This week (March 2 – 8) in crime history – Charlie Chaplin’s
body was stolen (March 2, 1978); Congress banned sending obscene material
through the mail (March 3, 1873); LAPD officers are videotaped beating Rodney
King (March 3, 1991); Louis “Lepke” Buchalter was executed (March 4, 1944);
Martha Stewart was released from prison (March 4, 2005); Jim Morrison was
charged with lewd conduct in Miami (March 5, 1969;); Trial of Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg began (March 6, 1951); Defense rested in the trial of Andrea Yates (March
7, 2002); Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez “The Lonely Hearts Killers” were
executed (March 8, 1951); Old west outlaw and bank robber, Emmett Dalton was sentenced
to life in prison (March 8, 1893)
Highlighted Story
of the Week -
On March 2, 1978, two men steal the corpse of silent film
actor Charlie Chaplin from a cemetery in the Swiss village of
Corsier-sur-Vevey, located in the hills above Lake Geneva, near Lausanne,
Switzerland. A comic actor who was perhaps most famous for his alter ego, the
Little Tramp, Chaplin was also a respected filmmaker whose career spanned
Hollywood’s silent film era and the momentous transition to “talkies” in the
late 1920s.
After Chaplin’s widow, Oona, received a ransom demand of
some $600,000, police began monitoring her phone and watching 200 phone kiosks
in the region. Oona had refused to pay the ransom, saying that her husband
would have thought the demand was preposterous. The callers later made threats
against her two youngest children. Oona Chaplin was Charlie’s fourth wife and
the daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. She and Chaplin were married in
1943, when she was 18 and he was 54; they had eight children together. The
family had settled in Switzerland in 1952 after Chaplin was accused of being a
Communist sympathizer.
After a five-week investigation, police arrested two auto
mechanics, Roman Wardas, of Poland, and Gantscho Ganev, of Bulgaria. On May 17 they
led authorities to Chaplin’s body, which they had buried in a cornfield about
one mile from the Chaplin family’s home in Corsier. Political refugees from
Eastern Europe, Wardas and Ganev apparently stole Chaplin’s body in an attempt
to solve their financial problems. Wardas, identified as the mastermind of the
plot, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years of hard labor. As he told it, he
was inspired by a similar crime that he had read about in an Italian newspaper.
Ganev was given an 18-month suspended sentence, as he was believed to have
limited responsibility for the crime. As for Chaplin, his family reburied his
body in a concrete grave to prevent future theft attempts.
Check back every
Monday for a new installment of “This Week in Crime History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of six nonfiction
books that includes Murder and Mayhem 52
Crimes that Shocked Early California. Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com for
more information. His book can be purchased from Amazon through the following
link:
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