Like a character in a Patricia Highsmith novel, Dr. Lawrence Gray was an outsider who blended into his high-society surroundings. He is suspected of a series of thefts in fashionable places up and down the East Coast.

The Talented Dr. Gray

As priceless heirlooms disappeared from the homes of Newport bluebloods and Georgetown ambassadors, Lawrence Gray remained above suspicion—and on the guest list

By Steve Kroft and Howard L. Rosenberg

The elderly gentleman with sandy-gray hair and the bearing of a patrician seemed uncomfortable and out of place in shackles alongside his fellow prisoners awaiting arraignment in Washington, D.C.’s Superior Court. Lawrence Gray, a 77-year-old retired academic with good posture and a previously clean record, had been arrested a day earlier on a fugitive warrant from the state of Rhode Island, and now appeared tired and rumpled after 24 hours in the roach-infested underground jail known as Central Lockup.

At this hour, in better times, he might be finishing lunch at Washington’ s Metropolitan Club, where he is a member, or preparing to accompany his longtime paramour, the late Jacqueline Quillen, to a black-tie dinner with La Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, one of the most exclusive wine societies in the world, where businessmen, bankers, lawyers, and their spouses gather to speak French, sing songs, and drink the world’s finest burgundies.