Hundred-Million-Dollar Questions

What we do know is that they left a lot of clues behind them.

Now, the ongoing investigation in Paris is top secret.

All the details of how French police approach the case, they might never be made public.

But Tim says he thinks he knows the first steps they would have taken.

He says immediately there were signs that looked promising for investigators The thieves had left items behind.

Police said there was a walkie-talkie, a blanket, a glove, a helmet, and a couple of angle grinders.

From those items and the crime scene, investigators said they were able to get 150 samples of DNA and fingerprints.

Now, they have likely been run through a database similar to the CODIS system in the US, where DNA from convicted criminals is stored.

From that, investigators would be able to see if the thieves were previously known to French police.

But investigators aren't just looking at physical evidence.

The Louvre investigation looked closely at cell tower data in those early days, too.

If he was running this investigation, Tim said he'd be contacting every cellphone tower operator in range of the Louvre that day and asking for their data.

Say we wanna know every device that connected to that tower in the last 72 hours.

Now, that pulls a...

You might imagine, that's probably a pretty big list, and then you just gotta do investigative work.

Finding the data that came from the thieves' phones among the noise of tens of thousands of Louvre visitors is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack, but Tim says it's possible if you know how to look.

It's about establishing patterns.

Which of these devices have been in the Louvre multiple times in the last month? Okay, which of those are staff? So if I know that the subjects, in this case they came in on a scooter, and I'm doing camera coverage and all of these things, right, then I can maybe establish a line of direction.

It's a, it's an onion.

You just start peeling the layers back.

Finding out where the thieves came from might reveal their identities, and finding out where they went might reveal where the jewels had gone.

And in cases like this, that's what Tim says he really cares about.

I would always tell people, like, an art theft case, our objective is probably not, primarily not the arrest of the subject.

W- we want to do that.

We wanna hold people accountable and charge the criminals.