An eccentric antiques dealer who kept a rare, stolen First Folio of Shakespeare's plays in his home for a decade has been found dead in prison two years into an eight-year sentence.
Raymond Scott, 55, was found unconscious in his cell at Northumberland prison on Wednesday.
Scott ensured extra headlines for an already notorious crime, the theft of the 17th-century work from Durham University library, when he attended court dressed as Che Guevara, sprayed journalists with champagne and revelled in his ownership of a yellow Ferrari. He was cleared of stealing the book but found guilty of handling stolen property and taking it abroad.
He concocted a defence so exotic – involving the supposed discovery of the folio in Cuba through a friend of his fiancee, a nightclub dancer in Havana – that the judge put him down as a fantasist with a personality disorder.
But the jury heard after his conviction that he had been a capable and long-time criminal, with 23 convictions, three aliases and £90,000 of debt on credit cards.
Scott was a well-known antiques dealer in the north east when a thief took advantage of lax security at the library in 1998 to take the 1623 folio from a special exhibition without being detected. After 10 years of failure to recover the folio, one of the most important printed works in English, scholars were close to accepting its permanent loss, when Scott broke cover.
He made a foolhardy attempt to profit from the theft by walking into the Folger Shakespeare library in Washington DC, one of the world's leading research centres, with his Cuban story. Staff recognised the folio as Durham's and played for time to double-check markings unique to the stolen work. There are fewer than 250 copies in the world of the collection of plays, which was printed seven years after Shakespeare's death.
Scott left the folio with the Washington library and returned to the UK, where he was arrested shortly afterwards at the modest house in Tyne and Wear's Washington where he lived with his mother and the Ferrari.
Passing sentence at Newcastle-upon-Tyne crown court in 2010, Judge Richard Lowden told him that, in spite of his fantasies and past alcoholism, he was not suffering from a mental disorder. Scott was visibly shaken by the sentence after two weeks of bravado.
A spokeswoman for the prison service said: "HMP Northumberland prisoner Raymond Scott was pronounced dead at approximately 8.40am on Wednesday 14 March after being found unconscious in his cell. As with all deaths in custody, the independent prisons and probation ombudsman will conduct an investigation."
Scott's denials persisted to the end but with a typical teaser in an interview with his biographer Mark Kelly of Newcastle's Sunday Sun, to whom he told a story about a lonely man who sneaked into a library and pinched a rare book to look after it.
He said: "It wasn't kept in a bank vault – it was openly kept on a book shelf and lovingly cherished. Then maybe the person fell in love and thought it's time to realise an asset. Perhaps this person decided to live one day as a lion rather than spend his days as a lamb. To live life to the full in Havana, London, Paris. You can't do this without money, without a lot of money. This is just a fairy story, of course."
The folio has been returned to Durham University where repairs have been carried out on damage received during its international travels in Scott's company.
