The Sarasota Classic Car Museum in Sarasota, Florida is the second-oldest continuously operating car museum in the country after the Henry Ford Museum. One of the examples in its collection of roughly 150 cars is a brown 1977 Porsche 930 Turbo with the 3.0-liter flat-six that the museum values at $250,000. On the morning of June 14, that car was stolen.
The alleged thief is 36-year-old local Daniel Boyce, who set off the alarm at 3 a.m. while entering but didn’t leave signs giving away his entry. When police responded to the alarm, they couldn’t find anything amiss, and they couldn’t get in touch with an employee to have a look around, so they left. Five hours later, police were called back to the museum, this time finding a door had been pried open, a chain link fence cut, and employees saying the 930 Turbo was gone.
According to the report, Boyce moved seven other exhibit cars out of the way in order to extract the Porsche. He drove out thanks to gas in a can on-site and the keys sitting on the Porsche’s floorboard. Police were able to pull surveillance video of a man entering the museum while the alarm was going off, and they saw the Porsche down the road driving away two hours after the alarm.
Three days after the theft, an anonymous tipster told the museum that Boyce had stashed a brown Porsche Turbo at a warehouse. Police arrested Boyce on June 21 on an unrelated warrant for contempt of court in a grand theft auto case. A warrant to search Boyce’s phone resulted in pictures of the car, of a storage unit in Brandon, Florida 50 miles away, and the code to the unit. Voila, car recovered with work from three different police forces.
In the time Boyce had the 930, he’d created a raft of fake documents to get it titled and tagged. Starting with the VIN of a brown 1976 Porsche wrecked 23 years ago and owned by a California salvage yard, Boyce created a bill of sale from Maine, an odometer verification letter, and a fake letter from a real company called Triton Engineering, LLC attesting that Boyce could register the car in the company name. When detectives asked Boyce about the documents and registration for the 1976 Porsche, police said Boyce’s only response was, “I do not recall.”
After being charged with scheming to defraud, sounds like he’ll have time to jog his memory. Boyce is being held without bond at the Sarasota County Jail, his first arraignment hearing not scheduled until September 22. The police are asking anyone with info to call the Criminal Investigations Division at (941) 263-6070 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at )941) 366-TIPS or www.sarasotacrimestoppers.com
In May, New College Florida (NCF), which owns the land the museum is on, gave the museum six weeks to vacate the premises. When it became clear there was little chance a small non-profit classic car museum could find a new location and move 150 cars and 3,000 pieces of memorabilia in that time, NCF gave the institution a four-month extension to get rehoused. However, NCF took over a big chunk of museum space immediately, compelling the museum to rearrange its collection into the smaller space. The museum is appealing for donations to help with relocating. And we’ll bet there are no more keys on floorboards.
Source: www.autoblog.com