In December 1977, comedian Charlie Chaplin died at his villa in Switzerland. The Briton was also buried there. But just two months later, his body was stolen from the cemetery – and his widow was blackmailed.
It’s probably the most famous case of body theft of all time. On the night of March 2, 1978, two men were busy with a grave in the cemetery in the Swiss village of Corsier-sur-Vevey. It is the final resting place of comedian Charlie Chaplin. The Brit had died two months earlier, on December 25, at the age of 88 in his villa on Lake Geneva. Now the men dig up his body in the dark, heave the oak coffin into a car and roar away.
The next morning, a cemetery attendant sounds the alarm when all he sees instead of the grave is a gaping hole. In the next few days, several people reported who allegedly took the comedian’s body into their power. free riders. They all demand large sums of money for their recovery. But only one of them can substantiate his claim with a photo. It shows the comedian’s coffin in a field next to a hole – big enough to let him disappear into it.
Charlie Chaplin’s kidnappers dreamed of owning their own garage
He’s asking for $600,000. Chaplin’s widow Oona appears to be agreeing to the request. But while her lawyer is negotiating the ransom, the police monitor her phone and trace the call made from a phone booth in Lausanne. Although the police set several traps for the caller, he always manages to escape. Only when more than 200 telephone booths are permanently monitored is the kidnapper finally caught after five weeks.
It is the Bulgarian Galtscho Ganev, a 24-year-old car mechanic who dug up the coffin together with his Polish friend Roman Wardas – also a car mechanic. The two wanted to use the money they had extorted to fulfill their dream of opening their own garage. And since, in their opinion, living kidnap victims were too expensive because they needed to be fed, they thought it wiser to kidnap someone who was already dead.
Charlie Chaplin’s coffin buried in a corn field
They had buried the coffin with Chaplin in a corn field near the village of Noville, about 17 kilometers away. Unfortunately, they couldn’t remember the exact spot, so the police had to search the field with metal detectors.
Eventually the coffin was found and taken back to the cemetery, where his wife had a centimeter-thick layer of concrete installed to be on the safe side. After she died too, the grave was concreted over in 1991. Ganev and his buddy got four and a half years in prison.
Incidentally, the kidnapping of Chaplin’s body is not the only case in which the peace of a prominent dead person has been disturbed. After RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison in May 1976, her brain was not buried so that it could be used for scientific research. It was not cremated and buried until decades later, in 2002.
In August 2010, the urn of communard and author Fritz Teufel disappeared from the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin-Mitte and reappeared at the grave of student leader and left-wing icon Rudi Dutschke in Berlin-Dahlem. In a letter, the authors were happy about the “devilish fun”.
The coffin of the German-Austrian billionaire Friedrich Karl Flick, who died in 2006 and was stolen in Austria in 2008, remained missing for around a year – probably also by a gang that wanted to extort money. The perpetrators had pushed aside a granite slab weighing several hundred kilograms and transported the coffin away. The coffin turned up again in Hungary at the end of 2009, and the dead industrialist was buried a second time.
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Source: Stern
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