I've never heard of this happening before, but it's possible it happened on a small scale by individuals. There wasn't actually a lot of investigation of the Maya Area done by archaeologists in the 19th century, though there are a number of notable people who contributed significantly to the field.

The first were John Lloyd Stevens and Frederick Catherwood in the late 1830's and early 1840's. Stevens was a writer and explorer who had previously published descriptions of his travels in Europe and the Middle East. While planning a trip to Central America to explore some ruins he heard about, Martin Van Buren decided to appoint him as a special ambassador to Central America to figure out what was going on there (there was a civil war going on, but that's a long story). He brought an excellent artist with him named Frederick Catherwood whose work he was familiar with, and the two of them explored and documented sites across the Yucatan and Guatemala, and as far east as Copan, the edge of the Maya Area. Upon their return, Stevens published the notes of their journey under the title Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán. It was a best-seller, which encouraged them to go back to the Yucatan to look at other sites, which resulted in another moneymaking book, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán. I've never seen it asserted that the two (or their group) did anything to harm the sites they inspected. On the contrary, they are lauded to this day by Mayanists for bringing the Maya Area to the world's attention though Stevens' prose and Catherwood's incredible drawings. Here's an example of a stele from Copan alongside a photo of the same. Here are some more of his drawings: El Castillo of Chichen Itza, a temple in Tulum, the "House of the Dwarf" of Uxmal.

Some of the other major explorers to visit the Maya Area in the late 19th century were Alfred Maudsley and Teoberto Maler, who visited some of the same sites as Stevens and Catherwood, and a bunch of new ones. The two intensively documented the sites with their own sketches and photographs, setting the stage for the more scholarly archaeologists who would come later. I've never heard of the two (or their contemporaries) "ruining" the sites. Though it was common at the time to bring striking finds home as museum donations, this wasn't limited to Mayan sites. That said, Maler was notably opposed to this, as he felt the integrity of archaeological sites should remain intact.

It's possible you're thinking of J. Eric S. Thompson, one of the most important Mayanists of the 20th century (not the Victorian era). Thompson made great strides in furthering our understanding of Mayan astronomy and mathematics, especially through his work with the Dresden Codex. Unfortunately, he also had some interesting ideas about the Maya themselves, including that they were purely peaceful, time-worshippers whose texts could not possibly have recorded actual historical information. He was dead wrong in this, and in fact singlehandedly held back investigations of Maya script for decades until the Russian Mayanist Yuri Knorozov managed to figure out the De Landa Alphabet could be used as a Rosetta Stone for decoding certain glyphs in 1952. Thompson continued to oppose efforts to decipher Maya Script, but after his death in 1975 scholars who were afraid of opposing the orthodoxy he enforced began to build momentum in deciphering it, which has by now basically been completed. If you're interested in reading more about this subject specifically (and more detail about Thompson's opposition to the Maya script's decipherment), I recommend Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe. Coe was heavily involved in the script's decipherment, so his perspective is invaluable.