O'Wyatt's information helped Lemmon track Homer's "Shepherdess" to the Hammer Galleries, which in 1973 sold the work to New York City's M. Knoedler & Co.

A Knoedler employee called Lemmon to say he'd found the drawing in a trash bin, but when Lemmon asked for it back, Knoedler officials balked.

Lemmon had developed a friendship with Armand Hammer's attorney and called him for help. The attorney called Hammer. Hammer stepped out of negotiations between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan and called Knoedler.

"It's Dr. Hammer," he said. "Give it back."

On Dec. 18, 1987, Lemmon flew to New York City and retrieved the wrapped drawing. He had it authenticated by a Homer expert then made sure he was the last one to board the plane for Utah.

"I put the painting in an overhead bin after everyone else had sat down," he said this week. "Then one last guy came running onto the plane, opened the bin and went to throw his bag in it. I literally screamed, 'No!' and stopped him just in time."

Knoedler & Co. had also had the Monet, worth $250,000, but sold it through Christie's of London to an English art dealer in 1974. He later sold it to a private New York City collector. BYU attorneys negotiated in the blind with the collector for the return of "Two Women in a Boat."

Lemmon still doesn't know who the final owner was, and he doesn't care.

"If we have a good case, we need to get the piece of art," he said. "In reality, it's not ours, it's the public's, it belongs to the members of the church who paid for the collection initially and the donors."

· · · · ·

Before the discovery of the losses, BYU's collection was loosely held. Faculty members were allowed into storage rooms to select art to decorate their office walls. Urban legends, rumors and innuendo swirled around the university about a Rembrandt found on the floor of a storage room, paintings rolled up and stuffed into corners.

The BYU loss was staggering. Nearly 10 percent of the 12,000-piece collection was gone. Rather than hide the embarrassment of the losses, which some counseled because the university was preparing to raise funds to build a museum to house its collection, BYU mounted a frontal assault in an effort to get the art back.

The recovery effort included registering the missing works with the International Foundation for Art Research. The university paid for an entire special edition of IFAR Reports, formerly the Stolen Art Alert, in which the entire story was laid out, warts and all, and listed 250 missing works. Interpol and the FBI joined the investigation.

"Since that was published, we have recovered 43," said Emily Poulsen, registrar at the BYU Museum of Art.