Police investigators were staking out the historic, 200-acre Mount Moriah Cemetery in southwest Philadelphia on Tuesday evening when their suspect finally emerged carrying a crow bar and a burlap bag.
For months, mausoleums in the graveyard, some more than a hundred years old, were being looted in the dead of night, police said. Finally, they believed they had found the perpetrator. Before they arrested the suspect, identified by police as Jonathan Gerlach, police said they could see numerous bones and skulls in the back seat of his car.
Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said Thursday it wasn’t the first time Gerlach, 34, had burglarized tombs in the area. Investigators wrote in an affidavit that when they searched Gerlach’s home, they found more than 100 “human skeletons,” including mummified hands and feet and skulls on shelves. Some of the remains were 200 years old.
These thefts happened “under the cloak of darkness, very much secreted from public view,” Rouse said. “This guy did everything in his power to secretly and silently grave-rob. Mount Moriah did everything they could to stop him from doing it. But as you can imagine, cemetery that size, it is very difficult.”
Gerlach has been charged with 574 counts, including 100 counts of abuse of a corpse, 26 counts of burglary, and dozens more of desecrating a public monument, trespassing and theft, according to court documents. He is being held under a $1 million cash bail at the Delaware County Prison. An attorney for Gerlach could not be reached for comment.
Police said Gerlach admitted to stealing approximately 30 sets of human remains from Mount Moriah Cemetery, a site that’s estimated to contain 200,000 graves, including of Civil War veterans and historic figures such as Betsy Ross, who many believe is responsible for the first American flag. After Gerlach was arrested, police allegedly determined the burlap bag he was carrying when he left the cemetery contained more remains.
Rouse said the macabre scene police found when they searched Gerlach’s home was unlike anything they had seen before.
“Detectives walked into a horror movie come to life,” he said.
These remains included a months-old infant and a corpse that still had a pacemaker attached. Police found the remains in various states of display: some were “hanging,” Rouse said, while others were “pieced together, some were just skulls on a shelf.”
Rouse added that investigators are still trying to determine what Gerlach was doing with all the remains. According to the affidavit, Gerlach stated to police that he sold some remains online but the vast majority were held in the basement of his home in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, a town about 70 miles west of Mount Moriah Cemetery.
Rouse said that from November to January, Gerlach “desecrated” 26 separate mausoleums and underground burial sites. Police received their first call to investigate a burglary at Mount Moriah Cemetery on Nov. 7, according to the affidavit. A mausoleum had been broken into, its marble flooring was destroyed and one of the crypts underneath, which held a deceased teenage girl born in 1854, was found empty, the affidavit said.
Later that month, the affidavit said, police responded to another burglary of a different mausoleum at the same cemetery, where several more crypts were damaged and another set of human remains was reported missing. Throughout December, several more mausoleums and underground vaults were targeted, police wrote in the affidavit.
On Dec. 23, police responded to a tip from a man who told police he had been in contact with Gerlach’s brother and sister-in-law, urging authorities to look into Gerlach in relation to the mausoleum thefts.
The tipster said he knew someone who had seen a “partially decomposed” corpse hanging in Gerlach’s basement but were afraid to tell the police. He provided authorities with Gerlach’s Instagram page, which allegedly followed accounts devoted to taxidermy and skeleton collection. The tipster also said he believed Gerlach had mentioned visiting Chicago for the purpose of “selling a human skull.”
The affidavit stated that police were able to trace Gerlach’s vehicle and cellphone, and they found that both were used around the area of the cemetery during the dates of the burglary. On Tuesday evening, investigators staking out the area observed Gerlach and his car, which had “numerous bones and skulls in the back seat,” parked outside the cemetery, according to the affidavit.
After authorities confronted him at the cemetery, Gerlach showed investigators how he opened the grave with the crowbar, the affidavit said. Investigators say he admitted to stealing about 30 sets of human remains from that cemetery.
Police also found a storage locker allegedly belonging to Gerlach and executed a search warrant on Thursday that found eight more remains, “miscellaneous body parts” and old jewelry and clothing believed to have been removed from graves.
The chief of the Yeadon Borough Police Department, Henry J. Giammarco Jr., said at a news conference Thursday that the case was “the most horrific thing” he’d ever seen in his 30 years of work.
“We all have loved ones that passed. ‘Rest in peace’ is rest in peace,” he said. “And this is definitely something that tears your heartstrings.”
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