The early reporting was largely drawn from what Swiss police and the family’s lawyer were willing to say publicly, which was limited. Magistrate Tenthorey’s statement that investigators were “mystified” after a week was given to press and conveyed genuine uncertainty, not evasion. The investigation was genuinely in an early and unproductive phase.
Some details circulating in those first weeks were incorrect or unverifiable. Statements attributed to Oona Chaplin — about her feelings, her response to the theft, her intentions — were denied as fabrications by the family lawyer. This is significant because those statements, or versions of them, continued to circulate long after the case was resolved, and some are still reported as though they were verified direct quotes.
The speculation about fans sending the coffin to England was not an invented theory; it drew on something real. Chaplin had roots in England and had expressed affinity for his country of birth. When he was denied re-entry to the United States in 1952, he had gone first to London and had spent time in England before settling in Switzerland. The idea that English admirers might have wanted to give him a burial in his homeland was, at least superficially, not absurd. But it was speculation, and investigators found no evidence to support it.
The political motive theory similarly had some surface plausibility. Chaplin had been branded a communist sympathizer in the United States, and the political climate in Europe in the late 1970s was not without its extremist episodes. The Red Army Faction in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy were active. A symbolic attack on the grave of someone who had been associated with leftist politics was conceivable. But again, investigators found no evidence to support this.