Every year, hundreds of thousands of people walk into the Meditation Garden behind Graceland and stand at Elvis Presley’s grave. Almost none of them know that he wasn’t originally buried there — or that the reason he ended up in that garden is one of the strangest crime stories in American history.
Twelve days after he died, three men climbed a cemetery wall in the dark, heading for his tomb. They planned to steal his body and demand $10 million.
Start with the funeral. Elvis died on August 16, 1977. Two days later, he was taken to Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, where his mother Gladys had been buried since 1958. His coffin was solid copper and weighed around 900 pounds — so heavy that six men, including his road manager Joe Esposito, carried it into the mausoleum. Outside, more than 50,000 fans came to pay their respects, leaving over 3,000 floral arrangements on the lawn.
Then, in the early hours of August 29, 1977, three men came over a back wall of that cemetery and made their way towards the white marble mausoleum. What they didn’t know was that the police were already waiting. Officers had been tipped off in advance about a planned “trial run,” and a task force had been watching the grave. The men grew suspicious, turned to leave — and were arrested on the spot.
Here’s the thing, though. The plan made absolutely no sense. To reach Elvis, they would have had to get through two concrete slabs and a solid sheet of marble. No tools were found on them. No explosives. And even if they’d somehow got to the coffin, it weighed 900 pounds — you’d need a forklift, not three blokes and a ladder. Memphis police clearly thought something was off. They charged the men with criminal trespassing and held them.
Elvis Presley’s First Burial Site: Where His Body Was Almost Stolen
The case fell apart quickly. The man who tipped off police was an informant named Ronnie Lee Adkins — himself one of the three. He then damaged his own credibility by getting arrested for fraud, and the prosecutor dropped the charges, declaring him too unreliable to build a case on. A lawyer for the others called the whole thing a hoax.
Now here’s where it gets genuinely strange. Twenty-five years later, Adkins claimed the entire thing had been staged — set up so that the Presley family could persuade county officials to let them move Elvis home to Graceland on security grounds.
Whether or not that’s true, that is exactly what happened next. Vernon Presley had wanted his son buried on the grounds all along, but Graceland wasn’t zoned for burials.
Three weeks after Elvis died, lawyers for the estate petitioned the local board for an exemption — citing the attempted theft and the enormous cost of guarding the grave around the clock. On September 28, 1977, permission was granted. On October 2, Elvis and his mother were moved, in their matching copper coffins, to the Meditation Garden.
He’s been there ever since — alongside Gladys, Vernon, his grandmother Minnie Mae, his grandson Benjamin, and his daughter Lisa Marie—a garden Elvis built himself, as a quiet place to think.