Was the most spectacular art theft of recent years, the taking of Edward Munch’s The Scream (1893), a mere ploy? Apparently so, according to the Guardian. The dramatic daytime heist from Norway’s Munch Museum in 2004, we are now told, was intended to pull the police away from their investigation of another crime—not to cash in on the value of the symbolist masterpiece. The story sheds an interesting light on the peculiar world of art theft.

Munch painted two versions of The Scream, an icon of existential despair. The more familiar version, in Oslo’s National Gallery, was stolen in 1994. Although it was swiftly recovered, the audacity of the theft startled the relatively crime-free nation. It also showed, as the Guardian reveals, how easy it was to paralyze Norway’s law-enforcement apparatus. A decade later, an armed band assaulted a government bank in the port city of Stavanger, machine-gunning a police officer in the process. The furious criminal investigation that ensued seems to have alarmed the robbers, who decided to try art theft as a diversionary tactic. It was the timing of the two crimes, only four months apart, which suggested to police that they might be related and which led them, in the end, to both the painting and the killers.

As the fate of The Scream shows, the rewards of art theft tend to be paltry. Hollywood notwithstanding, art thieves tend to be hapless incompetents like those who stole Goya’s Children with a Cart from a van last November as it was being shipped from the Toledo Museum of Art to the Guggenheim in New York. The Goya was promptly recovered, apparently after its new owners realized that their “priceless” masterpiece had a considerably lower resale value.

Not all art theft is solved so briskly, of course. Caravaggio’s Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco, stolen in 1969 from an oratory in Palermo, remains missing, as do those works by Vermeer and Rembrandt stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. A comprehensive listing can be found on the FBI’s Art Theft Program. One of the sadder aspects of the theft of The Scream is that the painting was not treated as a valuable commodity. Having performed its diversionary function, it was wrapped in a wet blanket and forgotten until police retrieved it. The original figure, painted on fragile cardboard, appeared to be melting away in agony; now, alas he is.