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Three weeks ago, while I was in Louisville, Ky, for the St James Court Art Fair, in the week preceding the show, my van was robbed and 3/4 of my beaded jewelry was stolen. I didn't realize it had happened because I wasn't using the van for driving around (I was there also to visit my son and granddaughter who live in that city) and didn't even notice it until I started out that fateful Thursday morning to go set up for the show.

Well, you can believe that I was devastated, in shock, thinking that somehow I had just misplaced everything and that it was somewhere else in the van than I remembered. I didn't actually start to cry until I got to the show, and after having torn open every box, told the show organizers that I had to withdraw from the show and blubbered out what had happened. The loss represented over 2000 hours of work and about a $30,000 loss.

I spent the rest of that day talking to the police, composing a flyer to hand out (like a lost cat), and going to local pawn shops with the few pieces that I had left to show them my work and ask for cooperation. Eventually, one nice lady at a pawn shop told me to not bother with pawn shops anymore as my work was beaded and beautiful, but they only bought precious metal and gemstone jewelry. My husband, back in Los Angeles, had contacted the local paper and written a press release for them. They then posted that on their blog and that connection became vital to the proceedings.

The next day, starting day of the show, I was armed with 200 flyers and went to the show, handing them out to every jewelry vendor at that show, thinking that they would be the most likely candidates to be approached if someone was trying to sell my work en masse. It's a huge show, 750 vendors, and I was happy to have an excuse to go and see ALL the booths. Just a side note: it is a real mix of the good, the bad and the also-rans. It was a fine day and I had a mission.

Talking to the other vendors was great therapy; they were wonderfully receptive and sympathetic and helped to ease my shocked nerves. Mid-day, I got a call from the local news channel asking for an interview which would air on the evening news. They had read the blog site for the paper! I drove to the TV station and did the interview; it went pretty well. Next day, I canvassed my son's neighborhood, a cute shopping/eating section of Louisville called The Highlands, posting and handing out my flyers to likely store owners and inside cafes. Many of those to whom I spoke knew about what happened from the newspaper and the TV news! I was amazed. I got a wonderful flow of support from them all and everyone promised to watch for my work if it surfaced.

Connie Mettler posted my sad story on this site and I got many emails from fellow artists with warm wishes, prayers for a good outcome and offers of help. The Louisville show organizer wrote to me to tell me she was refunding my booth rent amount in full with an open invitation to participate next year, should I decide to come back. CERF+ contacted me offering assistance in the form of a grant or loan to get me back to battery. The police even called me a few days later to see how I was doing and find out if I had any leads for them, which I didn't.

So, even though the situation was bad, I was bombarded with good thoughts, warm wishes and positive energy as well as actually help and advice.

Then something incredible happened.

This morning the Louisville police called me to say that they had recently been given a tip that someone had been seen entering/living in a vacant house near to where my son Cassidy lives. They went there to check it out and caught the fellow who had been squatting there, hiding up in the attic. A look-about showed them piles of stolen goods that this fellow had stashed, including my jewelry! It was all there, plus much more!

The officer looking over the confiscated goods saw that my jewelry was unusual in nature and so took one container-ful over to a little shop in the Highlands area, Edenside Gallery, 1422 Bardstown Road, Louisville, to get an opinion from the owner, Nancy, as she was known to this officer to be an expert on hand-made crafts and unusual jewelry.

She recognized my work instantly because she was one to whom I had spoken and handed out my flyer when I was canvassing that neighborhood after the theft. Nancy pulled out my flyer, showed the officer and together, they called me with the good news. It was only a few hours later, after some paperwork with me to finish up the business,
that all the jewelry was released to Cassidy and he is shipping it home to me tomorrow!
What a success story!

Oh, happy day!

Kathleen Caid

Long time member Kathleen Caid, a jeweler from California, had her entire stock of jewelry stolen from her van before the St. James Court Art Show opened today.

More info: http://www.courier-journal.com/story/louisville-arts-bureau/2014/10/02/theft-keeps-artists-out-of-st-james-court-art-fair/16603711/

A friend asked that I post this. This is a great story of how you just can't keep a good guy (or woman) down. What started out bad finished with a happy ending. Plus, this story will alert you to why you need to always be aware of your surroundings, why you need to have a good inventory, and why a guardian angel can be very helpful.

Ok Everybody – have I got a story for you!  And if you have never believed in miracles before, I don’t see how you couldn’t change your mind after reading this. 

My husband makes beautiful, high-end gold jewelry.  Last weekend, we did the show at Lincoln Center in NYC and on Saturday night, after the show when we were getting out of our van at our hotel in New Jersey, 4 guys wearing masks jumped my husband, threw him facedown to the ground, held him down, and yanked the backpack of jewelry off his shoulder and jumped into the car they had pulled up right behind our van. I screamed and grabbed the door handle on the driver’s side, but he just gunned the car and took off, and left me lying on the pavement.  And there we were, stunned and devastated, our entire livelihood ripped from us in less than 15 seconds.

Of course the police came and we filled out a report, then spent a sleepless night just clinging to each other, too numb to even talk.  We still had about 12 pair of earrings and 5 bracelets which I had been holding in a separate bag so they didn’t get, and we actually opened the next day because I didn’t think we would be allowed to tear down early. 

Word spread throughout the show and the other artists were very sympathetic and even took up a collection of about $400 and we were touched and blessed by that. We had decided to be as positive as possible and were thankful that we hadn’t been shot, and I kept believing for a supernatural recovery, because I knew that’s exactly what any recovery would have to be.  Our whole church was praying for the same thing.

And guess what – IT HAPPENED!!!!!!!!   The following day, Monday, we were in the airport getting ready to fly home, when I get a phone call from a police officer in SOUTH CAROLINA, and in a nutshell, they had pulled over a car going down I-95, for some “irregular driving behavior”, and opened the trunk and there they found a pillowcase filled with a bunch of gold jewelry.  They confiscated it and tried to figure out who it belonged to – they didn’t know anything about the police report filed in New Jersey. 

My husband stamps the inside of his rings with his first name, but it’s extremely difficult to read because it’s so small – you really have to use a magnifying glass and even then sometimes it is illegible.  But they figured it out and googled him on line and FOUND HIM, and that’s when they called me at the airport!!!!!!! 

The stolen loot after it was recovered

Of course I was screaming hysterically with happiness in the middle of the airport. The officer said he wasn’t sure how long we would have to wait to go get it because of paperwork and whatnot but then he called a couple days later and said they were releasing it!  So we dropped everything, jumped in the car and drove till midnight to get there, and after spending most of the following day in the police station inventorying everything --- WE GOT EVERYTHING BACK EXCEPT THREE PIECES!!!!!!!!!

Not only that, there are more layers to this miracle.  Out of their entire police force of 127, those two officers are the only ones  on a special team called an “interdiction” force, and they are trained NOT to be just regular traffic policemen, but to specifically look for certain driving behaviors and other things they couldn’t tell me that alert them to thieves and drug runners and stuff like that, and THOSE two officers happened to be at the right place at the right time when these guys went zipping by on I-95 at 5:00 that Monday morning, and they pulled the car over for a “slightly irregular lane change”.  The Good Guys

One more layer – those officers were scheduled to work that evening from noon until 7:30, but they said they just had a feeling they would catch more bad guys in the early morning, so they came in to work at 4 a.m. instead.  Unbelievable.

And also, another little part of the miracle and a lesson to all of us about keeping a good inventory system:  up until about 3 weeks before this happened, our “inventory” system was a big unorganized MESS, but because we had gone about 2 months without doing shows, we had just gone through and taken pictures of every single piece and organized them into folders of Pendants, Rings, etc., and had made a new notebook where we wrote everything about each piece and its price.  That notebook was actually in the back pack that they ditched after they dumped everything into the pillowcase, BUT, we had made a copy!!!!  And with that in hand, we were able to identify all of our pieces to the police!!!!

When you think about the odds of us recovering that jewelry, especially in the way it was recovered, they would be astronomical – it truly is a miracle.

The Happy Reunion with the Recovered Loot

A few after notes:

- We donated the $400 that was collected for us at the show to C.E.R.F., and told them the story as well.

 -  We learned that the bad guys were part of a Columbian gang working with the drug cartel, and they were heading to Miami when the officers stopped them on I-95 that morning. 

The police made them open their luggage, and there they found the masks they used when they jumped my husband, one of those tools that are used to open a car by going in through the window, and – get this ---- they also found a GPS tracking device that they had used to track us!!  In other words, they had put some little device on our van, and with that GPS tracker that they had, they knew where we were even without physically following us. Very scary.

- And scariest of all – these guys are not in jail!!!  From what I understand, even though they had enough grounds to apprehend the jewelry, the police had to let the guys drive away because they claimed that they had bought the jewelry all in a big clump from a jeweler and though the police knew they were lying, since they didn’t actually have a victim at the time, and the guys said they would send a receipt (riiiiiight……), by law they had to let them go!!!!!  And even though now they have a victim (us), nobody has arrested them because they don’t know exactly where they are and the information I have is that “the investigation is still going on and they are looking.”  Isn’t that terrible???  I just hate it when the law protects the bad guys more than us!!!