True Crime Society - The case of alleged Grave Robber Jonathan Gerlach

Jonathan Gerlach (34) is a Pennsylvanian man suspected of stealing more than 100 pieces of human remains from a cemetery. He has admitted to selling the remains online.

Police began an investigation in 2025, following a series of break-ins at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Pennsylvania.

Mount Moriah Cemetery is the biggest abandoned burial ground in America with about 150,000 grave sites.

At least 26 mausoleums and vaults in the cemetery had been broken into since November 2025.

Police narrowed their search down to Jonathan after an investigator checked vehicle license plates and found that Jonathan’s car had been near the cemetery when the burglaries had occurred.

Police say the break-ins centered on sealed vaults and mausoleums containing older burials, which had been smashed open or had stonework damaged to reach the remains inside.

A tip was also submitted online which suggested that Jonathan was connected to one particular mausoleum robbery. The tipster said they knew someone who had been in Jonathan’s home and they had spotted a “partially decomposed corpse” hanging in the basement.

The tipster also said that Jonathan had claimed to have been in Chicago ‘selling a human skull.’

Detectives started looking at Jonathan’s social media.

A member of a Facebook group actually called ‘HUMAN BONES AND SKULL SELLING GROUP’ tagged Jonathan in a post with a human skull and thanked him.

“Both eyes remain in the orbital sockets … Snag her before I change my mind,” Jonathan posted in August 2025 with the photo of a skull.

Another skull posted was missing its face and instead showed an open cavity between the forehead and the jaw. “Faceless ones are always underappreciated,” he posted in July 2024.

In 2024-2025, Jonathan’s neighbor Charles Rothermel reported seeing swarms of flies—”20 or 30 on each window”—covering the inside of Jonathan’s garage and basement windows.

Detectives also found Jonathan on a cash payment app and his profile photo was someone holding a human skull.

Jonathan was arrested on January 6, 2026, as he walked back to his Rav4 – presumably from the cemetery – with a crowbar. He was also carrying a burlap bag which held the remains of two children, three skulls and other bones.

Investigators could see bones and skulls visible on the back seat of a vehicle.

When they searched his home and a storage unit under his name, they found more than 100 human skulls, long bones, mummified hands and feet, two decomposing torsos and other skeletal items.

Specifically from the storage locker, detectives retrieved: eight human corpses, miscellaneous body parts, ashes, and older jewelry believed to have been removed from graves.

“They were in various states. Some of them were hanging, as it were. Some of them were pieced together, some were just skulls on a shelf,” Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse said.

Most were in the basement, authorities said, and they also recovered jewelry believed to be linked to the graves. In one case, a pacemaker was still attached.

According to the search warrant in the case, a headlamp, gloves and a metal cutting wheel, along with other items detectives said were commonly used for burglaries, were stolen from a local hardware store.

Jonathan confessed to investigators that he had stolen around 30 sets of human remains. He showed them the graves that he had taken the remains from. He told authorities that “that he sold some remains online but that the vast majority of them were in the basement.’

“Given the enormity of what we are looking at and the sheer, utter lack of reasonable explanation, it’s difficult to say right now, at this juncture, exactly what took place. We’re trying to figure it out,” DA Rouse told reporters.

A government official has called the case ‘a horror movie come to life.’

Jonathan has been charged with almost 575 alleged crimes including 100 counts each of abuse of a corpse and receiving stolen property, along with multiple counts of desecrating a public monument, desecrating a venerated object, desecrating a historic burial place, burglary, trespassing and theft.

A preliminary hearing has been tentatively scheduled for 20 January, 2026.

Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, a non-profit which has striven to maintain the graveyard as much as possible, has said it hopes to install new surveillance cameras, initiate patrols of the grounds, and erect a security fence in the aftermath of Jonathan’s arrest. The group has also asked the public to consider making tax-deductible donations to the cemetery to support the planned upgrades, as the Philadelphia news outlet WTXF reported.

Christine Mello told FOX43 that she drove to the cemetery to check in on her grandparents’ graves shortly after Jonathan’s arrest. She said feels heartbroken for the families who were impacted by the robbery.

“I pulled up and there was an elderly man there who was looking for his dad,” Mello recalled. “‘Where’s my dad at? Were my dad’s bones taken? Where are they?’ And I was calming down this man and being like, ‘is he in a mausoleum? What do we know?’”

In Pennsylvania it is legal to buy and sell human remains. All states allow selling of human remains except for eight that have broad bans: Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

Other states, however, make it illegal under certain circumstances.

Georgia and Tennessee, for example, only allow selling and trading of human remains within state boundaries. Nothing can go in or out of their jurisdictions.

Most collectors and dealers in human remains are running legal businesses, according to Jason Haack, owner of oddity store Bonez by Dezign said.

“We’re not grave robbers,” said Jason, of South Dakota. “We don’t condone that sort of activity. We don’t want to see things being stolen because we respect them for what they are.

This info is from PennLive.com

Bonez by Dezign has been around for 13 years, and over that time, Haack has handled hundreds of human remain pieces. Speaking to PennLive over the phone, he counted 14 human skulls sitting around him.

The only ethical sourcing for human remains is buying items when a university or college auctions them off, according to Haack. This happens because higher education institutions sometimes use human models for educational purposes, but they remodel and sell things off as they are no longer needed.

“It doesn’t happen all that often, but there’s enough ‘inventory’ floating around the market to keep it saturated,” Haack said.

But there are still ethical concerns with human remains donated for medical purposes. Did those people understand or agree that their remains eventually could be used and sold by collectors or turned into art?

A clear non-ethical and illegal way to source human remains is stealing from graves. Haack said if there’s a skull for sale that’s just “sitting on a table with a pile of dirt under it,” purchasing it would be “a big no.”

A gray area of sourcing comes from overseas. Sometimes, things are stolen from graves internationally, and they end up in the U.S. market, one way or another. Sometimes, these pieces are floating around the open market for decades, and it’s hard to determine their chronology of ownership.

“Most of us in this business know what’s legal and what’s not, so we don’t tend to worry about the police and feds. The thing you have to learn the most is your clientele,” Haack said.

If a dealer is rumored to partake in grave robbing, racism, sexism or other illegal and unethical actions, Haack said they get a “notch” on their name and the clientele will “bulldoze you over,” or stop buying from your shop.

It’s also important to have respect for the items, he said.

“I have a lot of pieces where I know their history and where they came from,” Haack said.

One of his favorite pieces is a skull from a 24-year-old man hanged by law enforcement in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1914. He was executed after shooting five people and killing two in May 1913.

“I cherish that piece,” Haack said.

Average people are often shocked by the idea of human remains in homes or being sold in shops and ask Haack why he doesn’t just bury them, he said.

“Why would we bury the remains? So they can be lost, forgotten, not loved? These pieces are cherished as much as if they were still living,” Haack said.