How the World’s Most Infamous Jewel Thief Turned to Murder
By Julie Miller
January 10, 2023
Nearly 60 years ago, a surfer named Jack Murphy pulled off one of the most audacious jewel heists in US history when he and a buddy scaled the American Museum of Natural History, broke through glass, and stole the Star of India sapphire, the DeLong Star ruby, and an assortment of diamonds and emeralds. R.J. Cutler’s new four-part docuseries, Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus, and Mayhem in the USA, premiering February 5 on MGM+, makes clear that Murphy wasn’t an expert thief. At 27, Murphy was a tanned party boy who simply lucked out with the museum’s unbelievably lax security. It was 1964, and the museum’s alarms had stopped working.
The true-crime story became catnip to a country still grieving John F. Kennedy, and Murphy—nicknamed Murf the Surf—was portrayed as a wise-cracking folk hero by the press. Bob Dylan referenced him in his liner notes and Nora Ephron reminisced about the “delicious” crime decades after covering it as a rookie reporter. “These guys had committed the perfect victimless crime,” Ephron said in 2010. “They just seemed like fabulous party boys.”
Murphy’s jewel heist and persona were so compelling that he remained a mythic figure to the press and public even after he was convicted of gruesomely murdering a young woman, Terry Rae Frank, in 1967. Frank and another woman, Annelie Mohn—secretaries who were allegedly conspiring with Murphy and his accomplice, Jack Griffith, on a stock scheme—were found bludgeoned, shot, and stabbed to death in Florida’s Whiskey Creek waterway.
Murphy and Griffith, who each accused the other of the murders, were convicted of murdering Frank—with Murphy sentenced to life in prison and Griffith sentenced to 45 years. (The death of Mohn was never prosecuted.) Cutler points out that, when The New York Times recalled the jewel heist in a 2019 feature, the murders were “mentioned 20 paragraphs in—that, oh, by the way, he was convicted of a murder.”
The jewel caper was not the only incident to pull focus from Murphy’s grisly crimes, though. In 1986, Murphy embarked on an unlikely and controversial redemption arc after apparently convincing the Florida parole board that he had discovered God and was a changed man. After being released, Murphy spent his final decades working as a prison evangelist—with some people believing that he had truly found religion, while others thought it was a get-out-of-jail-free con.
The docuseries, which features interviews with Murphy himself, chronicles his crimes and examines the perception of his life. Speaking about Frank and Mohn, Cutler says, “[We wanted] to honor [Murphy’s] victims, and see how history exploited them and how the reporting on Murf has exploited them…This is a story that is about the very nature of truth itself…at a time where truth itself is under siege in our culture and society.”
When Cutler connected with Murphy in 2020 and began to interview him—shortly before his death that year—Murphy was eager to share the sunnier moments of his story. (Murphy has long avoided discussing the murders, going so far as to publish a memoir in 1989 that failed to mention his homicide conviction.) Fancying himself to be more of a charming rogue than a hardened criminal, Murphy even presented the filmmaker with a self-mythologizing script he had cowritten and ideas for slick scenes.
Speaking about the interviews with Murphy, Cutler says, “If you are looking for the story of a guy who committed murders, that’s not what you’re going to get here [from him]. If you want the story of a guy who had a derring-do life and was a great surfer and went awry for a couple of years in the middle and then found the Lord and has helped redeem the souls of thousands, if not tens of thousands, that’s the story [he’s] got for you.” From the time of Murphy’s murder conviction to his death, Cutler says his subject’s “struggle has been to wrestle the truth to the ground like it was an alligator.”
According to Cutler, Murf the Surf “gets to the core of what it is about American identity and culture that compels us to follow those who might be selling us snake oil. And why doesn’t it matter? What is the attraction to the person who will tell us what we suspect might not be a truth?”
The docuseries explores the dilemma in real time—with the filmmaker clearly captivated by Murphy, even if morally opposed to his heinous crimes and the treatment he received by the media. This paradox made Murphy the perfect docuseries subject to explore, says Cutler.
“You say to people, ‘I’m making a show about the most infamous jewel thief in American history and the first true-crime celebrity superstar,’” says Cutler. “People are like, ‘How do I not even know this guy existed?’ He’s a bull’s-eye character who allows us to examine all of these issues in an extremely immediate way.”
