Chaplin died on Christmas. In March they were already asking for $600,000 in ransom for his body.
On the night of March 1-2, 1978, a pair of unemployed mechanics dug up the coffin of the legendary Charles Chaplin from a Swiss cemetery, and moved it to a cornfield, where they hid it. They asked for $600,000 to return it and the widow refused to agree to their demands. Everything was solved with an intervention by the police, but with an unexpected final twist: the thieves did not remember where they had hidden it. Death. Chaplin had died on December 25, 1977, at the age of 88, at his residence in Corsier-sur-Vevey, a town on the shores of Lake Geneva. He had been there since 1952, when the US government denied him a visa to return to his country after being accused of communist sympathies. during McCarthyism: He had left the United States to attend the London premiere of ‘Candilejas’ and was never able to return. The funeral was discreet and the oak coffin was buried in the local cemetery without much fanfare. A quiet end for someone who had been, literally, the most famous person in the world in the 1920s. The robbery. The tranquility lasted ten weeks. In the early hours of March 1-2, 1978, two men crossed the unprotected cemetery carrying flashlights and shovels. They were Roman Wardas, Polish, 24 years old, political refugee who led a precarious life in Switzerland and Gantscho Ganev, Bulgarian, 38 years old, also a mechanic, also without stable work. They had come to the conclusion that Chaplin’s corpse was the solution to his financial problems. They unearthed the 135 kilo oak coffinthey dragged him to the street and loaded him into Ganev’s car. They drove to a cornfield a little over a mile from the Chaplins’ house and reburied him. You don’t negotiate with terrorists. On the morning of March 2, police discovered the empty hole and notified the family. Press speculation They were immediate: uncontrolled fans, local anti-Semites, neo-Nazis resentful of ‘The Great Dictator’… That same day, calls from tomb desecrators began to arrive. And they repeated themselves. Between March 2 and May 16, Oona Chaplin, the actor’s very young widow, received 27 calls demanding a ransom of $600,000. His refusal made history: “Charlie would have found it ridiculous.” In reality, there was a reason for delaying them: while he pretended to negotiate to buy time, the police tapped his phone and deployed agents to the two hundred public telephones in the region, because the thieves changed booths with each call. The situation was complicated because impostors appeared who claimed to have stolen the body, forcing the real kidnappers to photograph the coffin to prove that they were the ones who had it. The thieves also threatened the family’s youngest children, but Oona Chaplin stood her ground. The arrest. On May 16, 76 days after the robbery, Wardas was arrested in a telephone booth in Lausanne, and Ganev fell shortly after. The police took them to the cornfield to recover the coffin, but there was still comedy in the story: the thieves did not remember the exact point where they buried it. The agents had to use metal detectors to locate the coffin. Chaplin was reburied in the same place, this time with a concrete slab on top of the coffin. Oona died in 1991 and is buried next to him. More robberies. The theft of Chaplin’s body was not an isolated accident, but the continuation of a macabre tradition of famous kidnapped corpses. In 1876, a gang of counterfeiters attempted to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body to ask for a ransom and the plan was aborted when the thieves had already sawed off the tomb’s padlock. In 1977, weeks after Elvis Presley’s death, four people attempted to break into his mausoleum in Memphis, convincing the family to move the remains to Graceland, also sealed under a slab. Eva Perón lived a posthumous journey that lasted decades: her embalmed corpse was stolen by the Argentine military in 1955, stored in a van parked in the streets of Buenos Aires, secretly transferred to Italy and buried in Milan under a false name until she was able to return to Argentina in 1974. And in 2015, the skull of ‘Nosferatu’ director FW Murnau disappeared from his grave near Berlin, possibly stolen by satanists. He never recovered. In Xataka | This is how sound was added to cartoons before sound films: the complex simplicity of mechanical orchestras
