Charlie Chaplin and the Body Snatchers

Most people have heard of Burke and Hare, the two Scottish body-snatchers who turned to murder to increase their profits. I won't recount the entire history of body snatching here, especially as Suzie Lennox at Digging Up 1800 has such a rich amount of material. In essence, body snatching was a response to tight restrictions on anatomical dissection - very few bodies were available for medical students to practice on, and so some individuals made a handsome profit by raiding graves and selling the corpses to medical schools. The illicit trade prompted a number of ingenious methods and contraptions for preventing grave robbers from gaining access, including the 'mortsafes' pictured below, which feature on Digging Up 1800, along with an explanation of their use. More examples can be found here. 

In 1832, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, which required the registration of anybody practicing anatomy and allowed the dissection of bodies which were unclaimed after death. These were usually paupers who had died in hospitals, prisons, or workhouses. Understandably, many people were distressed by this law, but it did do its bit to curb body snatching.

Almost 150 years after the passage of the Act, on Christmas Day 1977, the 88-year-old filmmaker Charlie Chaplin died in Switzerland. His body was interned in a cemetery overlooking Lake Geneva and his widow and children began to grieve.

Three months later, two men dug him up and carried him away. 

Aberdeen Evening Express, 3rd March 1979

The day after the body-snatching, when the cemetery's gravedigger arrived at work, the theft of Mr Chaplin was discovered. Initially, both the police and Chaplin's family were stumped. A police official was quoted in a newspaper as saying

"We don't know whether this is a macabre kidnapping or the work of madmen"

Eventually, Chaplin's wife, Oona, received a ransom demand, which she dismissed as ridiculous, refusing to hand over any money. Chaplin's lawyer also received ransom demands but again nothing was paid. The family waited. The police, meanwhile, used the ransom demands to begin closing the net. 

Police at the desecrated gravesite

Finally, after two and a half months, the police tracked down the culprits and were able to recover Mr Chaplin's remains, which had been reburied about fifteen miles away from the original place of internment. The two perpetrators of the crime were Roman Wardas, a Polish man, and Gantscho Ganev, who was Bulgarian. 

Coventry Evening Telegraph, 17th May 1978

The pair stood trial in the December of 1978, both for "disturbing the peace of the dead" and attempted extortion. By way of explanation for their deeds, Wardas, who had arrived in the country as a refugee, told the court that

"I left my country in order to be free but found it difficult to get steady work in Switzerland"

The court found that Wardas was the mastermind of the whole plot and that Ganev had only limited responsibility. As such, Wardas was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, while Ganev was given an eighteen month suspended sentence. Mr Chaplin's family had his remains reburied, though this time they used a concrete coffin.

Next week, I am going to tell you another story about Charlie Chaplin from the vaults of criminal history - how he got caught up in the Red Scare and was accused of perpetrating "white slavery".