More Unfortunate, Mostly Literary, Happenings of Past Marches

Read last year's Bummer March post here.

March 2, 1978: Two thieves steal the coffin containing the body of actor Charlie Chaplin, which was interred in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. They hope to gain $600,000 in ransom, but Chaplin’s widow Oona (the daughter of American playwright Eugene O’Neill) refused to pay. The two men, auto mechanisms from Poland and Bulgaria, were instead forced to show police the corn field in which they’d reburied the coffin. Chaplin’s family took the precaution of burying the coffin in concrete when it was returned to the cemetery. The English actor had died at age 88 on December 25, 1977.

March 11, 1918: Private Albert Gitchell, stationed in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley, Kansas, is discovered to have the first-recorded case of influenza in what becomes the influenza pandemic of 1918. An estimated 50 million to 100 million people die of influenza during the pandemic worldwide.

In the Disaster Area Podcast episode on the Bazar de la Charite fire of May 4, 1897 in Paris, Jennifer Matarese loosely outlines how that tragic fire that killed 126 people indirectly related to the events that started World War I and the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. To wit:

- The fire kills Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria, Duchess of Alençon.

- Sophie's sister, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, is inconsolable at the death of her favorite sister. Empress Elisabeth was already having a pretty rough time.

- Elisabeth's only son (of her four children), Crown Prince Rudolph, had died in an apparent murder-suicide, killing his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera and himself, in 1889. Crown Prince Rudolph, who was to inherit the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dies without leaving a legitimate male heir.

- In 1898, Empress Elisabeth is assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist, who stabs her with a thin needle-file as she walks between her hotel and a steamship.

- When Empress Elisabeth is assassinated with no son or male grandson to inherit the throne, rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire passes to Elisabeth's husband's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig.

- Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria dies of natural causes (typhoid) in 1896, passing the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

- Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are assassinated by a Serbian anarchist on June 28, 1914, leading directly to the Great War when Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

- Fort Riley is one of the major training grounds for the American Expeditionary Forces who will fight in the Western Front of the Great War. As American troops are moved into Europe, they are among those who spread the H1N1 influenza A virus. 

- The virus kills an estimated 25 million to 50 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920, with some estimates going as high as 100 million people.

March 20, 1964: Poet, novelist, and folk hero Brendan Behan, considered one of the all-time greatest Irish literary talents, dies at the age of 41 after collapsing into a diabetic coma in the street.

March 22, 1950: Convicted child sexual predator Frank La Salle is arrested for the kidnapping of Florence Sally Horner, whom he has abducted from her home in New Jersey 21 months earlier. Horner is ten years old at the time of the kidnapping. La Salle is sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison.

Although he denied it during his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov almost certainly based some of his narrative in his book Lolita on Horner’s story. In her 2018 book The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman describes how literary scholars know this.