For Susan Brown, December 17, 2004, was a perfectly normal day—until she saw the elevator doors open. Brown, director of Transylvania University’s J. Douglas Gay Jr./Frances Carrick Thomas Library in Lexington, Kentucky, was walking past the staff elevator on the library’s main level when the doors parted and she reflexively glanced inside. That’s when her gaze locked, she says, not on the two young men standing there, but on what they held: “Great big red books that I knew probably shouldn’t be in the elevator.”
Those great big red books were four double-size, incalculably valuable folios of John James Audubon’s 1838 Birds of America. Fewer than 200 sets exist. Brown realized that one of them was probably being stolen from her library.
On the 20th anniversary of what became known as the Transy book heist, American Libraries looks back at one of the most brazen and puzzling thefts ever to take place in an academic library.
The heist unfolds
As Brown watched, one of the men jabbed at the elevator buttons, and the doors slid shut again. She rushed up the stairs to an upper floor in search of Special Collections Librarian and University Archivist Betty Jean “BJ” Gooch, thinking that her colleague might know what was happening. “That’s when I found her on her knees with her glasses knocked off, stricken,” Brown says. “She said, ‘They tied me up, and they took the Audubons!’ From there, the adrenaline kicked in.”
Yelling to her colleagues to call 911, Brown flew back down the stairs. An accidental elevator trip to the basement waylaid the robbers, and Brown made it to the main level of the library just as they were about to walk out with their cargo.
“I started screaming obscenities at them,” Brown remembers. “They look at me, look at the books, look at me, drop the books, and slam out the side door. In retrospect, it’s dumb, but I chased them. They jump in a van, and for a hot minute I stood behind the van, and then I went, ‘Okay, nobody’s making good decisions,’ and I stepped aside. They took off.”
Anger and unanswered questions
The Audubons were safe. But what Brown hadn’t noticed in the rush was that the robbers had been wearing backpacks. Those backpacks, as she would soon learn, contained more than $725,000 worth of books and manuscripts from the university’s collection, including an 1859 first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
As the adrenaline wore off and the police arrived, different emotions washed over Brown: concern for her traumatized colleague, of course, and also white-hot anger. “We were trying so hard to make our rare-books collection open and available to people,” she says. “And we got betrayed.”
In the months following the incident, as Brown and her colleagues worked with the Lexington Police and the FBI, the question on everyone’s mind was: Who were the robbers? Casual opportunists? Or professional criminals?
The robbers’ side
“The truth is, I was a disaffected teenager,” says Eric Borsuk, one of the robbers.
At the time of the robbery, Borsuk was a student at University of Kentucky (UK) in Lexington. Two childhood friends, fellow UK student Warren Lipka and Transy student Spencer Reinhard, recruited him to help steal the books. The idea for the robbery came to Reinhard while touring Transy’s library during freshman orientation.
“They take you in the special collections and show you these books,” including Audubon’s Birds of America, Reinhard told journalist John Falk for Vanity Fair in 2007. When he learned that a similar set recently sold for $12 million, “it immediately had kind of sparked my imagination, like a fantasy.”
Fantasy aside, 20 years after the robbery, it’s difficult to understand how a small group of college students decided to undertake such a difficult and dangerous crime. Though Borsuk and Lipka had a lucrative campus business making fake IDs for fellow students, neither they, Reinhard, nor Chas Allen (another UK student, later brought in as a getaway driver) were hardened criminals. “The whole thing started as a game, like playing cops and robbers as a kid,” Borsuk later wrote in his memoir American Animals (Turner Publishing Company, 2018).
Lipka, Reinhard, and Allen did not respond to interview requests from American Libraries. But Borsuk agreed to an email interview. About his motives for participating in the robbery, he says: “For me, more than anything, it was this all-pervading, cultural obsession with materialism and consumerism that drove me away toward a life of crime and self-destruction.… [In] no way is that meant to justify our actions. I was lost and thought that the crime would somehow lead to salvation or a better life, as odd as that may sound.”
‘I felt very violated’
After months of planning, the day of the heist arrived. Reinhard stationed himself as lookout at a window in an athletic center near the library, while Allen waited in the getaway van in the library parking lot. Lipka arrived at the rare book room for an appointment he had made with Gooch, the special collections librarian, through a Yahoo email address under the name “Walter Beckman.” Once there, he phoned Borsuk to join him.
Inside the rare book room with Gooch, Lipka used a Taser-like device called a stun pen to force her to the ground, and Borsuk bound her hands and feet. In his memoir, Borsuk describes Lipka reassuring Gooch that they were just there for the books and wouldn’t hurt her. Vanity Fair later quoted Gooch as remembering Lipka saying, “Quit struggling, BJ, or do you want to feel more pain?” (Through a Transy spokesperson, Gooch, now retired, declined to be interviewed for this article, stating that “what she has to say about it is out there” already.)
Borsuk and Lipka then stuffed smaller books and manuscripts in their backpacks before working together to carry the heavy Audubon set to the elevator. Despite Brown’s chase, the thieves escaped with nearly three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of rare books and manuscripts.
For Brown, the hours after the theft were a haze of action. “You don’t get training on this,” she says. While the Lexington Police and the FBI swung into gear, “I contacted the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association [of America] and started getting advice. I reached out to Interpol. I built a little website with images [of the stolen items] on it so that I could share that. At this point, I wasn’t sure if these were people who took the books because they have a buyer in mind. I was not convinced [law enforcement was] going to find these things.”
Meanwhile, Gooch—who had been so frightened during her ordeal that she’d feared having a heart attack—was understandably traumatized. As she told the Associated Press in 2018: “Because I’m here [in the library’s rare book room] alone so much, I’ve made it into a second home, so when these guys attacked me, it was like someone coming into my home and attacking me. I felt very violated.” She initially remained at work, but a few months after the incident, took a leave of absence.
“I didn’t immediately realize what she was going through,” Brown says of her colleague. “In retrospect, I would have checked in with her more. That’s the piece that I wish I had handled better. I think we tend to be more aware of the trauma people carry now than we were 20 years ago.”
The fatal mistake
The robbers took the stolen books and manuscripts to the auction house Christie’s in New York City for appraisal. And there they made the mistake that would lead to their capture: They gave the employee who met with them the same “Walter Beckman” email address Lipka had used to make the appointment with Gooch.
That meant that when the FBI subpoenaed “Walter Beckman’s” emails from Yahoo, they found messages to Christie’s. The Christie’s employee who had met with the robbers—and been so mistrustful of them that she hadn’t pursued the appraisal—turned over the contact information they’d given her, which included Reinhard’s actual phone number.
Less than two months after the robbery, Allen, Borsuk, Lipka, and Reinhard were arrested and the stolen items recovered undamaged. All four robbers confessed. All pled guilty to six federal charges, among them conspiracy to commit robbery, aiding and abetting the theft of objects of cultural heritage, and interstate transportation of stolen property.
“BJ Gooch’s ordeal had become a cause célèbre among librarians, many of whom wrote letters to the judge arguing against leniency,” wrote Falk in the Vanity Fair article about the case. In the end, Allen, Borsuk, Lipka, and Reinhard each received a sentence of seven years and three months in federal prison with no possibility of parole.
Taking responsibility
All served their sentences and were released in 2012. Allen’s LinkedIn page describes him as a filmmaker, producer, and screenwriter. Borsuk is now a writer and prison-reform advocate. Lipka earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in film from Temple University in Philadelphia and now, according to his social media pages, works as an electrician. Reinhard is a working artist.
In 2018, Borsuk published his account of the crime, American Animals; a companion film of the same name, written and directed by Bart Layton, came out the same year. In the film, the robbers and Gooch appear as themselves.
We were trying so hard to make our rare-books collection open and available to people. And we got betrayed. —Susan Brown, director of Transylvania University’s J. Douglas Gay Jr./Frances Carrick Thomas Library in Lexington, Kentucky
“We were glad that [Gooch] participated in the film and got to tell her story,” Borsuk says. “We’d hoped that, in a sense, the film could provide some sort of closure. Because we never got to speak with her, she couldn’t possibly have known the extent of our guilt and regret. I hope she knows that we’ve done everything within our power to take responsibility for our actions, pay our debt to society, and become our best possible selves.”
Gooch retired from Transylvania University in 2020, after 26 years. “Forgiveness is a work in progress. I have good days and bad days,” she told the Associated Press in 2018. “The bottom line is, I don’t bear [the robbers] any ill will. I really don’t anymore.”
Security and access
The effects of the robbery still linger at Transylvania University, according to Brown. “It changed the way we do security; I’m not sure I want to say how,” she says, not wanting to give potential thieves any ideas.
Beth Kilmarx, cochair of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) Security Committee, has worked in special collections since the 1980s. She was aware of the Transy heist when it happened and says it is atypical of the thefts she sees today.
“High-stakes thefts are largely being committed by professional thieves using sophisticated planning and technology,” Kilmarx says, noting that recent book heists in the US and Europe have been inside jobs or involved perpetrators forging paperwork, disappearing records, and making impeccable counterfeits to replace stolen materials. Many libraries and cultural heritage organizations are also reluctant to report thefts, she says, because they can reflect poorly on an institution or upset boards and donors.
While the RBMS Security Committee does not issue statements on specific thefts, the section provides guidelines on security, most recently updated in 2023, and hosts regular webinars on the topic. But try as a library might to prevent or prepare for thefts, when a high-profile incident rocks a community, collection access will come into question.
“We’re still trying to make sure that scholars have access, that our own students have access, but we’re doing a lot more through email and scanning materials when we can,” Brown says. “It’s not a closed collection. But it is a bit more limited than it used to be.
“One of the things I realized is that there are no winners here,” Brown continues. “Yes, we got the things back, but BJ was affected, and these people have affected their own lives and their families’ lives by doing this. And the echo of that all the way through their lives, BJ’s life, the life of the library—that’s going to ring for a long time.”
