In March 1978, just two months after Charlie Chaplin was buried in Switzerland, two unemployed mechanics dug up his coffin and tried to ransom his body back to his widow. The men were 24-year-old Polish mechanic Roman Wardas and 38-year-old Bulgarian mechanic Gantscho Ganev. They stole Chaplin’s 135kg oak coffin from the cemetery at Corsier-sur-Vevey and buried it in a cornfield roughly 12 miles away. Then Wardas began calling Chaplin’s widow, Oona, demanding around $600,000. She refused to pay. Instead, police tapped the family’s phone while Oona’s lawyer pretended to negotiate. The kidnappers kept calling from different public payphones, forcing police to simultaneously watch around 200 phone booths across Lausanne. On May 16, officers finally caught Wardas as he made another ransom call. There was one problem. The men could no longer remember exactly where they had buried Chaplin. Police eventually used metal detectors to locate the coffin’s metal handles beneath the cornfield. Chaplin was reburied in his original cemetery, this time beneath roughly two metres of reinforced concrete to make sure nobody could steal him again. Wardas received four-and-a-half years in prison, while Ganev received an 18-month suspended sentence.