In a bizarre twist, Harris turned out to be the estranged half-brother of Fulgear, the man who found the trophies by some bins, but detectives – after questioning Fulgear for hours and hooking him up to a polygraph – decided that this was pure coincidence, and there was no suspicious connection between the heist and the discovery.
On 18 March – the day before Fulgear found the trophies – police arrested truck driver Lawrence Edward Ledent and forklift operator Anthony Hart at their respective homes.
Arnold Schwarzenegger shook his hand, telling him, “Willie, you’re a born star!’” He even got a shout-out onstage from host Billy Crystal, with Fulgear waving his top hat to the crowd and Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman applauding the man of the hour.
A year later, Fulgear told Vanity Fair: “Man, I wish I’d never seen them Oscars.
Just six days earlier, on 13 March, Academy executive director Bruce Davis was en route to the annual nominees’ luncheon at the Beverly Hilton when he got the panicked call telling him that the statuettes were missing.
