1 Stealing the Tramp
Silent-era funnyman Charlie Chaplin died on Christmas day in 1977 and was buried soon after in Switzerland. But in March 1978, grave robbers swiped Chaplin’s body and phoned in a ransom demand of £400,000. The thieves’ plan seemed so perfect until Chaplin’s widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, refused to pay the sum because “Charlie would have thought it rather ridiculous.”
In an attempt to nab the crooks, the local police set up false payoff meetings, but these proved fruitless when the robbers didn’t show. However, both police and the suspects were persistent, so the two parties continued to communicate in the hopes of resolving the standoff.
In May, the police were expecting another call from the robbers, so they tapped the Chaplins’ phone. In an extraordinary display of coordination, they also assigned officers to watch as many as 200 phone booths throughout the area. When the call from the robbers came in, police traced it back to the originating booth and arrested two men, Roman Wardas and Gantscho Ganev, both auto mechanics. The men led police to Chaplin’s remains, which were buried in a cornfield about 10 miles from the graveyard.
Wardas received a four-year stint for masterminding the scam, while Ganev, seen only as a muscleman, got off easy with an 18-month suspended sentence. As for Chaplin, he was reburied in the same burial plot, but this time his coffin was surrounded by thick concrete to prevent anyone else from disturbing his slumber.
2 The Slinking Memorial
In the early hours of November 7, 1876, a group of four counterfeiters broke into Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Ill., with the intention of stealing Abraham Lincoln’s body from his sarcophagus. They planned to take the body, hide it in the sand dunes of northern Indiana, and hold it for $200,000 ransom, plus demand the release of one of their gang from prison.
A police informant in the crew foiled the plan, though. When the men broke into the cemetery that night, police and Secret Service agents (who were only charged with investigating counterfeiters at the time, not guarding the body of the President) were waiting for them. The crooks initially got away, only to be arrested a few days later.
After the attempted robbery, Lincoln’s remains were reburied in the same mausoleum at Oak Ridge, but instead of being inside the sarcophagus, they were secretly hidden in a shallow grave in the basement of the tomb—a fact that was known only to a handful of people for decades. There the body stayed until 1901, when eldest son Robert Todd Lincoln had his father’s remains placed inside a steel cage, lowered 10 feet into the ground, and covered in concrete for safekeeping.
Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest in a theater in San Francisco. He lost.
3 Elvis Almost Left the Building
In August 1977, just two weeks after The King’s death, police received word from an informant that a group planned to steal Elvis Presley’s 900-pound, steel-lined, copper-plated coffin and hold his remains for ransom.
Thanks to this heads-up a police task force monitored Presley’s grave and caught three men—Raymond Green, Eugene Nelson, and Ronnie Adkins—snooping around the mausoleum. Just how the men planned on getting through the two concrete slabs and solid sheet of marble that covered the coffin is unknown, since they weren’t carrying any tools or explosives. The Memphis police felt like something about the situation didn’t add up, so until further evidence about the plot could be uncovered, they charged the men with criminal trespassing and kept them in jail.
As the investigation continued, it became apparent that the story the informant had told police was full of holes. He said the men were going to be paid $40,000 each by a mysterious criminal mastermind who planned to ransom the body for $10 million. But he couldn’t tell police how the men intended to get their reward or how to contact this shadowy kingpin once the deed had been done. With no actual crime being committed (other than the men being in the cemetery after dark), and the evidence against the men being so weak, all charges were eventually dropped.
As a result of the almost, kinda, sorta attempted grave robbery, the Presley estate requested permission to move the bodies of Elvis and his mother to Graceland where they could be monitored 24-hours a day by staff security and closed-circuit TV cameras. Of course they’re still at Graceland and have become one of the estate’s main attractions.
4 Stay On the Line. Police Will Be with You Shortly.
Soon after his death in 2001, the body of Enrico Cuccia, a powerful bank president often considered the father of Italian capitalism, disappeared from its vault. A loyal housekeeper who visited the grave on a weekly basis to clean up around the tomb discovered the foul play.
The family received a ransom demand for the equivalent of $3.5 million to be deposited by Mediobanca—the bank Cuccia had controlled for more than 50 years—into a numbered Swiss account. When the ransom was not immediately paid, a man called Mediobanca to set up the transfer of funds, but was placed on hold under the pretense that the bank president was on the other line. This gave the police time to trace the call back to a small village near Turin, Italy, and found Giampaolo Pesce, a steelworker, still holding the phone.
Caught red-handed, Pesce led authorities to a barn where Cuccia’s coffin had been hidden under some straw.
In 1977, a tree branch that fell to the ground during Elvis’ funeral sold at auction for $748.