A Pennsylvania man accused of desecrating a historic cemetery was charged with hundreds of counts after authorities discovered “a horror movie come to life” at his home, officials said Thursday.
More than 100 human skulls, as well as “numerous” long bones, mummified feet, decomposing torsos and other remains, were found Wednesday in the home of Jonathan Gerlach, 34, according to a probable cause affidavit.
The remains were found in Gerlach’s basement, Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse told reporters. Eight additional sets of human remains were found at Gerlach’s storage locker, he said.
“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,” Rouse said.
It’s unclear what Gerlach is alleged to have been doing with the remains, Rouse added, noting that some of them were hundreds of years old. Another set of remains was found with a pacemaker, he said.
“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,” Rouse said.
Gerlach was arrested Tuesday leaving Mount Moriah, a sprawling cemetery that stretches from Philadelphia into the nearby borough of Yeadon, according to the probable cause affidavit.
He was charged with 300 counts of theft, receiving stolen property and abuse of a corpse, court records show. He was charged with dozens more counts of criminal mischief, burglary, intentional desecration of a venerated object and other crimes.
Gerlach is being held in lieu of $1 million cash bail, Rouse said.
Court records do not list an attorney who could speak on Gerlach’s behalf. The affidavit says Gerlach told authorities that he admitted stealing roughly 30 sets of human remains from Mount Moriah.
Betsy Ross was once interred at the cemetery before her remains were moved, Yeadon Mayor Rohan Hepkins said at the news conference, and soldiers from every war since the Revolutionary War are buried there.
The site is an “inviting target,” Hepkins said, because it has no fence and there are many points of entry with easy access.
Authorities learned of the alleged crimes after board members with a nonprofit group that works to preserve the cemetery notified police that grave sites had been desecrated, Hepkins said.
From Nov. 7 to Tuesday, 26 underground vaults and mausoleums at the cemetery were broken into or damaged, according to the affidavit. Twenty-five of those sites are more than a century old, according to the affidavit.
After investigators identified Gerlach as a suspect in the break-ins, they conducted surveillance of the cemetery and observed him leaving the area Tuesday carrying a burlap bag, the affidavit alleges.
Inside the bag were the mummified remains of two small children, three skulls and other bones, according to the affidavit. Investigators found the remains at Gerlach’s home in Ephrata, roughly 70 miles away, on Wednesday, according to the affidavit.
Rouse said the remains found at Gerlach’s home most likely came from other cemeteries in addition to Mount Moriah, though authorities have not confirmed which.
In a statement, the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery thanked the district attorney’s office and local police departments and said the group had worked extensively with all parties involved in the investigation that led to Gerlach’s arrest.
