How investigators used DNA to catch the Winston Churchill portrait thief

Details from court after an Ontario man pleads guilty to stealing famed portrait of former British Prime Minister. CTV’s Josh Marano reports

The northern Ontario man accused of stealing an iconic portrait of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier hotel has pleaded guilty.

Jeffrey Wood, 44, submitted his plea in an Ottawa courtroom Friday morning, more than three years after the photo disappeared from the hotel, and nearly one year since his arrest.

He pleaded guilty to three of six counts including theft over $5,000, trafficking in stolen property and knowingly committing forgery by making a false document.

According to the agreed statement of facts, Wood acted alone and planned the heist months in advance.

He began communicating with Sotheby’s auction house in London, England about auctioning the Roaring Lion print in the spring of 2021. He told Sotheby’s he acquired it from Yousuf Karsh’s estate, but that was false.

Wood ordered a fake copy of the portrait online and forged Karsch’s signature. Sotheby’s sold the portrait to a buyer in Italy, who did not know it was stolen.

Wood made a two-minute phone call to the Chateau Laurier on Dec. 24, 2021. Within days he stole the photo and replace it with a fake using duct tape.

In August 2022, a hotel worker noticed the frame was not hung properly and helped the hotel discover the portrait was fake. The hotel asked members of the public to share photos they’d taken at the hotel, which helped investigators narrow the timeline of the theft to be within a short period between late December 2021 and early January 2022.

Ottawa police pulled DNA from the duct tape, but found no matches in the national database.

Investigators, with the help of experts including those from Library and Archives Canada, deduced Karsh signed each of his portraits differently.

From there, they searched the internet to find similar portraits that were up for sale. Once determining it was sold to a man in Italy, investigators matched the signature of the forged copy with the original for a perfect match.

Police found Wood made a call to a storage facility on Dec. 27, 2022. They issued a search warrant and found a second Roaring Lion print he ordered online from the service RedBubble, as well as a toothbrush which matched Wood’s DNA from the duct tape.

Chateau Laurier manager Geneviève Dumas said in news conference she is happy to soon put this all behind her and the hotel.

“I am feeling relieved, a guilty plea, that’s what we wanted to hear,” Dumas told media on Friday. “We’ll look forward to the sentencing on April 14, but he agreed to all the charges that were against him, so, very happy about this.”

Wood received $4,503.85 for the stolen portrait after the auction house took its cut.

Wood explained to Justice Robert Wadden and the court that he committed the crime to help his struggling brother.

Wood’s lawyer Lawrence Greenspon told CTV News Ottawa that his brother was living on the streets of England and had wanted to bring him home to his family in North Bay.

Greenspon says Wood’s brother was found dead after he sold the print.

“This was not a crime of greed. It was a crime of love.” Greenspon stated.

Dumas says the hotel has spent at least $100,000 on improving security and alarm systems near its artworks to prevent something similar from happening in the future.

A sentencing date has been set for April 14, 2025.

With files from The Canadian Press