The time Char­lie Chaplin’s corpse went missing

On 2 March, 1978, Char­lie Chaplin’s corpse went miss­ing. Chap­lin, who spent his last years in the bucol­ic Swiss vil­lage of Cor­si­er-sur-Vevey with his wife Oona and their eight chil­dren, had died the pre­vi­ous Christ­mas aged 88. In the unguard­ed and nor­mal­ly peace­ful ceme­tery, his cof­fin was dug up, dragged sev­er­al feet across the earth and trans­ferred to a vehi­cle. The vil­lagers were per­plexed and hor­ri­fied. Was this a ran­som plot or a prac­ti­cal joke gone awry?

The act of corpse kid­nap­ping has a long lega­cy. From the grave rob­bers of Egypt­ian mum­mies to Vic­to­ri­an-era body snatch­ers, who sold cadav­ers to anatomists and doc­tors, there is a strange and often bewil­der­ing his­to­ry of prof­it­ing off human remains. There were sev­er­al schemes to seize Abra­ham Lincoln’s body after his assas­si­na­tion; short­ly after Elvis’ death, four men were arrest­ed try­ing to break into his mau­soleum; Eva Perón’s body was buried and reburied for decades; and in 2015, FW Murnau’s skull was stolen. Just a cou­ple of years ago, Enzo Ferrari’s body was almost stolen from the fam­i­ly tomb, with the prospec­tive thieves plot­ting a $10m ransom.

Between 2 March and 16 May, Oona Chap­lin and her lawyer received 27 phone calls demand­ing mon­ey. When she flat-out refused to pay out the equiv­a­lent of $600,000 for the return of her husband’s body, the crim­i­nals appeared will­ing to nego­ti­ate. Unbe­knownst to the per­pe­tra­tors, how­ev­er, Oona nev­er intend­ed to pay, stat­ing, ​“Char­lie would have thought it rather ridicu­lous.” The nego­ti­a­tions only con­tin­ued in order to allow the police time to trace the calls. On 16 May, Roman War­das, a 25-year-old Pol­ish refugee, was arrest­ed in a phone booth. His accom­plice, Gantscho Ganev, from Bul­gar­ia, was arrest­ed short­ly thereafter.

The men claimed they nev­er intend­ed to dis­turb the body or whisk it away. The ini­tial plan was to remove Chaplin’s cof­fin, dig the grave deep­er, and then con­ceal it beneath a lay­er of earth. Rather than steal the body, they want­ed only to make it seem as though it were miss­ing. But things didn’t quite pan out that way, and they were forced to impro­vise. By the end of the year, both men were found guilty in a Swiss court for dis­turb­ing the peace of the dead and attempt­ed extortion.

There is lit­tle infor­ma­tion online about these men and what became of them. They were report­ed­ly inspired by a sim­i­lar case in Italy in 1977, and evi­dent­ly hoped to come into a swift for­tune. The prac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tions of their crime is queasy and extort­ing a recent­ly wid­owed moth­er is pret­ty rep­re­hen­si­ble. Yet their sta­tus in the mar­gins of soci­ety and the bla­tant des­per­a­tion of their act sim­i­lar­ly inspires a kind of sym­pa­thy. It’s worth not­ing that after their crim­i­nal con­vic­tion, the pair sent Oona let­ters express­ing their sin­cere regret. She ulti­mate­ly for­gave them.

In 2014, French film­mak­er Xavier Beau­vois drama­tised this infa­mous true crime episode in The Price of Fame, about two men who plot to steal Chaplin’s corpse for ran­som. While the most macabre ele­ments of the sto­ry invoke a late-career Chap­lin com­e­dy, the dark and bit­ing Mon­sieur Ver­doux, Beau­vois chan­nels Chaplin’s ear­li­er, more human­ist style. The film itself is a pale imi­ta­tion of the real Chap­lin, but its under­stand­ing and social con­scious­ness is heart­warm­ing giv­en the more grue­some details of the events in ques­tion and how they inter­act with Chaplin’s legacy.

Like Chaplin’s films, The Price of Fame sheds light on the invis­i­ble class­es of soci­ety and their per­ceived val­ue in a world obsessed with mate­ri­al­ism and wealth. The fact is, the real-life case sup­ports this inter­pre­ta­tion. This wasn’t an Ocean’s 11-style plot but a small-scale crime by non-pro­fes­sion­als who were more des­per­ate than dastardly.