In January 1947, a chance discovery rocks the world of natural science―over 3,000 rare and precious butterfly specimens have vanished from the most prestigious natural history museums in Australia. Alarmingly, the missing insects include many priceless “holotypes”: the first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared.
New Scotland Yard and a team of entomologists are tasked to catch the culprit, and the person they suspect turns out to be a fascinating, larger-than-life figure―British ex-soldier, former champion skier, painter, semi-professional yodeller, and amateur lepidopterologist Colin Wyatt.
But who was this man, and how did he pull off such an ambitious string of burglaries? What did he serve to gain from amassing a vast illicit collection of specimens? What was the root of his obsession, and was he really a criminal, marked for life by his thefts, or a gifted and imaginative collector?
A delightful puzzlebox of a mystery drawing from unpublished dossiers, case files, and on-the-ground reporting, The Butterfly Thief unfolds this captivating tale of stolen specimens in rich, spellbinding detail.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“In his intricate new book, The Butterfly Thief, the Australian journalist Walter Marsh offers up a delicious premise: the robbery of 3,000 priceless butterflies from museums in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.”
―Sam Kean, New York Times
“This fascinating tale of conquest, colonialism, and collecting kept me riveted from the first page to the last. Walter Marsh is a compelling and gifted storyteller, but it is his ability to reveal the intricate connections between a singularly weird and wonderful butterfly heist and the wider crimes of the West that makes The Butterfly Thief truly extraordinary.”
―Hannah Kent, author of Always Home, Always Homesick
“Walter Marsh’s true crime caper The Butterfly Thief pieces together several mid-century museum thefts that shook Australia’s leading natural history institutions … The book’s scope is broad … [with] vivid details … Compelling.”
―Foreword Reviews
“The Butterfly Thief is the most delicate of books that, like its insect namesake, unfurls its brilliance slowly and then all at once. Walter Marsh has given us his ‘lepidopteran Sherlock Holmes’ book in all its delightful eccentricity. This is a work filled with artefacts, curios, and the ephemera of human striving, teased out with the sharp eye of a writer, if not a collector. Marsh has a wry attention to detail that thrills, and deploys it to wonderful effect here.”
―Rick Morton, author of Mean Streak and One Hundred Years of Dirt
“In The Butterfly Thief, Walter Marsh follows the trail of Colin Wyatt, a mysterious 20th-century collector who becomes a lightning rod for the tangled legacies of empire, science, and obsession. With wit and wonder, Marsh turns one man’s improbable life story into a fascinating reflection on how history is gathered, shaped, and stolen.”
―Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole
The Butterfly Thief tells a story stranger than fiction … As Marsh describes in this fascinating, impressively researched and at times dismaying book … all the trouble caused by Colin Wyatt’s meddling with Australian butterflies.”
―Simon Caterson, The Australian
About the Author
Walter Marsh is a journalist and editor based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, and the author of Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire (Scribe 2023). A former staff writer and editor at The Adelaide Review and Rip It Up, his writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The Age, and InDaily.