On Christmas morning in 1977, silent film icon Charlie Chaplin died at the age of 88. After a private funeral two days later, he was buried at the Corsier-sur-Vevey cemetery in Switzerland, the country where he had been living since 1952. Ordinarily, that’s where a story like this would come to an end. Unfortunately, as Chaplin’s widow, Oona, found out a couple of months later, her husband’s final resting place wasn’t quite as final as they’d initially thought.
By March 1, 1978, newspapers were reporting that Chaplin’s body had been stolen, and that police hadn’t found any clues as to why. The bizarre crime was the work of two unemployed mechanics, Roman Wardas and Gantscho Ganev, who were looking to open up a repair shop with the money they planned to get from Chaplin’s family. Their asking price for the safe return of the Little Tramp’s remains was $600,000. Oona Chaplin said that her late husband would have thought the situation was “ridiculous” and would have refused to give in to the grave robbers’ demands.
Then other people started trying to get a piece of the action. Enough fake extortion attempts came through that the real thieves were forced to take a picture of Chaplin’s coffin to prove that they actually were the awful human beings they were claiming to be. The police started monitoring Oona’s phone and kept an eye on 200 phone booths on top of that because the kidnappers kept calling from different numbers. Their efforts finally paid off, and Wardas and Ganev were arrested on May 16th of that year.
In a comically stupid turn of events, the two corpse snatchers weren’t even able to remember exactly where they’d hidden Chaplin’s body. Using metal detectors, the police managed to find it in a cornfield not too far from Chaplin’s house. The pair were later charged with grave robbing and extortion. Wardas received a four-and-a-half-year sentence for masterminding the whole thing, and Ganev was sentenced to 18 months for his limited involvement.
As for Chaplin, his body was returned to the same cemetery it was stolen from and thoroughly enclosed in concrete, to be on the safe side.
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