TL;DR
The Star of India is a 563.35-carat greyish-blue star sapphire, mined in Sri Lanka and held by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. On October 29, 1964, three Miami beach boys swung through a fourth-floor museum window and stole it with 23 other gems, because the hall's alarms were dead and its windows had been left open. Recovered in January 1965 from a Miami bus locker, it now anchors the museum's Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals — a two-billion-year-old stone, starred on both sides, that survived America's most famous gem heist.
A star that is technically a flaw
Hold the Star of India under a single light and a sharp, six-rayed star floats across its domed surface — and glides as the stone moves. The effect is called asterism, and it is, in the American Museum of Natural History's cheerful phrase, technically a flaw: trace amounts of rutile, frozen inside the sapphire as microscopic needle-like fibres, reflect light into the star pattern. The same rutile gives the stone its milky, greyish-blue colour.
At 563.35 carats (112.67 grams), roughly the size of a golf ball, it is one of the largest star sapphires in the world, and the museum describes it as the largest gem-quality star sapphire known. It is also almost flawless, and unusually, the star appears on both sides of the stone. Sapphire is corundum — red corundum is ruby, every other colour sapphire — and a star stone is cut en cabochon, as a smooth dome, so light can play across the rutile silk. The stone itself is ancient: the museum dates it to about two billion years old, formed roughly when photosynthesis first began on Earth.
How a banker's collection brought it to New York
The Star of India reached New York through money, taste, and a world's fair. The financier J. P. Morgan commissioned the mineralogist and Tiffany gem expert George Frederick Kunz to assemble a gem collection for the Paris Exposition of 1900, and the Star of India was among the stones Kunz procured. Morgan then donated the collection to the American Museum of Natural History, where the sapphire became the centrepiece of the J. P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals. For more than six decades it sat there, admired by millions who had no reason to suspect how lightly it was guarded.
The night the surfers came through the window
On the night of October 29, 1964, Jack Roland Murphy and Allan Dale Kuhn, two self-styled Miami beach boys, crept onto the museum grounds while lookout Roger Frederick Clark circled the block in a white Cadillac. They scaled a fence, climbed a fire escape, tied a rope to a pillar above the gem hall's fourth-floor windows, and swung in through an open window.
Inside, a glasscutter and duct tape breached three display cases, and a squeegee gathered 24 gems: the Star of India, the orchid-red DeLong Star Ruby of 100.32 carats, considered the world's most perfect star ruby, and the purplish-blue Midnight Star, a 116-carat black sapphire. Fearing a silent alarm, the pair retraced their steps and escaped in separate getaway cabs. Murphy, a former surfing champion known as "Murph the Surf," later shrugged that they had just swung in and taken the stuff.
The reason it was so easy still stuns. The museum's director conceded security was "not good": the display-case alarm batteries had been dead for months, all 19 gem hall windows were left open two inches overnight for ventilation with no burglar alarms, and even the precaution of locking a guard into the gem room overnight had lapsed. The museum valued the haul at $410,000 — roughly $3 million today — and because insurance premiums were prohibitive, none of the gems were insured. The full, stranger-than-fiction account is told in Smithsonian Magazine's retelling of the heist.
A bus locker in Miami
The thieves' luck ran out within two days. An informant from a party the trio threw at the Cambridge House Hotel, a short walk from the museum, tipped off a plainclothes officer. Detectives searching the gang's $525-a-month suite found a museum floor plan and books about precious stones; Clark walked in mid-search and caved, and Murphy and Kuhn were arrested in Florida.
But the gems had been handed off before the arrests, and getting them back took a stranger chapter still. In January 1965, Kuhn, bargaining for leniency, was taken to Miami under guard. Days later, a tip delivered directions to a key for a locker at the Northeast Miami Trailways bus terminal. Inside were two water-logged suede pouches holding nine gems: the Star of India, the Midnight Star, five emeralds, and two aquamarines. On April 6, 1965, Kuhn, Murphy, and Clark each received three-year sentences at Rikers Island, and days later the Star of India went back on exhibit, in a thick glass case that pivoted each night into a black two-ton safe.
The DeLong Star Ruby took longer, and a ransom. That September, the insurance millionaire John D. MacArthur — the man behind the "genius grants" — negotiated privately with a Florida fence and paid $25,000 for the ruby, found in a telephone booth near Palm Beach. With its return, 10 of the 24 most valuable stolen gems were back in museum custody; the rest, including the Eagle Diamond, were never found. Murphy's story later turned far darker: in 1969 he was convicted of first-degree murder in Florida's "Whiskey Creek" case, though he won parole in 1986.
Why are star sapphires so expensive?
Part of the answer is written into the Star of India's story: stones of this size and quality are vanishingly rare. Gemologically, value comes down to four things: size, since large clean star sapphires are rare and value climbs steeply with weight; body colour, where a rich even blue beats a grey or overly dark stone; the star itself, which collectors want sharp, straight, well-centred, and steady as the stone moves; and origin — Sri Lankan sapphires carry a prestige of their own.
A note on superlatives: a larger star sapphire has since been found, the 1,404.49-carat Star of Adam, discovered in Sri Lanka in 2015. What keeps the Star of India in a class of its own is the combination — museum-grade size, near-flawless clarity, a star on both faces, and a story no other stone can claim.
Where to see it now
Today the Star of India is back where it belongs, anchoring the museum's redesigned Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, which reopened on June 12, 2021 with more than 5,000 specimens from 98 countries (see GIA's account of the renovated halls). The current display gives no hint of its tabloid past — just a greyish-blue dome, about two billion years old, with a star that appears, impossibly, on both sides. Sixty-two years after the night three surfers swung through a museum window, it remains what it was before they came: a flaw that became a marvel, guarded rather better than it once was.
If the Star of India has you looking at sapphires a little differently, that is the point of stones like this — they remind us that the most valuable thing in a gem is rarely just its weight. You can explore sapphires and other storied stones at Lumière Gems.