The Body Snatchers

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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          When Charles Chaplin died at age 88 on Christmas Day in 1977, it was the beginning of a most unusual journey, which got underway 46 years ago this week. The comedian in the Little Tramp might have enjoyed at least some of it.

          Chaplin was laid to rest in the cemetery at Corsier-sur-Vevey in Switzerland, close to the mansion that had been his home for several decades. However, his rest turned out to be anything but eternal.

On the night of March 1, 1978, two men dressed in black and armed with torches and shovels scurried across the graveyard in Corsier. Both were out-of-work car mechanics, one 24, the other 38. They dreamed of setting up their own car repair shop, complete with a vehicle lift and a large clientele. It was this dream that led them to seek out the world-famous actor and director in the dead of night and get to work with their shovels, digging briskly until they had uncovered Chaplin's coffin. The two men, one from Bulgaria, the other from Poland, heaved the heavy oak coffin out of the ground and carried it across the cemetery, where they loaded it into a waiting estate car.

Until their plan was completed, the body-snatchers had to find somewhere to hide the body. They found a quiet cornfield outside the nearby village of Noville, not far from where the Rhone River enters Lake Geneva. They dug a large hole and hid the coffin containing Chaplin in it. Then they waited before making their next move.

In the morning, when the empty grave in the cemetery was discovered, alarms were raised. Rumors circulated – one was that Chaplin had been moved to England, where he had originally wanted to be buried. Others even went so far as to speculate that Chaplin had actually been Jewish and his body had been removed to a Jewish cemetery.

The mystery was somewhat solved when the thieves broke their silence and attempted to extort $600,000 from Chaplin's family for the patriarch's return. Meantime, word of the missing body was spreading rapidly. Suddenly, the grave robbers were not the only ones demanding money: Chaplin's widow, Oona (the daughter of the great American playwright Eugene O’Neill), and children also received ransom demands from imposters eager to get in on the act.

This forced the actual kidnappers to prove that Chaplin's coffin was in their possession. This they did by sending out a photo showing the casket next to a hole in the cornfield. In doing so they gave the local police who were working on the case their first clue. Oona O’Neill Chaplin pretended to go along with the real ransom demand. The family's lawyer exchanged 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 ransom 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 May 16, 76 days after the body was stolen, the police were finally able to close in and arrest the two men.

There was a further complication: By then, the body-snatchers could not remember the exact spot in the field outside Noville where they had re-buried the coffin. The police were forced to resort to metal detectors, and they finally found Chaplin's remains thanks to the metal handles on the casket. The body then received its second proper burial ‒ although this time the coffin was encased in two meters of concrete and a slab of concrete was placed over the grave to further secure it.

Fittingly, the great filmmaker’s posthumous adventure was portrayed in a movie titled The Price of Fame. The French film was released in 2014, directed by Xavier Beauvois, and starring, among others, Eugene Chaplin, a son of Charles, and a granddaughter, Dolores Chaplin. Bizarrely, in the film, the Chaplin family feels some sympathy with the kidnappers, showing both leniency and generosity.

Real life was not quite as kind as reel life. The two grave robbers were hauled into court and charged with desecration and extortion. The older man was sentenced to prison for four-and-a-half years while his accomplice received an 18-month suspended sentence.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. Now out in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press is The Last Outlaws and coming in May is Throne of Grace (with Bob Drury). Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase/pre-order a copy.