‘The most horrific thing I’ve seen:’ Authorities say a Lancaster County man stole more than a hundred skulls and bones from a historic cemetery

He stored them in the basement, authorities said — the human bones and headless torsos, the skulls and mummified feet, a skeleton with a pacemaker still attached. More than 100 pieces and parts, in all.

There were so many remains, they said, that the police officers who discovered them stopped short, stunned by what they were seeing.

Jonathan Christian Gerlach, 34, of Ephrata, is charged in what Delaware County law enforcement officials described as the most sweeping and unsettling case of its kind they have encountered: the systematic theft of human remains from Mount Moriah Cemetery, the sprawling 160-acre burial ground that straddles Philadelphia and Yeadon Borough, and the place where Betsy Ross was once interred and Civil War soldiers still lie.

“After 30 years, I can say this is probably the most horrific thing that I’ve seen,” said Yeadon Police Chief Henry Giammarco.

Authorities announced Gerlach’s arrest Thursday on charges of burglary, abuse of corpse and desecration and theft or sale of venerated objects. He is being held in jail in lieu of $1 million bail.

Inside the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office, law enforcement officials projected Gerlach’s photo — his neck covered in tattoos, a gold ring through his nose, green eyes rimmed red — onto a television screen as they outlined crimes whose scale and depravity District Attorney Tanner Rouse said were difficult to comprehend.

Prosecutors said Gerlach repeatedly broke into mausoleums and underground vaults, prying them open with tools and carrying away bodies, bones, and body parts, leaving behind desecrated graves and questions.

The thefts began last fall, authorities said, and ended after dark on Jan. 6, when Yeadon Borough detectives caught Gerlach as he was leaving the cemetery.

For weeks, the detectives had been tracking reports of vandalism and theft from at least 26 mausoleums and underground vaults inside Mount Moriah Cemetery, said Yeadon Mayor Rohan Hepkins, who sits on the cemetery’s board and who brought the case to police.

Investigators tied Gerlach to the crimes, investigators said, after his brown Toyota RAV4 began appearing on nearby license plate readers around the times the burglaries were believed to have occurred. The vehicle had never shown up on the readers before the thefts began, according to the affidavit of probable cause for Gerlach’s arrest. Records also showed his cell phone in the area.

“This was good, old-fashioned police work,” Rouse said.

On Jan. 6, detectives said they watched Gerlach walk out of the cemetery carrying a burlap sack and a crowbar. He was arrested beside his SUV, its back seat strewn with human remains. Inside the sack, detectives said, were the mummified remains of two children, three skulls, and several loose bones.

According to the affidavit, Gerlach told detectives he had used the crowbar to pry open a grave that night to steal the remains. He also admitted to taking at least 30 sets of human remains from across the cemetery, investigators said.

The next day, Jan. 7, a search of Gerlach’s home on the 100 block of Washington Avenue in Ephrata uncovered what Rouse described as the grim collection he had been amassing: remains scattered on shelves and suspended from the ceiling, some in fragments, others stitched back together.

Despite what authorities called overwhelming evidence that Gerlach committed the crimes, much remains unknown, Rouse said Thursday.

“We don’t know what he was doing with them,” he said.

Investigators have not identified a motive, and they cannot say whether Mount Moriah was the only cemetery targeted.

“There are other reports out there that we have not been able to corroborate,” Rouse said, declining to name specific locations. “And frankly, I don’t know that we ever will.”