The motive as articulated by Wardas was economic. He and Ganev needed money. They saw in the famous grave at Corsier-sur-Vevey an opportunity to generate the capital they needed. Whether they discussed the plan at length, how long they had been considering it, and exactly how they decided on the date and method are not established in the public record. Wardas’s account of the plan as a “viable financial decision” suggests a degree of rationalization — a framing that presented the crime as a business calculation rather than a desperate act — but what went into the planning beyond that characterization is not in any source accessible here.
The planning and execution had some tactical elements. Wardas had obtained the Chaplin estate’s telephone number by posing as a journalist. He had selected a cornfield approximately twenty kilometers from the cemetery as the hiding place, in the village of Noville. The original plan had involved hiding the coffin within the cemetery itself, but the wet ground had made that impossible on the night of the theft, forcing an improvised alternative. They had a van available, associated with Ganev’s repair work, which allowed them to move the heavy coffin.
What is also established is that the theft generated consequences neither man had anticipated. Wardas said at or after his arrest that he had been “scared out of his wits” by the international media response. This is attributed directly to Wardas in the SwissInfo account. The phrase captures a certain reality: two men who had conceived of a private extortion scheme discovered that stealing the coffin of Charlie Chaplin was not a private matter. Within hours of the empty grave’s discovery, the story was on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Within days, Interpol was involved. The scale of the police response eventually culminated in an operation that a cantonal police force described as the largest in its history.