Today in 1977, they moved the body of Elvis Presley and his mother Gladys from the cemetery where they were buried to Graceland’s after they attempted to body snatch the coffin. Elvis died on August 16, 1977. They buried his body in a crypt at the Forest Hill Mausoleum.
His mother, Gladys, was disinterred and placed in the crypt below him. The crypts were inside a gated room inside the Mausoleum.
About two weeks later, there was a botched attempt to steal Elvis’ remains from the crypt. They have never revealed the motive for this. City officials determined that the bodies of Elvis and his mother, in their matching copper coffins, would move to Graceland, where they rest today.
On August 29, 1977, they arrested three people in Memphis after trying to steal Elvis’ body. As a result, they would later move his remains to Graceland.
In the early morning hours, the three men entered the cemetery over a back wall and made their way toward the white marble mausoleum.
The men apparently became suspicious and turned to leave, the police said. They then arrested them, yet no charges against the men. The police refused to identify them.
The Memphis prosecutor dropped the charges against the three men who allegedly tried to swipe Presley’s body when the chief witness and accuser (legalese for “rat”), one Ronnie Lee Adkins, showed his unreliability by getting himself arrested for fraud.
Adkins apparently had checked into Memphis’s Doctor’s Hospital, posing as a policeman to claim that the city’s insurance plan covered him.
Twenty-five years later, Adkins confessed that a Shelby County deputy Billy Talley staged the corpse-snatching hoax so the Presley family could convince county officials to allow them to move Elvis to Graceland for security reasons.
In a bizarre twist, Adkins later helped put away Talley in 1997 for conspiring to murder an FBI agent.
