Charlie Chaplin in ‘City Lights’.
Keystone
A few months after Charlie Chaplin’s death, his body was stolen from the cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey, overlooking Lake Geneva in western Switzerland, where the great actor and director had lived for 25 years. Let’s retrace this macabre story.
March 1, 1978. Corsier-sur-Vevey, where thick fog is about to give way to a cold rain. Two figures are moving cautiously around the cemetery.
The following day, in place of one of the graves, the cemetery caretaker finds a deep hole. Tyre tracks suggest that the coffin buried there had been taken away. The man immediately raised the alarm, setting in motion a dramatic investigation that would attract international attention. The body that had been stolen was, in fact, that of Charlie Chaplin.
The crime scene.
Keystone / Str
Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin’s adopted home
The great British filmmaker lived in the village on the shores of Lake Geneva for 25 years until his death on December 25, 1977. He did not choose Switzerland on a whim, but was driven there by the icy winds of McCarthyism. In the United States, he had come under the scrutiny of the FBI, which accused him of “un-American activities”, particularly due to the anti-war and anti-capitalist themes in many of his films.
In 1952, while he was in England for the premiere of Limelight, the US government revoked his entry permit. Unable to return to Hollywood, Chaplin arrived in Switzerland. What was supposed to be a stay of just a few weeks turned into a permanent move.
In Corsier-sur-Vevey, he purchased the Manoir de Ban estate, nicknamed the “Little White House”, and, despite a minor disagreement stemming from the director’s irritation at the noise from the neighbouring shooting range, the village became a home for Chaplin, who described the locals as “charming, hospitable and genuine”, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reportsExternal link.
Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona had eight children. This family photograph dates from 1961.
AFP
Monsieur Rochat
So who were the two suspicious-looking figures? They turned out to be 24-year-old Roman Wardas and 38-year-old Gantscho Ganev, two unemployed mechanics seeking their fortune. The former, a Pole, is the mastermind of the duo. Inspired by similar stories he had read in an Italian newspaper, he persuaded his friend, a Bulgarian, to help him steal Chaplin’s body and then demand a ransom from his family. Wardas would later explain that he had conceived the abduction as a “viable financial decision” to realise their dream of escaping poverty and opening their own garage.
Charlie Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel in one of the most famous scenes from *The Great Dictator*.
Keystone
In the days immediately following the disappearance of the coffin, the media, the police and the public were left in the dark. Interpol was called in to assist with the international search, and a wide range of theories were put forward as to the motives behind the act: its repatriation to England by British admirers; revenge by neo-Nazi fanatics angered by Chaplin’s satire of Hitler in The Great Dictator; a simple prank in very poor taste; or the idea that the body had been stolen for cryopreservation.
These speculations were dispelled when the telephone rang at the Chaplin estate. On the other end of the line, a certain “Monsieur Rochat” revealed himself to be the perpetrator of the theft and demanded a ransom of $600,000.
It is Wardas, who had managed to obtain the number of the residence by posing as a journalist.
However, he and his accomplice hadn’t reckoned with Oona O’Neill, Charlie Chaplin’s wife, who proved to be a tough nut to crack. She described the whole affair as “ridiculous” and stated: “A corpse is a corpse. My husband is in Heaven and in my heart.” She had no intention of parting with a single cent.
However, in agreement with the police, she decided to play along to buy time and, through the family lawyer, Jean-Félix Paschoud, she engaged in a sham negotiation to drive down the price.
To complicate matters further, a string of compulsive liars came forward falsely claiming to be in possession of the coffin. The family demanded tangible proof from Monsieur Rochat. Wardas and Ganev therefore sent a photograph of the coffin in a maize field, providing the police with their first lead. It later transpired that the image had been taken in Noville, some 20 kilometres from Corsier-sur-Vevey, where the pair had gone to great lengths to conceal the coffin – weighing over 130 kilograms – and its occupant.
The fake negotiations continued for around ten weeks, towards the end of which Wardas began to lose patience, becoming increasingly aggressive and even going so far as to threaten to kill the couple’s children if he did not receive the money.
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‘That mummy is my great-grandfather’
The slip-up
The police were not sitting around doing nothing. The Chaplin family’s home telephone was under surveillance so that conversations could be monitored and the number traced. The two grave robbers, however, are cautious and always use public payphones in the Lausanne area, never using the same phone twice.
This situation continues until the blackmailers slipped up, setting a specific date and time for the decisive telephone contact during which they believed the payment handover would be arranged.
The Vaud police then launched what they would later describe as the biggest operation in their history, simultaneously placing around 200 telephone boxes in Lausanne and the surrounding area under surveillance.
On May 16, 1978, at 9:30am, Wardas picked up the receiver for the last time, posing as Monsieur Rochat. Plainclothes officers arrested him on Avenue de la Dôle before he could complete his 27th blackmail call. His accomplice was arrested shortly afterwards.
The story had one final tragicomic twist. Wardas and Ganev could no longer remember the exact spot where they had buried the coffin. Chaplin might still be lying there, in an anonymous maize field in Noville, were it not for the coffin handles that the police managed to locate using metal detectors.
The coffin was found again by the police in Noville.
Photopress-Archiv / Str
‘All is forgiven’
The Guardian reportsExternal link that, during the trial, Paschoud asked from the witness box to be introduced to Monsieur Rochat. Wardas stood up nervously, and the lawyer with whom he had argued so much – using his pseudonym – greeted him with a cordial “bonjour”.
During the hearings, the young grave robber admitted to having been “scared out of his wits” on realising that the theft had attracted worldwide media attention. He also revealed that the initial plan had been to hide the coffin deeper within the cemetery itself, a scheme that fell apart, however, because the ground had become too heavy with rain.
In handcuffs, Ganev (left) and Wardas enter the court on December 11, 1978.
Keystone / Str
He was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for attempted extortion and disturbing the peace of the dead. Ganev was found to bear only limited responsibility for the incident and served an 18-month suspended sentence.
The two later wrote a letter of apology to the widow, who replied that “all is forgiven”.
It is not known what became of Wardas and Ganev. They returned to anonymity following the unusual affair, which was also made into a film in 2014, La Rançon de la Gloire (The Price of Fame), which romanticises the case by blending elements of reality and fantasy.
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It is known, however, that Charlie Chaplin has been laid to rest in Corsier-sur-Vevey, alongside his wife Oona (who died in 1991), and is protected by a thick slab of concrete.
Adapted from Italian by Thomas Stephens
