Robert Turner’s journey into gem collecting began innocently enough. As an Austinite in the early 1980s, he hunted for the mica, quartz, and other sparkly rocks a kid might find in a museum gift shop. But the more he learned about their chemistry and geology, the more his fascination grew. By the early 2000s, he had moved on to the finer stuff—diamonds, rubies, sapphires—and eventually amassed a collection of 90,000 carats in gems and minerals that defied explanation. Yet an explanation was exactly what his wife, Jill, wanted the day in 2017 when, in the midst of a spousal spat, she stormed into his garage studio in Austin. “She said, ‘What the f— are you going to do with all this s—?’ ” Turner recalls. Thinking on…
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