The ransom theory — that someone had stolen the coffin to extort money from the wealthy family — was, from the beginning, considered a plausible motive by the villagers of Corsier. The Notre Dame Observer report noted that “most village residents still believed the thieves would eventually demand ransom.” This common-sense expectation of what would happen turned out to be correct, though the ransom demands did not begin immediately.
Several weeks passed between the theft and the first contact. During that time, the suspects — as would become clear after the arrests — had already hidden the coffin in a cornfield near the village of Noville, approximately twenty kilometers from Corsier-sur-Vevey. They had originally planned to hide the coffin in a different location within the cemetery itself, but the waterlogged ground made that impossible. They had transported it by van, apparently from a vehicle associated with Ganev’s car repair work, and had buried it in a hole they had dug in the field.
The decision to wait before making contact may have been tactical, or it may reflect uncertainty on the thieves’ part about how to proceed. Wardas later said that he had been “scared out of his wits” when the theft generated the international media response it did. A local cemetery robbery in a small Swiss village had become, within hours of its discovery, a global news story. The man who had planned this as a “viable financial decision” — in the words attributed to him in the SwissInfo account — had not anticipated that scale.