Looted

Based on the accounts of several Mexican nationals, including a man who worked with the archaeologist at Teotihuacan for more than 30 years, Millon believes the murals were trucked to the Panama Canal Zone and shipped to the United States. He says former workers at Teotihuacan told him in 1964 that stolen materials from the then-largely unprotected archaeological site were being spirited to a secret warehouse near the ruins and offered for sale on the black market. He suspects that's where Wagner encountered them.

At the time, the Mexican government was working feverishly to complete a major excavation of Teotihuacan's so-called Avenue of the Dead, the road and plaza linking its two largest pyramids, dedicated to the sun and moon. Mexico's then-president, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, wanted the work completed before the end of his six-year term that year and government trucks hauled huge amounts of dirt day and night, Millon says. "If you ask how 3,400 pounds of antiquities could just disappear, the answer, I'm afraid, is very easily."

The ruins at Teotihuacan.

Harald Wagner as a young man, with one of his paintings.

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By the next year at the latest, according to Georgia Dunlavy's recollection, the murals were spread out inside Wagner's Jackson Square home. There, they remained out of sight and under the radar of the pre-Columbian art world for more than a decade.

If nothing else, Wagner knew how to keep a secret.