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Charlie Chaplin was one of the world´s greatest comic actors. His career spanned over six decades, and his image of the wide eyed clown with the battered bowler hat is still recognizable today, 31 years after his death.

Chaplin spent his life bringing laughter and joy to cinema and theater audiences. But whether he would have found the events that followed his death in 1977 amusing or not is a moot point.

He was buried in Vaut, Switzerland, where he rested in peace until March the following year. Then his coffin disappeared. It was dug up and taken away to an unknown location, and his family hit with a $600,000 ransom demand to have it returned.

Lady Oona Chaplin, the great clown´s widow, received the original demand, along with a photo of the coffin, still covered in dirt. She refused to consider paying a ransom for the coffin and her husband´s remains.

``Charlie would have thought it ridiculous," she told reporters at the time. She also issued a statement through her lawyers, saying that she did not need to know, and didn´t care, where the dead body of her husband was.

"My husband is in Heaven and in my heart," she said.

So the coffin kidnappers changed their tactics, and started threatening the eight Chaplin children.

So the remarkably cool and collected Lady Oona bargained with the kidnappers, bringing the asking price down to $250,000, while Swiss police monitored the calls and tracked down the public pay phone from which the calls were being made and set up a trap for the caller.

After two attempts at nailing the perpetrator, police decided the only way to catch their man was to keep a watch on all public pay phones in the area. This proved successful, and 24 year old car mechanic from Poland was taken into custody.

His accomplice, a 38 year old Bulgarian man, also a car mechanic, was soon after arrested, and the whole strange tale emerged.

The two men, Polish Roman Wardas, and Bulgarian Gantscho Ganev, confessed to digging up the coffin at the Corsier-Sur-Vevey cemetery, and spiriting it away in order to extort money from Chaplin´s family.

Wardas said he stole the coffin to alleviate his financial problems, using the intellectually challenged Ganev as the `muscle´ he needed to complete the heist. Chaplin had been buried in an oak casket that required more than one man to lift it. He said he had been inspired by a similar crime reported in the Italian media.

Unfortunately, with Lady Oona´s calm refusal to be ruffled by the kidnapping, or to pay the ransom, they were left with a problem - what to do with the coffin? They buried it in a cornfield near the Chaplin family´s home in Lausanne, and continued to negotiate with the intractable widow.

Chaplin´s coffin was dug up on May 17, 1978, and was returned to the Chaplin family. Wardas was sentenced to four and a half years´ hard labor for `masterminding´ the plot, while his hapless accomplice Ganev , received an 18 month suspended sentence.

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Written by: Gail Kavanagh
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