Offbeat News: Woman rescues $1 million painting, gets a mere $15,000 reward

A woman who rescued a stolen $1 million USD painting from a rubbish pile has been handed a reward of just $15,000 USD.

Elizabeth Gibson found the painting - "Tres Personajes," by Mexican abstract artist Rufino Tamayo - in 2003 as she was returning home.

It sold for more than $1 million on Tuesday at a Sotheby's auction nearly 20 years after it vanished from a warehouse in Texas. Then, it was valued at $55,000, and when it disappeared, the woman owner put up a $15,000 reward for it.

And this week she refused to budge on the amount of the reward.

Gibson told a US newspaper: "I basically gave her a million dollars."

The work had been saved in 2003 by Gibson, who spotted it in perfect condition while going out to buy her morning coffee in New York. It had been bought for $55,000 in 1977 and put in storage during a house move.

It was found to be missing in 1987. Gibson said she was drawn to the painting as soon as she saw it in the street in New York.

She said: "I took it because it has a supernatural power. "There was a mystery to it from the moment I saw it to when the hammer went down."

After she took it home, she struggled to find out who created the work and who owned it. After four years of probing the painting's origins, Gibson finally found her way to the Web site for US TV show, "Antiques Roadshow."

There, she discovered that the splotchy red, purple and yellow picture was stolen in 1989, the New York Post reported.

Gibson later took the painting to the Sotheby's auction house, which discovered the owner was a Houston, Texas woman - and that the painting was stolen from storage.

The owner's husband bought it from a Sotheby's auction in 1977.

Gibson said that when she got the painting back to the woman through contacts at Sotheby's, she hoped the owner would increase the reward a bit, considering two decades of inflation and the fact that experts expected it to sell for between $750,000 and $1 million.

But the woman - who has not been identified - wouldn't budge, Gibson said. "People tried to get her to give me more," she said. "But she wasn't interested."

The painting beat expectations and sold for $1,049,000 in the Latin American art auction Tuesday.

The owner wouldn't give her a percentage of the sale. Gibson said that Sotheby's felt so bad for her after all her work that it gave her an undisclosed percentage of the sale commission.

Nevertheless, Gibson said she had no regrets. "In the end I feel very blessed," she said. "This is the best Thanksgiving ever."

The FBI is still investigating the case