On the evening of January 6, 2026, detectives conducting surveillance outside Mount Moriah Cemetery in southwest Philadelphia watched a brown Toyota RAV4 pull up and park. The driver climbed out, slipped through the perimeter fence, and disappeared into the dark. When he emerged roughly an hour later, he was carrying a crowbar and a burlap sack. Inside the sack: the mummified remains of two small children, three skulls, and additional loose bones.
Jonathan Christian Gerlach, 34, of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, did not resist. He allegedly admitted on the spot to stealing approximately 30 sets of human remains from the cemetery. It was, investigators would say, only the beginning of what they found.
A Mausoleum Lay Open
The investigation had started two months earlier. On November 7, 2025, a volunteer with the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery arrived to carry out routine maintenance at the historic burial grounds straddling southwest Philadelphia and the borough of Yeadon, Delaware County. Founded in 1855, Mount Moriah spans 160 acres and holds more than 150,000 grave sites, including burials dating to the Revolutionary War. The cemetery had ceased accepting new interments around 2011 and had since fallen into disrepair, maintained by a small nonprofit volunteer group that came out each Saturday to clear brush and tend the grounds.
What the volunteer found that November morning was not a maintenance problem. The marble floor of a mausoleum had been broken open. A rope and carabiner hung down into the exposed cavity below, positioned in a manner consistent with rappelling. The crypt, identified as holding the remains of Martha Hunter, who had died at 15 years of age in 1869, had been emptied completely.
Also left behind at the scene: a flathead screwdriver etched multiple times with the name “Bryan.” Detectives submitted the screwdriver and carabiner for DNA and fingerprint analysis. Yeadon Mayor Rohan Hepkins, who sits on the cemetery’s board, brought the case to police. An investigation began.
Good Shepherd Was Hit First
What detectives did not yet know was that Mount Moriah was not Gerlach’s first target. Between November 1 and 6, 2025 the week before the Yeadon discover someone broke into the condemned mausoleum at Good Shepherd Memorial Park in Plains Township, Luzerne County, roughly two hours north of Philadelphia.
The mausoleum had been declared structurally unsound and abandoned since 2015. It made no difference. Two sets of remains were removed from their crypts: those of Mary Cappellini Paga and Leo Terence. Human remains were found afterward wrapped in plastic just outside the open crypts, alongside cigarette butts and energy drink cans. Funeral director Chris Yanaitis was present when the mausoleum was boarded up and declared a crime scene. “It’s one thing to know where your family is and that they’re at peace,” he said. “But it’s another thing to have them taken and not know what’s being done with them.”
Yeadon Borough detective Leah Cesanek, investigating the Mount Moriah burglaries in early December, found the Good Shepherd case through an online search for cemetery thefts in the region. She contacted Plains Township police, who shared their report. The evidence matched: the same method, the same debris left behind. Gerlach’s phone records would later place his device near the Good Shepherd mausoleum on November 3, 2025, three days before the break-in was confirmed.
More Crypts Were Broken
Back at Mount Moriah, three weeks after the first discovery, police were called again. On November 29, 2025, another mausoleum had been forced open. The Prichard family tomb contained nine crypts. Five had been damaged.
The remains of Mary Prichard Steigleman, born 1878 and died 1940, were gone entirely. She had been the daughter of Jonathan Prichard, a wholesale grocer who built the mausoleum in 1912 specifically to keep his family together in death. Judy Prichard McCleary, a descendant, would later say he had not anticipated this.
On the same day, detectives found that a third mausoleum directly behind the Prichard family tomb had also been attempted, its concrete-sealed window chipped away before the effort was abandoned.
Inside the disturbed crypts, investigators recovered cigarette butts, empty energy drink cans, zip ties, a blue pry bar, and nylon rope. Each scene bore the same method: sealed stonework forced open with tools, marble slabs moved, the remains inside taken.
In December alone, four underground vaults were burglarized on a single day, with remains missing from the Slack, Ogden, McCullough, and Louber family plots. Additional vaults were damaged in the days that followed. By late December, detectives had confirmed at least 26 mausoleums and underground vaults had been burglarized or desecrated within Mount Moriah Cemetery alone. At the Baker Mausoleum, a single vault, Gerlach allegedly removed 16 sets of remains.
A Tip Changed Everything
In late December 2025, a tip arrived through a Lancaster City Police Department crime portal. The tipster identified Jonathan Gerlach as a possible suspect in the Good Shepherd Memorial Park burglary and mentioned something else: a witness had reportedly seen a partially decomposed human corpse hanging in the basement of Gerlach’s home in Ephrata. The tipster also noted that Gerlach had disappeared for several days in November, claiming he had been in Chicago selling a human skull.
Detectives pulled Gerlach’s vehicle registration and identified a brown Toyota RAV4. License plate reader data showed the vehicle traveling near Mount Moriah Cemetery during the estimated timeframes of the burglaries. Before November 2025, the RAV4 had never appeared on those readers in that vicinity. Cell phone records placed Gerlach’s phone pinging towers near the cemetery on repeated occasions, including overnight.
His social media accounts told a parallel story. An Instagram account under the username “deadshitdaddy” contained more than 100 images of skulls, many with captions indicating they were for sale. One post showed a skull with both eye sockets still intact, captioned “Snag her before I change my mind.” Another showed Gerlach posing on a motorcycle with a skull, captioned “riding a Harley, and slinging skulls.” He described himself publicly as a “curator of specimens” who could provide “pathology and osteology reports” on request.
A post in a Facebook group called “Human Bones and Skull Selling” showed a buyer publicly thanking Gerlach for mailing him what he described as “a possible teen.” A separate member thanked him for a “human skin bag.” Gerlach received payment through CashApp, where his profile picture showed someone holding a human skull in front of their face.
That Facebook group had more than 5,300 members and operated openly. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, it is not illegal to buy or sell human bones. What is illegal is theft, grave robbery, and interstate trafficking of stolen goods. Gerlach had been selling into a market that existed entirely in plain sight.
On legitimate specialist sites, skulls sell for $900 to $5,000. A full skeleton can fetch $7,000. In Facebook groups, items typically go for a few hundred dollars. Investigators have not confirmed how much Gerlach earned in total, but he admitted to making online sales and allegedly traveled to Chicago specifically to deliver a skull to a buyer in November.
Detectives also linked Gerlach to a retail theft on October 31, 2025, in East Earl Township, where he had allegedly stolen a headlamp, an LED glow stick, gloves, a hammer drill bit, and a metal cutting wheel from an Ace Hardware store. The store owner identified him through his Ace rewards card. A store receipt on the same date tied him to the purchase of a 12-inch steel tent stake. Investigators measured a tent stake recovered near a disturbed vault at Mount Moriah. It matched exactly.
Gerlach Was Caught
Detectives placed Mount Moriah under active surveillance. On the evening of January 6, 2026, they watched Gerlach park his RAV4, enter the cemetery, and exit approximately an hour later. Before he was even stopped, detectives could see skulls and bones on the back seat of his car. The burlap sack he carried contained the mummified remains of two children, three skulls, and additional bones. He told investigators he had used the crowbar to pry open a grave that evening. He admitted to taking approximately 30 sets of remains from across the cemetery. Then he offered to show detectives exactly what he had done, walking them through the sites he had desecrated.
The following morning, January 7, detectives executed a search warrant at Gerlach’s home on Washington Avenue in Ephrata. They found more than 100 full or partial sets of human remains in the basement: skulls on shelves, bones suspended from the ceiling, mummified hands and feet, a skeleton with a pacemaker still attached, and two decomposing torsos. Some of the remains had been reconstructed, fragments pieced back together and stitched. Delaware County District Attorney Tanner Rouse told reporters that detectives “walked into a horror movie come to life.”
Gerlach refused consent to search a storage unit registered in his name on East Main Street in Ephrata. Detectives sent a cadaver dog. The dog signaled on human remains through the closed door. A search warrant was granted and executed the following day. From that locker, investigators retrieved eight human corpses, miscellaneous body parts, ashes, and jewelry believed to have been removed from the graves. It was Gerlach’s fiancée who had told investigators the storage unit existed, apparently unaware of what was inside. Some of the remains were 200 years old. Others belonged to newborns.
The Aftermath
Jonathan Christian Gerlach was charged with 574 counts in connection with Mount Moriah Cemetery alone, including 26 counts of burglary, 26 counts of criminal trespass, 100 counts of abuse of corpse, 100 counts of receiving stolen property, and 26 counts of intentional desecration of a public monument. He was held at George W. Hill Correctional Facility on $1 million bail. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office opened a separate investigation into the Good Shepherd Memorial Park burglary. As of April 2026, no charges had been filed against Gerlach for that site.
Yeadon Borough Police Chief Henry Giammarco, who was among the first to enter Gerlach’s home, said it was “probably the most horrific thing” he had seen in 30 years of law enforcement. “There was an infant,” he told reporters. “And unfortunately, to see that, being a father and a grandfather, it truly tears your heart up.”
Friends who had known Gerlach through his years in the Pennsylvania heavy metal scene struggled to process what they were hearing. He had been a vocalist and lyricist for bands including Blind Bird and Road to Milestone. They remembered him as thoughtful and empathetic. One friend told reporters it seemed like psychosis of some kind, that something must have triggered it.
Investigators are still working to identify the remains and notify families. The task is complicated by the age of many of the burials. Some of the crypts date back more than 150 years. Detectives believe it is almost certain that additional cemeteries were targeted beyond Mount Moriah and Good Shepherd.
After the arrest, a man drove to Mount Moriah Cemetery alone. He walked the grounds and asked anyone he could find a question. “Where’s my dad?” he said. “Were my dad’s bones taken? Where are they?”
No one, at the time, could tell him.
