Crystal ball's trek has been long, strange

Kim Beckles' friends tease her about being a witch. The 29-year-old Trenton, N.J., woman is an avid believer in the occult and even owns a black cat. And until Tuesday, Beckles had her own crystal ball. But three days before Halloween, agents from the Federal Bureau of Inevstigation came to her house and seized the ball. Beckles received the 55-pound crystal ball just over two years ago as a birthday gift from a man whose house she cleaned. Her employer knew she had an interest in mysticism and the supernatural, so the ball seemed to be a natural gift for her. It was only on Tuesday that Beckles learned the piece she kept in her bedroom is valued at about $400,000, is the second-largest flawless crystal in the world, and was stolen from the University Museum on November 11, 1988. The FBI, University Police and Philadelphia Police worked together to trace down the 19th century crystal once owned by the Dowager Empress of China, which was swiped from the museum's Chinese Rotunda along with a 2000-year-old bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. Beckles, who insisted yesterday that she is not a witch, seemed convinced that the crystal was special, and not simply a large glass ball. Several things happened to Beckles during the period she owned the crystal, which in retrospect, she said seem weird and even a little eerie. On September 22, 1989, the day she received the gift from Lawrence Stametz, a 34-year-old West Mount Airy resident, the 10-inch ball burned Beckles with light reflected through her living room window as she was speaking on the phone. Though she was on her way out the door and usually lets the answering machine pick up her calls when she is busy, Beckles stopped for the call. She also sat on the floor of her living room, something she said she never does, and the concentrated light hit her just enough to burn. "If I had left it there, it might have burnt my house down," Beckles said. So she covered it to prevent a fire and then enlisted her husband's help moving the 55-pound crystal to their bedroom. "Maybe it was trying to tell me something," Beckles pondered yesterday. The crystal's supposed message did not become clear until this week when a strange trail of luck led University Museum researcher Jeanny Camby to a store called South Street Garage Sale, just across the Schuylkill River from the museum. On the tail end of her lunch break last Thursday, Camby wandered into the shop at 2427 South Street. Camby said she looked around a little and then saw the Osiris statue which was stolen at the same time as the crystal. As a former curator of an Egyptian exhibit, she "knew it was real and very good." But just to be certain, Camby went back to the museum and urged two other workers to come confirm her finding. "I was afraid I had lost my mind," Camby said yesterday. "I thought this was too incredible." The museum's registrar brought documentation, and the owners of the shop, Bruce Sumerfield and Rich McFall, turned over the 2000-year-old statue, which is estimated to be worth $30,000. Sumerfield said although he is "conversant with early things" he thought the statue was only old, not ancient. "Because it was mounted with a modern machine screwmount I though it was tourist trade stuff," Sumerfield. "It had a good look and a good feel, but that can be faked." The owners bought the statue for $30 from "Al the Trash-picker," Sumerfield said. "I didn't think I had scored," Sumerfield said. "I didn't think I had hit the big one." Ironically Sumerfield had set the statue aside and planned to take it to the museum to ask for help in pricing it before it was sold. The $10,000 reward offered for information leading to the return of the pieces will be given to Camby, museum officials said yesterday. Camby, who is currently studying a statue of the Mesopotamian King Ur-Nammu, said she will return the money to the museum. "I'm amazed it led to the finding of the crystal," said Camby, who has worked at the museum since 1984. "Everyone is full of congratulations. It was just a very good piece of luck." Investigators tracked the statue back to Stametz, who was shown a picture of the crystal and helped the FBI get in touch with Beckles. Beckles helped piece together the more recent parts of the puzzle. Stametz could not be reached for comment last night. Beckles said Stametz called her Tuesday, but was told by the FBI not to tip her off about the true value of the crystal. Instead he told her an appraiser thought the crystal was worth a great deal and wanted to see it. "I was like, 'Wow it might be worth 5,000 bucks,' " Beckles said. But then Stametz asked if the "appraiser" could come to her house to see it immediately, and Beckles said she thought that was a little weird. She said she was not sure the people coming were actually appraisers interested in the crystal. When the FBI agents arrived on her Trenton doorstep, Beckles said she was really scared and did not know exactly what to think. "I actually had to ask them three times, 'It's stolen? Am I a criminal now?' " Beckles said. "I thought about America's Most Wanted. A lot of things go through your mind. [The agents] were laughing at me because I must have asked them things a hundred times." After the agents told her the crystal ball had belonged to a Chinese Empress, "chills went up my spine." Part of the reason Beckles said she was hesitant to believe the ball could be very valuable was that her husband bought her a baseball-sized crystal for $80. She estimated that the Museum's crystal was 10 times bigger, and therefore worth hundreds of dollars. Beckles found it impossible to believe Stametz would have given her something worth that much or that someone would simply abandon it. The crystal was appraised at $200,000 about five years before the theft, and estimates now put the price closer to $400,000. Though she had heard of the University, Beckles said she did not know of the museum and had not heard of the 1988 theft. "If I had seen [the stolen piece in a newspaper article] after I had the ball, I would have said, 'Wow that's mine.' " Beckles said. Beckles said jokingly that she probably would have called the museum and said, "I've got this lawn ball that I think might be yours."

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