George Vanderbilt’s massive Biltmore House, with its hidden corridors and storied history, provides the perfect backdrop for a mystery. The Cecil family (Vanderbilt descendants who continue to own the castle) had no idea, however, that the filming of the movie “The Private Eyes” on the estate in 1980—and starring Don Knotts and Tim Conway—would lead them searching for clues in a real-life whodunit.
The movie was a Sherlock spoof, with Biltmore House posing as an English country mansion. Meanwhile, what could have been called “The Case of the Disappearing Books” was shaping up in real life. While touring the family library, said to hold more than 25,000 volumes, an estate employee offered to show Conway a 1756 edition of Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language,” but it was nowhere to be found.
Estate managers frantically called the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department when they discovered that the two-volume set, valued at $7,500, was missing. The loss didn’t stop there. They inventoried the library and detailed a list of 234 missing items, including an $80,000 portfolio of Goya etchings; a 1797 copy of “The Book of Common Prayer;” Edmund Spenser’s “The Fairie Queen;” volumes by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm, and other items.
Local authorities called in the FBI, and agents said they believed the case to be “one of the largest of its kind in the United States.” As they questioned estate employees, they quickly keyed in on one person as a prime suspect. Robert Livingston Matters (also known as Rustem Levni Turkseven) had been working at Biltmore for about a year and a half as a night watchman. He also had another career, a job that raised the red flags for investigators. Matters owned the Plane Tree Book Store, an antique bookbinding shop, located at 12½ Wall Street in downtown Asheville. The Harvard grad ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts of interstate transportation of books, photographic plates and etchings and received a sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The judge admonished him during sentencing: “Your good education should have taught you what you did here was wrong. There is a price tag attached to violating the law.”
FBI agents engaged the help of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of Austin to help track down the pilfered books. They recovered items in book stores in New York City and Los Angeles and located others in Europe, London and Canada. The 60 works initially recovered were valued at $300,000, but as William A.V. Cecil, owner of the Biltmore House, said in a January 1981 article in the Asheville Citizen-Times, the works were priceless because “they’d be impossible to replace.” According to the book “Lady on the Hill,” it took more than two years to track down all 234 stolen volumes.
