The story has fascinated Olivia Rutigliano since she was 12, so as a student she decided to solve the case.
While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, she was able to study cases of stolen Oscars through a research grant. An email to the Academy revealed that Alice's case had been resolved smoothly ten years previously.
The “mystery man” turned out to be Henry King, who directed Alice in In old Chicago, the film for which she was awarded. After the afterparty, Alice's colleagues presented her with the Oscar and she had to take it to the Academy to engrave it herself.
However, Alice died the year after her Oscar win, and the award apparently disappeared sometime afterward.
Several years after beginning her research, Olivia, then a doctoral student at Columbia, decided to find the missing Oscar. Eventually, she discovered that a Dallas auction house had sold it, even though they had mistakenly called it a “replacement” for Alice's original Oscar. However, Olivia was unable to contact the anonymous buyer to tell him the truth.
In 2018, she said Mother Jones“My plan is to keep talking about Alice Brady's unstolen Oscar and hope the message gets to them.”