Emily Chan
The last thing you would expect to spark a scandal is a children’s picture book, but that’s exactly what happened in 1979. After an artist named Kit Williams published Masquerade, treasure hunters across the U.K. raced against one another to find the location of buried gold.
The picture book was said to have hidden clues in its pages that, once solved, would lead to an 18-carat golden hare Williams had buried somewhere in England.
When it was finally unearthed in Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire, the scandal behind its discovery stunned the entire nation. Afterward, Williams melted into the shadows, away from the fame, and returned to a quiet, peaceful life. Here’s what happened.
The storyline of Masquerade follows Jack Hare, who was assigned the task of delivering a jewel from the moon to the sun.
During his journey, he loses the gem, and readers were invited to decode the riddle to find the real jewel-encrusted golden hare, a piece that was crafted by Williams himself. It was valued at over $6,300.
When Williams buried the hare, he placed it in a ceramic case and sealed it with wax to disguise it from metal detectors. Across the country, countless lawns were dug up in the hopes that the golden hare would be buried beneath the ground.
Three years later, the treasure was eventually found by Ken Thomas, an alias for Dugald Thompson.
Later, in 1988, it was revealed that Thompson had not obtained the golden hare by solving the full puzzle.
Instead, he had help from a woman named Veronica Roberts. She was his ex-girlfriend and had insider information about the location of the hare. She shared her knowledge with Thompson, who subsequently dug up the hare.
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