He Stole 100 Bodies. A Facebook Group Helped Him Sell Them

He Stole 100 Bodies. A Facebook Group Helped Him Sell Them

The business of being dead in the United States is an expensive one. According to statistics released by the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral with a viewing and burial is about $8,300 in 2023. With a funeral with cremation only coming in just $2,000 less. However, if you’ve lost a loved one anytime recently, you’d know that these figures vary wildly.

 Now with this in mind, you’d hope that once the funeral was over and your loved one’s final tab was paid, they’d be resting in peace for all eternity, right? Now unfortunately for many families in Southeastern Pennsylvania, this wouldn’t be the case. Between November 7th, 2025 and January 6th of 2026, Detective Leah Chesanek of the Yeadon Borough Police Department and Detective Chris Carr of Delaware County’s Criminal Investigation Division responded to numerous calls regarding burglarized graves within Mount Moriah Cemetery.

At around 8:00 p.m. on their final night of surveillance, the detectives noticed a suspicious Toyota RAV4 parked on a street near the cemetery. The vehicle contained a number of skulls and bones that were plain view visible in the backseat. It was then, what looked like a scene out of an old horror movie, that a man was witnessed leaving the cemetery holding what the detectives described as a burlap sack, a crowbar, and other assorted items.

 That man was arrested and later identified as 34-year-old Jonathan Christian Gerlach of Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Inside of the burlap sack was the mummified remains of two small children, as well as three skulls and other assorted bones. He had to use the crowbar to break into a number of graves and even managed to get into the vaults by repelling down with a length of rope that he tied to a tree branch.

 After the authorities secured a warrant to search Jonathan’s home located at 100 Washington Avenue. They found, and I quote, “Over 100 human skulls, numerous human long bones, mummified human feet and hands, two decomposing human torsos, and other assorted skeletal items.” Eight more sets of human remains were also discovered in a storage unit belonging to Jonathan.

It’s like my grandma’s dentures. This is It is. It’s It’s gross. Look at the one hanging. Oh my gosh. There’s There’s a couple of Look at these ones. All the ones behind you. God damn. Oh, that one’s still alive. How long was that one alive? What I want to get the the hand. Wow, look at this. Sorry. Oh my god.

 What the Is that a pacemaker? Following a review of the evidence, the DA’s office hit him with every charge they could possibly justify. Those charges were as follows: Burglary not adapted for overnight accommodation, no person present, 26 counts. Criminal trespass, 26 counts of felony three and felony two. Abuse of a corpse, 100 counts.

Theft by unlawful taking, 100 counts. Receiving stolen property, 100 counts. Intentional desecration of public monument, 26 counts. Intentional desecration of venerated object, 26 counts. Intentional desecration of historic lots and burial places, 26 counts. Criminal mischief damage property, 26 counts.

 Defiant trespasser, seven counts. But this was not Jonathan’s first brush with the law. On November 10th, 2025, he was arrested and charged with retail theft after he allegedly stole $167 in goods from a business in East Earl Township on Halloween. What the business sold and what he stole currently remains a mystery at this time.

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 Ready to prove you’re a top chef? Then download Royal Cooking for free today and start your culinary journey. Thanks, and back to the episode. Shortly after his arrest, First Assistant District Attorney Tanner Rouse held a press conference to discuss Jonathan’s charges. We eventually watched and caught Mr. Gerlach as he desecrated yet another monument as recently as 2 years ago.

He’s taken into custody. Search warrants were executed at his home in Ephrata where over 100 human skeletons were recovered. And that’s in part at this point we are still trying to figure out how many of those are complete and what exactly we are looking at. A separate storage locker was found to be in Mr. Gerlach’s possession.

 That also was in Ephrata. We found there eight more human remains. Um very simply, detectives have recovered an awful lot of bones at this point and we are still trying to piece together who they are, where they are from, and how many we are looking at and it’s going to be quite some time before we have a final answer.

 He is in on 26 counts of burglary, criminal trespass, and a host of other offenses. Kelly Wilson, who’s handling our media affairs, is going to pass out the complaints so you guys with the complete list of charges at your disposal. And it is a whole laundry list of charges as we mentioned previously. One thing we didn’t mention though is that Tanner was really sloppy while conducting these crimes.

 I’m actually shocked that they hadn’t caught him sooner. Maybe they just really want to catch him in the act. Now, according to reports, he liked to leave cigarette butts and empty cans of Monster behind at the graves. All of which were gathered and swabbed for DNA. His RAV4 was also known to the police thanks to license plate readers.

 Very simply, detectives walked into a horror movie come to life the other night, guys. This is an unbelievable scene that no one involved, from myself to the detectives to the medical examiners that are now trying to piece together what they are looking at, quite literally. None of them have ever seen anything like this before.

 When I was 16 years old, a friend of mine was killed in a car accident and I personally have visited his gravesite as many people do when they lose a loved one. I know his parents have also visited that site. I cannot imagine I cannot imagine what it would put them through to know that someone like this guy had dug up those remains and was doing God knows what with them.

 This is one of the main reasons that as the stewardess of my grandmother’s ashes, I’m terrified to bury them. So, I keep them locked away in my Billy bookcase. I don’t want some weirdo leaving Monster at her grave. It is It is truly, in the most literal sense of the word, horrific. I I grieve for those who are upset by this, who are going through it, who are trying to figure out if it is in fact their loved one or their child because we found remains that we believe to be months old infants among the those that he had collected.

So, um our hearts go out to every family that is impacted by this. Some of these are hundreds of years old. We are trying to figure out exactly what we are looking at. We quite simply at this juncture are not able to date and identify them all. The Mount Moriah Cemetery was established in 1855, making it 171 years old in 2026.

Some of the graves and mausoleums that Jonathan broke into were about that old. Well, other remains that were recovered contained pacemakers and were more recently deceased. According to ABC 6, Jonathan sometimes sold some of his oddities in a Facebook group called Human Bones and Skulls Selling Group. The post in which a buyer thanked him for mailing a possible teen and a baboon and a monkey have since been removed and the admins have paused this group as of January 16th, 2026.

When digging a little more into the group, it’s not too difficult to see that the group is based in Indonesia and are selling specimens that are very likely not ethically sourced. Some of which may be in direct violation of the Endangered Species Act. Take these monkey skulls, for example. Most monkey species are protected under the ESA, which strictly prohibits the sale, interstate or international, of any part or product of an endangered or threatened species without a specific permit from the US Fish and Wildlife

Service. Buying and trading oddities is not the problem here. It’s the question of where is it sourced from? Because it certainly could be from somewhere nefarious. You know that old joke about, “Oh, don’t go to that part of town because you’ll end up in a bathtub full of ice with your kidney missing.

” Well, that isn’t too far from this. If you’ve not seen the episode of Trafficked Underworlds with Mariana van Zeller where she discusses this very topic, then you should. There’s a whole black market economy thriving right under our noses where shady funeral homes and medical supply companies are stealing body parts and marketing them as oddities or materials for spiritual practices.

 So, I’d love to hear from you some of the darkest things in that you’ve seen in this industry and the things that you think shouldn’t exist. First and foremost, it is far too easy to get away with theft of either personal effects or body parts in the funeral business. There are plenty of opportunities if someone were so inclined to go in there with a scalpel or not even necessarily in the case of an autopsy, all of the organs are conveniently presented to us in a bag.

 What would a person do with a bag full of someone’s insides? >> If they were so inclined, they could make wet specimens, put them in a jar, fix them with formaldehyde or alcohol, and sell them. So there’s a market for that? >> There is a market, yes, yes. You could do that and it would be totally legal for you to do that? It would not be legal to take the organ, but it is legal to buy, sell, and trade organs in 47 of the 50 states.

 And it sells for good money? Like there’s an incentive? Oh, yeah. It can be very profitable. 43-year-old Jeremy Pauley, a Thompson, Pennsylvania man who was sentenced to 72 months in prison for conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen property, shared his thoughts on Jonathan in this case. Keep in mind, Jeremy is the man who got in trouble for trafficking stolen human remains for his part in the Harvard Medical School scandal that operated from 2018 to 2022.

I’ve said this many times about him since I’ve been asked about him, either he’s mentally ill or he has the biggest balls I’ve ever seen because to do what he was doing at the volume he was doing it, I can’t fathom you know, what would possess someone to do that. And obviously he was selling the stuff, you know, I don’t know why he was collecting stuff in such volume.

Um it’s really weird to me cuz I know he had posted about forming an LLC on forensic analysis and things like that. So maybe the the best case scenario in my opinion is in some warped way, maybe that’s what he was trying to do was to like build some kind of database to to learn, but that’s giving him a lot of credit.

I definitely think greed was a huge factor factor here. About 8 years ago, prior to robbing graves, Jonathan worked on a musical project called Blind Bird. In this clip here, he discusses his album entitled Vulture. Perhaps he should have just kept doing that. So, this new Blind Bird album called Vulture, um started writing it last September in [music] 2015.

 I uh I went through a pretty rough breakup that kind of it was abrupt [music] and it left me to really question a lot of things about myself. [music] Uh My faith walked. Everything I kind of >> [music] >> assumed about who I was as a man and as an individual and I cooped myself up in my apartment for probably a good 7 months just writing this album [music] and getting it all out of my system.

 Um For the most part, the [music] album started out as a reaction to the woman in question who kind of left me very hurt and confused. A lot of open-ended uh a lot of open-ended questions and she and I met up a couple times in the middle of writing this album and just kept digging things back [music] up and in the midst of that other things were going on.

 I spent most of my time staring [music] at a wall in my apartment writing and just kind of having to ask myself the question, what do I really [music] believe? What do I believe about myself? What do others believe about me? And the album kind of expanded into this this mixture of dealing with that broken relationship, dealing with things I hate about myself and dealing with friends who walked away from me because I decided to be real about who I was and what I felt.

 So, this album [music] is a culmination of the past 10 months. In the wake of the recent disturbances, other area cemeteries wondered if they, too, might be victims of Jonathan’s crimes. The photography and urban exploration Facebook page called A Lady Called Jonna made the following post on January 16th, which read in part, “We visited the abandoned Good Shepherd Mausoleum in Plains Township, Pennsylvania on September 13th and witnessed that four bodies had been relocated by family members.

 And then right around the first week in November, we heard that someone had stolen two bodies from the chapel.” Then, the first week of January, detectives patrolling Mount Moriah Cemetery said they found a Toyota parked outside the cemetery with human skulls and bones in the backseat and caught a man walking back to the Toyota carrying a crowbar and a burlap sack filled with a child’s mummified remains.

Jonathan Gerlach, 34, was arrested and is facing more than 500 criminal charges following an investigation into repeated break-ins at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Yeadon. Apparently, he left a trail of energy drink cans everywhere he went and the police are testing the DNA on those cans to compare to some of the energy drink cans that were left at the Good Shepherd Chapel to find out if he was the culprit there, also.

Just a day prior, News 8’s Bailey Martin spoke with Tom Bowman, who lives right next to the now abandoned Good Shepherd Memorial Cemetery in Luzerne County. And it was getting worse. Tom Bowman has lived on Westminster Road since the ’80s, right down the street from a now abandoned Good Shepherd Memorial Cemetery in Luzerne County.

 Well, listen, I got sick of looking at it. It was No, it it was it was it was a mess. And I I figured, well, the least I could do is cut the grass. Tom says he’s cut the grass and kept an eye on the cemetery, especially near holidays, for the last several years. I said, “Ava, I’ll be down in a couple days to clean it up for for uh Veteran’s Day.

” So, I went when I went down there, I always I looked inside and the the two the coffins were open. The one coffin they tried to pull out and they must have pulled the end off of it. >> [music] >> And they I’m I’m assuming that was that was the one that they emptied. Tom reported what he saw that day on November 6th to police.

 And then next thing I know there was, you know, a whole bunch of cops up there, the coroner was up there. Cigarette butts and two empty energy drink cans found near the crypts are now being tested by police to see if they’re a match for Efferton resident Jonathan Gerlach. Although he’s not being charged just yet, police are now investigating if he could be in connection to two bodies stolen right behind those boarded up walls.

 The crypts that once held a Mary Cappellini Paga and Leo Terrance were empty. It’s getting very strange, but uh at my age nothing surprises me. John Schmale Jr., who serves as the president of the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, started a GoFundMe campaign aimed at ramping up security and conducting repairs at the 171-year-old burial grounds.

John, who is a fourth-generation caretaker who has personally reset over 500 monuments, sees his work as not just a duty but a family legacy. His post read in part, “The past 8 weeks have been incredibly difficult for all of us. The Friends have discovered several disturbed mausoleums and vaults on the property.

 I’ve personally placed nearly every 911 call regarding these incidents, ensuring that authorities were notified within minutes of any discovery. While I cannot share specific details due to the active and ongoing investigation, please know that we are working closely with the appropriate authorities to address these violations of our sacred space.

” He continued, “As a nonprofit that relies entirely on donations, we are currently at at We want to move forward with these vital infrastructure improvements, but our current funds are stretched thin by these unforeseen emergencies. Mount Moriah is more than just a cemetery. It’s a repository of our shared history and a final resting place for our families.

These recent events have been a wake-up call that our aging infrastructure can no longer protect this sacred space on its own. If you’re interested in supporting John’s mission, we will post a link to the GoFundMe in our pinned comment and video description. To date, the fundraiser has collected about 5% of its $100,000 goal.

 The preservation of historic landmarks like cemeteries is important to us, so we will be making a donation as well. Art Anderson, who serves as the secretary of the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, took Bailey Martin on a tour of the grounds to survey the damage. Somebody entrusted us entrusted society, the community to let their people rest.

And now they’re not resting. We walked the path that Gerlach is accused of taking for months, where concrete now replaces stained glass windows on mausoleums. Mausoleums like this have been broken into over >> Bricks are thrown where they were torn from and vaults left open. This is an example of one of those underground vaults that were broken into.

 You can see bricks everywhere, scratch marks indicating that someone struggled to get this 9,000-lb top off the vault, get themselves down inside. I’m sure history is not going to stop this from happening, but we need to prevent it in the future. They now have installed cameras and have a GoFundMe set up, so other families like Diane’s can walk to their loved ones’ graves and not worry if they’re still there.

 It’s terrible to have to think about, you know, that somebody would do that. Pray that first of all it wasn’t touched and second of all if she if it was, then we got to go through the process and see. Jonathan is currently being held at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility located in Delaware County on a $1 million cash bond.

He has a preliminary hearing set for January 20th, 2026 and is currently being represented by attorney Adam Zalaghi and I’m sure I’m saying that wrong. As this episode will be released after that date, any updates discussed in the hearings will be added to our pinned comment. As Jonathan hasn’t gone to trial yet, he’s considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

In addition, the DA’s office is asking anyone with any information about this case to please reach out to Detective Leah Chessenik or Chris Carr. Also, if you believe that one of your loved ones has been affected by Jonathan’s crimes, then the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery wants to hear from you as well. We’ll have all relevant information listed in our pinned comment and video description for you.

Now, I know this episode is a little bit outside of what we normally cover on the Misery Machine, but it’s a topic that I’m familiar with and have a lot of opinions on. And honestly, it sort of brings me back to the topics that we used to cover on this channel in its early years. If you’d like to hear a similar bizarre story, then click here to check out the case of Anatoly Moskvin from Russia.

Anatoly became obsessed with cemeteries and then took things too far after stealing the bodies of young girls and making dolls from the remains.