Retired grandmother Elaine Traverse in Heart’s Delight, N.L., near where she found the stolen statue of Amelia Earhart.Greg Locke/The Globe and Mail
Police led Elaine Traverse into an interrogation room inside the RCMP detachment in the small Newfoundland town of Harbour Grace last August. Did she want to speak to a lawyer? They asked.
“Why would I need to speak to a lawyer?” she recalled saying. “I did nothing wrong.”
But police, and eventually the whole town, thought she did.
Over the next few hours, Ms. Traverse, 67, realized no one saw her as the hero who stumbled upon the town’s stolen statue of famed aviator Amelia Earhart. Crying in the police station, she realized she was the prime suspect.
The small fishing town of Harbour Grace is tucked into a nook on the expansive Conception Bay, one of the easternmost points in North America. It’s a destination for history and aviation buffs, the place where Ms. Earhart launched the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman, on May 20, 1932.
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The connection to Ms. Earhart is a source of pride in the town. Stories resound of how she set off in her red Lockheed Vega with a Thermos of beef-and-vegetable soup gifted by a local hotelier. The Conception Bay museum has a room dedicated to her. And in the park, a monument overlooks the airfield where she flew into the sunset almost a century ago – or at least it did.
The bronze statue, designed by Saskatchewan’s Lorne Rostotski and sculpted by Bulgarian-Canadian Luben Boykov, vanished last spring in the middle of the night. The brazen theft of something considered so sacred and erected with much fanfare in 2007 outraged locals, and reverberated across the Avalon Peninsula and beyond.
“Who would do such a thing?” posted the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots that Ms. Earhart founded. “We can only hope the thieves are caught before this meaningful piece of history is lost forever.”
The motive, many surmised, was cash. But unfortunately for the thieves, the composition of the metal in the statue is almost like a fingerprint, sculptor Morgan MacDonald said. Scrapyards were told to be on the lookout for the unusual alloy.
The town pleaded for the public’s help. It took at least three thieves to steal the 300-kilogram, seven-foot statue – security footage from a nearby convenience store showed a red SUV picking up two people at the Spirit of Harbour Grace Municipal Park at 2:45 a.m. on April 24.
“Sad what the skeets get up to these days,” one man wrote on the town’s social-media post, using Newfoundland slang for a petty criminal.
Months passed and rumours were spun: it was thrown in the sea, it had been taken to the U.S.
And if it weren’t for Ms. Traverse, the whereabouts of the statue might have remained a mystery, like Ms. Earhart herself, who vanished somewhere in the Pacific during a bid to circumnavigate the globe in 1937.
The retired grandmother was driving home to Heart’s Delight, about a 40-minute trip from Harbour Grace, with a load of groceries last August, when she turned down a familiar dirt road to let her dog Mya out for a run.
Free to roam, Mya barked at something in the trees. Ms. Traverse peered in and spied something brown. Is it a body? she recalled thinking.
She drove home and collected her son, David Traverse, who soon waded into the trees.
“Mother, that’s the statue,” she recalled him saying.
By this time, the stolen statue had been all over the news, including the fact that there was a reward out for information leading to its return – $25,000 pledged by anonymous donors and local businesses.
“Oh my god, Dave, what are we going to do?” Ms. Traverse recalled saying.
Police and then mayor of Harbour Grace Don Coombs with the statue after it was found.Supplied
Several days later, after some inquiries about the reward, she led Mounties down the dirt road to the statue. It lay in pieces, with the head severed, the torso cut, both legs and the left arm sawed off.
Police took the pieces back to the station where they laid them out on a picnic table, posing triumphantly alongside then-mayor Don Coombs.
But police were skeptical. Inside the station, an officer peppered Ms. Traverse with questions for hours. Police brought up her son, who had recently faced a raft of criminal charges, including theft.
“I said, ‘My son was in jail, how could he do it?’”
Unconvinced, police hooked Ms. Traverse and her son up to polygraph tests, which she said they passed. But it didn’t seem to matter. Many in the town had made up their minds. The prevailing theory was that Ms. Traverse had orchestrated the theft to claim the reward.
“I have not had anything to do with the theft of this statue,” said Ms. Traverse. “I’m disabled. I can’t even lift a 15 pound bag of potatoes. So how am I going to lift the statue?”
Ms. Traverse said she saw nasty comments from people online, calling her a thief. In public, people stopped greeting her and averted their eyes. She no longer felt welcome on her community’s recreation committee. Feeling ostracized, she moved to another town an hour-and-a-half away.
“I’ve been put through the ringer, to put it politely,” she said. “The people in my community have turned against me.”
As for the statue, the pieces were soon in the hands of sculptor Morgan MacDonald at the Newfoundland Bronze Foundry. He spent months welding it back together and reinforcing it with a stainless steel skeleton.
Sculptor Morgan MacDonald works on the statue at his bronze foundry in Logy Bay, N.L., in December.Greg Locke/The Globe and Mail
Mr. MacDonald said it was fortunate that he’d apprenticed with the original artist, Mr. Boykov, so he knew how to disguise the new weld marks, a delicate and meticulous process of applying chemicals and heat.
“There’s probably a handful of people that could’ve recreated that colour or been familiar with the process,” he said.
The town, elated to get the statue back, is planning a rededication ceremony in May. Already, town officials say national and international aviators’ groups, including the Ninety-Nines, plan to be there.
Newfoundland sculptor Morgan MacDonald is in the business of immortalizing heroes
“We’re going to have a major party, that’s the best way to celebrate her coming back,” Harbour Grace town councillor Christina Hearn said.
Ms. Traverse, meanwhile, didn’t get the reward, which she says is disappointing because of the social price she’s already paid. But Ms. Hearn said the reward was always contingent on the return of the statue and information that led to an arrest. So far that hasn’t happened.
In a recent statement, RCMP Corporal Jesse O’Donaghey wrote, “the identity of the person or persons responsible for the theft remains unknown.” Police continue to investigate.