SIR CHAPLIN'S TOMB

It was this day 45 years ago that the revered Sir Charles Chaplin's coffin went missing from the cemetery in the Swiss village of Corsier-sur-Vevey, Lausanne. The 88 year-old legend had passed away on the Christmas of 1977. The village folks aghast and dumbfounded to see the empty grave, were unable to fathom whether it was a prank or otherwise...

The dust soon settled as Mrs. Oona Chaplin received over two dozen phone calls between March 2nd and May 16th demanding money to the tune of $600,000, which she refused to pay. She purposefully continued 'negotiations' till the two perpetrators, a Polish refugee Roman Wardas, and a Bulgarian Gantscho Ganev were nabbed...

Trying to copy an instance that occurred in Italy in 1977, they admitted that their initial aim was to lower the coffin, to make it seem as though it were missing. A Swiss court pronounced them guilty for disturbing the peace of the dead and attempted extortion...

To digress a little, grave robbery was said to be common till the 20th century. The robbers were commonly known as “Resurrectionists.” In fact, many claim that it happens even today in a much smaller scale, and may not be just relegated to novels and movies...

The motive used to be mainly for profit. The demand for cadavers rose with the advancement of medical education in America, and corpses were known to have been acquired illicitly for dissection purposes. Ever since the 1800s resurrectionists were known to have sold corpses to anatomists for dissections. In the 1900s, it is said that corpses of recently-buried African Americans made their way into dissection halls...

Why, even recently there are reports of skulls and other human remains from graves reaching a rather unregulated online market. According to the Australian osteoarchaeologist and illicit trafficking researcher Damien Huffer, two popular social media platforms have been used clandestinely for such activities by way of 'groups.' Shutting them makes way for new ones...

One could argue that it is a sinister side of medical science. Nevertheless, such 'contributions' have played their part in our being in this current stage of 'evidence based medicine.'...

Said a renowned physician, a decade after the above story,

“Ruffians, scoundrels, sordid opportunists, call them what you will – They played a part in our medical history.”...

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