Jim Morrison’s long-lost graveside bust discovered in French police search
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(Credits: Public Domain)
The bust, which once adorned the grave of The Doors singer Jim Morrison, has been discovered by French police, 37 years after it first went missing.
A post made on Instagram on May 17th revealed that the bust, created as a tribute to Morrison by Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin in 1981 and laid at his graveside Paris’ Père-Lachaise cemetery, was found by authorities in a “chance discovery” while they were investigating a separate fraud case.
The sculpture, covered in graffiti and missing a large chunk of its nose – reportedly sliced off before its disappearance in 1988 – oversaw thousands of visitors to Morrison’s grave for the seven years it sat in residence.
Fans were often known not only to leave tributes but also to take drugs and have parties at the site, sparking speculation that one such reveller was responsible for the theft. There was also an unsupported claim that the authorities took the sculpture back into hiding in order to protect it from damage.
It added to the mounting mystery that swirled around the circumstances of Morrison’s death, where he lost his life aged 27 in 1971 inside his Paris apartment. The exact cause of the singer’s passing has forever remained unknown, with a popular conspiracy theory claiming that he, in fact, could have faked his own death in order to live in hiding.
Two American fans were arrested in 1994 for attempting to place a replica of the bust at the graveside. However, now that the original has been rediscovered, it is not known whether it will return to its former resting place.
Benoît Gallot, the curator of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, told French media in light of the revelation: “The police haven’t contacted us, so I don’t know whether the bust will be returned to us.”
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