On August 21, 1961, a mystery thief broke into London's National Gallery and made off with Francisco Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, a painting recently acquired by the British Government to the then-cool tune of 140,000 British pounds. Baffled authorities assumed the robbery to be the work of master criminals; little did they know the culprit was a 60-year-old pensioner from Newcastle by the name of Kempton Bunton. Or so he led everyone to believe.
It was a burglary so brazen that it captured the attention of a nation. A replica of the missing painting even showed up as a sight gag in the original James Bond film, 1962's Dr. No, at a time when detectives were so confounded that an arch supervillain may as well have been a plausible suspect.
