What is not in dispute: she did not pay the $600,000. The family cooperated with police. The negotiations were tactical, not genuine. And when the case was resolved, the coffin was recovered.
Part Three: The Family in the Months After December 1977
Chaplin died on Christmas Day. Swiss law governs inheritance in cases where the deceased was a resident of Switzerland, and the estate the family was managing was substantial by any measure. Contemporary estimates cited in the Notre Dame Observer’s wire-report coverage from March 1978 put the estate’s value at as much as $100 million, with royalties — from the continuing distribution and reissue of Chaplin’s films — still arriving at a rate of approximately $13.3 million per year.
These figures were journalistic estimates and should be read as such. But they indicate the scale of what Oona and the family were administering after December 25. The archive of Chaplin’s films was commercially significant. The rights to his works, the royalties from ongoing distribution, the Manoir de Ban itself, and the financial structures the family had built over twenty-five years in Switzerland represented a complex estate.
Oona was the executor. She had been Chaplin’s partner in managing their affairs for three decades. She was also, as of Christmas morning 1977, a fifty-two-year-old widow with two minor children still at home — Annette, eighteen, and Christopher, fifteen — and six adult children scattered across Europe and America.
In the weeks after the burial, the family appears to have maintained a reasonably private profile. The press had covered Chaplin’s death extensively, and the grave at Corsier was a site of public interest. A security guard was posted at the entrance to the thirty-seven-acre estate to manage unwanted visitors, as the Notre Dame Observer reported. The family was not actively seeking publicity during the period of mourning.