The day after the arrests, on May 17, the two men led authorities to the field near Noville where the coffin was buried. They could not identify the exact spot; the field was large enough that their recollection was imprecise. Police used metal detectors, locating the coffin by the signal from its metal handles through the soil above. The coffin was recovered intact.
Part Seven: The Offenders, Their Backgrounds, and the Account Given at Trial
Roman Wardas was twenty-four years old at the time of the theft. Gantscho Ganev was thirty-eight. Both were described in contemporaneous press coverage as unemployed auto mechanics. Ganev had operated a car repair shop; the van used to transport the coffin was associated with his shop.
Wardas was identified consistently as the instigator. He later told investigators that he had read about a similar crime in an Italian newspaper and been struck by what he called a “viable financial decision” — a scheme that could provide the money needed to open their own garage and escape from the financial difficulties they were experiencing. Whether that Italian newspaper article was real, and whether it described an actual crime or a speculative scheme, is not established in the sources accessible here.
Both men were described in contemporaneous reporting as political refugees from Eastern European communist countries. This was their legal status in Switzerland, where they had settled after leaving their home countries. Poland in the late 1970s was still under communist governance, and Bulgaria was a Soviet-aligned state; emigration under those conditions was typically treated in Western Europe as grounds for asylum or refugee status. Being a political refugee from Poland or Bulgaria in Switzerland in 1978 did not necessarily mean the person had been persecuted for political activity; it might simply mean they had emigrated from a communist country and been granted protected status.