Paschoud, identified in contemporaneous wire reports as “Jean-Felix Paschoud,” was a Swiss attorney who had represented the Chaplin family’s interests in Switzerland. His participation in the negotiations was tactical, not aimed at reaching any genuine agreement. The Washington Post’s contemporaneous recovery report from May 18, 1978, describes the family bargaining through Paschoud over a tapped phone, with the ransom figure eventually being negotiated down from $600,000 to $250,000. This does not mean the family intended to pay any amount; the negotiations were designed to extend contact and provide time for the police operation.
The problem of proof complicated matters. Multiple callers contacted the family in the weeks after the theft, claiming to have the coffin. Some of these were opportunists — people who had read the news and decided to try to extract money from a wealthy widow on the basis of a lie. There was no simple way to distinguish genuine kidnappers from copycat callers without some form of evidence.
At some point during the negotiation period, Wardas sent a photograph. The image showed the coffin beside the hole in the cornfield — evidence that whoever sent it had access to the physical object. This photograph gave police their first geographic lead, as the setting eventually proved traceable to the Noville area. It also distinguished the Wardas-Ganev contact from the false claimants who had been using the crime to generate their own ransom attempts.
The threatening calls escalated. Wardas threatened to harm Oona’s two youngest children if the family did not cooperate with his demands. The Crime Magazine account attributes these threats to “the callers” without specifically identifying whether it was Wardas, Ganev, or both who made such statements. The SwissInfo account says Wardas grew “increasingly aggressive” and made threats about the children. These threats were taken seriously enough to factor into the family’s cooperation with police and the overall handling of the case.