Rare one-cent magenta postage stamp printed in what was then British Guiana in 1856 is expected to fetch a record price of $10 -$20 million at Sotheby’s auction in New York this June. The stamp was most recently owned by the estate of murderer John du Pont, who died aged 72 in a Pennsylvania prison in 2010 where he was serving a sentence for the 1996 shooting of Olympic champion U.S. wrestler David Schultz. Du Pont was one of the richest murder defendants in U.S. history at the time of his conviction. His wealth was estimated at $250 million at the time of his 1997 trial.
The expert committee at the Royal Philatelic Society London had re-authenticated the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta, and after close examination by each of the panel’s six noted experts, including spectrometer analysis, it has once again certified the British Guiana as genuine making it “the world’s most famous stamp.”
The current auction record for a single stamp is 2,875,000 Swiss francs (approximately $2.2 million), set by the Treskilling Yellow in 1996.
