A former champion skier ‘driven to distraction’ visited multiple Australian museums – and walked out with hundreds of dead butterflies in his pockets

With his marriage on the rocks and fearing his wife was having an affair, ex-champion skier Colin Wyatt decided to cope the only way he could think of. He began stealing rare butterflies. What unfolded over the following months in the late 1940s would become a bizarre search spanning multiple museums and crossing international waters. It would also involve thousands upon thousands of tiny flying insects. Hundreds of ‘the best specimens’ taken from museums across Australia The first sign of trouble came in early 1947 — some 825 specimens of rare Australian butterflies had disappeared from the Melbourne Museum’s George…