That Time Charlie Chaplin's Body Was Stolen From His Grave

The legendary performer Charlie Chaplin passed away on Christmas Day, 1977 at age 88 at his home in Switzerland. He had lived there since 1953, when he left the United States following his blacklist via the House Un-American Activities Committee. His home was a 35-acre estate overlooking Lake Geneva called Manoir de Bain, in the town of Corsier-sur-Vevey.

When he died, he was interred in the cemetery there. But he didn’t stay there for long.

Sometime between the late hours of March 1st and the early hours of March 2nd, 1978, Chaplin’s corpse was stolen. Two men, dressed in black, entered the cemetery and dug a hole at the gravesite. They lugged Chaplin’s oak coffin (which weighed nearly 300 lbs) out from its resting place and loaded it into a hatchback sedan. Then, they disappeared into the darkness.

According to the Swiss National Museum, news of the the empty grave traveled fast, and caused widespread speculation. Across the globe, everyone seemed to be asking what had happened to Chaplin’s body? Who could have taken it? And why? Writing for the Museum’s retrospective on the theft, Michael van Orsouw chronicles some of the theories: “Was it the work of souvenir hunters? Was Chaplin to be buried in England, as had once been his wish? Others even went so far as to speculate that Chaplin had actually been Jewish and should therefore have been buried in a Jewish cemetery.”

But then, a ransom request appeared. Chaplin’s widow, Oona O’Neill (the daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill), received a note asking for a payment of $600,000 (USD) in exchange for the body. But that wasn’t the only sum the grieving family was asked to pay—widespread news of the theft meant that plenty of opportunists also sent in ransom demands to O’Neill and their children, in attempts to cash in on the incident. 

The ransomers were in a tight spot, and decided that they then had to legitimize their request. They sent a photo of the casket next to a giant hole, at its temporary hiding spot the middle of a nearby cornfield.

Van Orsouw writes,

In doing so they gave the local police, who were working flat out on the case, their first clue. Chaplin’s widow Oona pretended to go along with the ransom demand, and the family’s lawyer exchanged a number of telephone calls with the kidnappers, supposedly to try and negotiate a somewhat lower ransom. But the police had tapped the Chaplins’ phone and were able to trace where the calls were coming from. The grave robbers used a different telephone box in the Lausanne area each time, causing the investigators to keep tabs on some 200 telephone boxes. On 16 May, exactly 76 days after the body was stolen, the police were finally able to close in and arrest the two men.

Somewhat stupidly, the kidnappers couldn’t remember the exact spot in the field outside Noville where they had hidden the coffin. The police were forced to resort to metal detectors, and found Chaplin’s remains thanks to the metal handles on the casket. It really does call to mind a scene from a movie…

Charlie Chaplin’s body then received its second proper burial ‒ although this time the coffin was encased in two metres of concrete, and a slab of concrete was placed over the grave to secure it.

The thieves turned out to be two out-of-work car mechanics, aged 38 and 24. One was Bulgarian, the other Polish, and they dreamed of opening up a car repair shop, together. The theft was how they planned to fund it. The mastermind of the operation was sentenced to four years and six months in prison, while the other got 18 months.