A thick layer of dust had settled on top of the frame. That was the detail Timothy Dertz couldn't ignore.
His tenant had just moved out of a Milwaukee apartment, leaving behind a print of a bullfighter hanging in a back bedroom, tucked behind a door. "A very odd placement for such a piece of art," Dertz told WISN-TV's Stephen Cohn. Odd enough that he called in an antique dealer to take a look.
What the two men found in the corner, written in green crayon, was a signature: Picasso.
The print was Torero, an etching of a bullfighter that Pablo Picasso made in 1949, drawing on a fascination that began when his father first took him to a bullfight in 1889. This particular impression had been missing since February 16, 2018, when someone walked into Milwaukee's DeLind Fine Art Appraisals in the middle of the day, lifted it off the wall, and walked out unnoticed by anyone, including the two men who owned the gallery.
Bill DeLind had seen the etching that same morning. His business partner, Michael Goforth, discovered it gone hours later. "I said, 'Bill, tell me the Picasso is out on approval,'" Goforth recalled to Fox6 News in 2018. "And the look he gave me was priceless."
The gallery, a small operation without working security cameras at the time, offered a reward that climbed from $5,000 to $10,000. Every year on the anniversary, DeLind and Goforth called the police, called the local news, kept the case alive by refusing to let it go quiet. Wisconsin's statute of limitations for theft is typically six years. The trail had gone cold well before that.
Dertz handed the print to the Milwaukee Police Department on August 5, reportedly after a sleepless night of pacing, worried about his own accidental entanglement in a crime he had nothing to do with. Officers called DeLind, who confirmed what the crayon signature had already suggested: it was the real Torero, valued between $35,000 and $50,000, and it had survived eight years of obscurity in near-perfect condition.
"I never expected to see it again," DeLind told the Washington Post. "The fact that it would turn up eight years later in perfect condition is just jaw-dropping."
Goforth died earlier this year and did not live to see the print recovered. Ownership now technically belongs to the insurance company that paid out on the loss, but DeLind hopes to hang Torero in the gallery again, if only for a few months, so it can return, however briefly, to the wall it vanished from.
