A tour manager and roadie stealing Gram Parsons’ body from a Los Angeles airport by telling officials they had a sexual encounter to get back to sounds like an uncouth music industry joke, but on November 6, 1973, two men appeared in court to plead guilty for that very real, very wild crime that police officers half-jokingly dubbed “Gram Theft Parsons.”
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And just to clear the air before we dive in, the manager and roadie were the ones rushing off to meet their anonymous female scapegoat, not the coffin and corpse of Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers guitarist Gram Parsons.
Two Men Plead Guilty For Stealing Gram Parsons Body
On November 6, 1973, Philip C. Kaufman and Michael D. Martin appeared in Los Angeles court to plead guilty to misdemeanor theft charges of their former business associate, Gram Parsons, who had died a month and a half earlier in his room at the Joshua Tree Inn, roughly 140 miles east of L.A. Parsons’ body had been in a coffin awaiting shipment from the Los Angeles International Airport to New Orleans when Kaufman and Martin arrived at the airport, posing as off-duty hearse drivers.
According to Kaufman and Martin, they were fulfilling their colleague’s final wishes. “It was Gram’s request,” an anonymous source told Rolling Stone shortly after Kaufman and Martin’s arrest. “Just something he had told them not too long before he died. ‘If I go, I want to be in Joshua Tree, and I want my ashes scattered here.’ That sort of thing.”
So, Kaufman and Martin set out to make that happen. The anonymous source told the magazine that when the two men spoke to airport officials, “They made up this story about how they didn’t really want to go get this body when they had a girl all ready someplace to f*** them out of their minds. So, they played that out to the guy. ‘Come on, we gotta get to this girl, we’re working overtime, let’s get out of here.’ Like that. So, they signed a name, ‘Jeremy Nobody,’ to the slip and took the body off.”
After they secured Parsons’ coffin with his body inside, Kaufman and Martin drove it up to Cap Rock in Joshua Tree National Monument. Per Parsons’ alleged wishes, they burned the coffin and spread the ashes in the high desert country.
A Legal Battle Between Family and Friends
Before Philip Kaufman and Michael Martin’s coffin heist, Gram Parsons’ family had planned a New Orleans burial for the Flying Burrito Brothers founder. Per the anonymous source who spoke to Rolling Stone in 1973, Parsons’ friends “resented” the family, who they believed not only went against their colleague’s final wishes but also excluded Parsons’ friends from the funeral arrangements.
Police arrested Kaufman first, booking him at the Venice police station. “I’m charged with stealing a coffin,” Kaufman told the press. “One of the cops called it ‘Gram Theft Parsons.’ He said, ‘We had the damndest time trying to figure out what to charge you with. I didn’t know what the charge was, or I would have turned myself in. Not armed with that knowledge, I just sat tight.” The day after Kaufman’s arrest, Martin arrived at the police station with his lawyer to surrender himself.
The court eventually reduced the men’s grand theft charges to misdemeanor theft. They both pled guilty and received 30-day suspended sentences, a $300 fine each, and a joint fine of $708 in funeral home expenses. (That’s a fine of about $2,130 and $5,027 today, respectively.)
Photo by Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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