"They STOLE Charlie Chaplin's Body — The Untold Story"

[0:00]They stole his body. In March of 1978, two men dug up the grave of Charlie Chaplin. They stole the coffin. They demanded $600,000 in ransom. And what Chaplin's widow said next became one of the most unforgettable responses in Hollywood history. This is the untold story of what happened to Charlie Chaplin after he died. Charlie Chaplin was born in London, England in 1889. His childhood was straight out of a nightmare. His father abandoned the family. His mother was sent to a mental institution. Young Charlie and his brother Sydney lived in workhouses and on the streets. They begged for food. They wore rags. By the age of nine, Charlie was performing on stage just to survive. By 1914, he had moved to America. By 1919, he was the most famous man on planet Earth. His character, the tramp, a clumsy gentleman with a tiny mustache and a bowler hat, made the entire world laugh for the first time during the darkest years of the Great Depression. He wrote his own films. He directed his own films. He composed his own music. He was the single most influential person in cinema history. But Chaplin had a dark side that Hollywood tried to hide. He married women half his age. He made fun of Adolf Hitler in 1940 with his film The Great Dictator, years before America entered the war. And during the red scare of the 1950s, the FBI labeled him a communist sympathizer and banned him from returning to the United States. He spent the last 25 years of his life in exile in Switzerland, in a small village called Corsier-sur-Vevey. He lived in a quiet mansion with his fourth wife, Oona. They had eight children together. On Christmas Day, 1977, Charlie Chaplin died peacefully in his sleep. He was 88 years old. He was buried in the village cemetery in a simple oak coffin. Two months later, the unthinkable happened. On the 2nd of March 1978, villagers woke up to find an empty grave. The coffin was gone. Chaplin's body had been stolen. The thieves made their first phone call to Oona Chaplin within hours. They demanded 600,000 Swiss francs for the safe return of her husband's body. That is almost $3 million in today's money. Oona Chaplin refused. Her exact response was quoted in newspapers around the world. She said, "Charlie would have thought this was absolutely ridiculous." She believed the dead deserved respect, not ransom. The Swiss police set up a wiretap on Oona's phone. For 11 weeks, the thieves kept calling. They threatened to harm her youngest children if she did not pay. But Oona never wavered. She played along just enough to keep them talking. Finally, in May of 1978, detectives traced the calls to two car mechanics. One was from Poland. The other was from Bulgaria. Both were political refugees who believed stealing a famous person would solve their money problems. Police arrested them immediately. Under questioning, they confessed and led detectives to a cornfield about 10 miles away from the cemetery. There, buried in a shallow pit, was the coffin of Charlie Chaplin, untouched. He was returned to his original grave. But this time, the cemetery porter reinforced concrete vault around the coffin to prevent anyone from ever doing it again. Chaplin's widow Oona died in 1991. She was buried right next to him under the same concrete. Charlie Chaplin made the entire world laugh during its hardest times. And in death, even his body could not escape the strange and cruel turns of fate that had followed him his entire life. If this story moved you, subscribe for more untold Hollywood stories. And tell us in the comments, what would you have done if you were Oona Chaplin?