After a weekend theft, Anne-Catherine goes to work while Stéphane Breitwieser spends full days at libraries in Mulhouse, Strasbourg, and Basel. He mines reference works like Benezit and catalogues raisonnés, compiles provenance notes, and creates a dossier for each stolen piece with drawings and dimensions. His attic holds a growing personal art library exceeding five hundred volumes, and his studies range from iconography to weaponry, fueling both expertise and desire.

Following the theft of Petel’s ivory Adam and Eve, Breitwieser immerses himself in the sculptor’s life, tracing Petel’s independence, Rubens’s mentorship, and the piece’s history. This scholarship intensifies Breitwieser’s coveting and affirms his self-image as a connoisseur-thief.

The couple’s tempo quickens in 1995. At Spiez Castle in August, they take a sixteenth-century knight’s helmet and conceal a handblown hourglass inside it. They even hit two museums in one day. The narrative underscores small museums’ reliance on public trust and limited budgets, conditions that Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine exploit.

In September 1995 at the University of Basel museum, Breitwieser fixates on a Willem van Mieris apothecary scene under direct camera coverage. Noticing the video booth’s empty chair near lunchtime, he persuades Anne-Catherine to proceed. Keeping his back to the lens, he unhooks the painting, slides it out of frame, removes the frame, and, when the panels prove large, stuffs them into her paper shopping bag. They exit before the attendant’s break ends. The theft is discovered only after they leave; the recording shows merely the back of an unremarkable man—“Mr. Ordinary.”