Van Pelt book thief sentenced

A former Van Pelt Library employee was sentenced to seven years of psychiatric probation last week for the theft of over 100 books and documents valued at $1,798,310 from the library's rare book collection. According to Christine Ruggere, the library's curator of special collections, 34-year-old Kathleen Wilkerson, of the 3900 block of Spruce Street, was also ordered to pay over $45,000 in restitution and instructed to help library authorities find any other books that are missing from the library's collection. Ruggere added that Wilkerson received an additional two-year probation sentence for tampering with library records which will run concurrently with the first sentence. The sentence was handed down last Thursday by Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Russell Nigro, the same judge who found Wilkerson guilty last November of stealing the books and covering up her crime by altering library records. Ruggere said that Wilkerson, who received a master's degree in English from the University, had entered a plea of "no contest" to the charges. Her attorneys backed up the plea claiming that Wilkerson has multiple personalities and did not remember stealing the books. Wilkerson faced a maximum sentence of seven years in prison and $15,000 in fines. Wilkerson's first thefts from the library were in December 1985 when she took a few books from the library and gave them to friends, Ruggere said. These books were not particularly valuable, she added. Ruggere said that in the summer of 1989, Wilkerson began taking large numbers of books, including many valuable ones, some of which she attempted to sell to a rare book store in Center City. Among the books Wilkerson stole was the most valuable printed book in the library's collection, a 1611 edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet valued at $1 million. When a Baltimore book dealer saw the 1611 Hamlet in the rare book store, he suspected it had been stolen and alerted the University, which began an investigation which led to Wilkerson's arrest on February 28 last year. At her trial in November, Wilkerson's attorney said that Wilkerson had been suffering from a mental illness since her childhood and was so upset by the arrest that she had to be hospitalized. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, University officials believe they have retrieved all 101 books that were found missing.

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