Crypt above Marilyn Monroe's is for sale posted 8/15/2009 6:59:21 PM | 1 kudo what's this?     report abuse tagged: news, death, stars, straddle

StraddleMyNose

Richard Poncher's eternal sleep will soon be disrupted.

The onetime Beverly Hills resident, who died 23 years ago at age 81, will be moving out of the crypt above Marilyn Monroe's resting spot at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery.

Poncher's wife intends to sell the crypt, said to have once been owned by Monroe's former husband, Yankee great Joe Dimaggio.

So while the plaque on Poncher's crypt reads: "To the man who gave us everything and more," his wife Elsie is hoping he has just a little more to give. She wants to use the money to help pay off the $1.6 million mortgage on her Beverly Hills home.

"I can't be more honest than that," she said. "I want to leave it free and clear for my kids."

Elsie Poncher plans to start the bidding at $500,000 when she places the crypt on eBay, making it -- per square foot -- one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on the market.

Richard Poncher was a serial entrepreneur, to hear his wife tell it, who made a fortune with a variety of electronics firms and once sold surplus U.S. Army airplanes and parts. She claims he built two bulletproof cars for Al Capone and owned 12 Rolls Royces in his lifetime.

"He wasn't afraid to tackle anything," Elsie Poncher said. "Besides that, he was a helluva nice guy."

She said they lived a colorful, outsize life after meeting in Chicago and moving west. "He knew all the gangsters," Elsie Poncher said. The couple ate at the legendary Los Angeles restaurants that catered to Hollywood -- the Brown Derby, Chasens, Perinos.

Elsie Poncher said her husband bought the crypt from DiMaggio during the ballplayer's 1954 divorce from Monroe. Richard Poncher had no way of knowing what an icon Monroe would become in death or that she'd someday be entombed at the Westwood cemetery.

The Ponchers were at the Regency Hotel in New York talking to DiMaggio, Elsie Poncher said, when the retired ballplayer asked, "You want to buy two crypts?"

"Who the hell wants two crypts?" her husband replied.

He later bought them, one for himself and one for Elsie.

When he was dying, Richard Poncher approached his wife with a request. "He said, 'If I croak, if you don't put me upside down over Marilyn, I'll haunt you the rest of my life,'" Elsie Poncher said.

Right after the funeral, she said, she told the funeral director of her husband's wish. "I was standing right there, and he turned him over," she said.

The cemetery is the final resting spot for many celebrities, among them Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Rodney Dangerfield, Merv Griffin, Mel Torme, Truman Capote and -- most recently -- Farrah Fawcett.

Monroe's spot, though, is the most popular. Admirers leave roses and lipstick marks on the crypt.

The dead man who's being evicted by his widow bought the crypt from Joe DiMaggio after the Yankee great divorced the movie star.

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I got this news item from the Columbus Dispatch

Now my question for all of you is, should anyone be allowed to sell a crypt that is currently in use?

*Bonus question*

If the opportunity came for a crypt to become available for you (that's if you wanted to be placed into a crypt), who would the celebrity be, and where exactly would you want that crypt to be in regards to that celebrity, over, under, or beside that celebrity?

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