Ila Solomon is a free woman this week. Consider yourself warned.
“Yeah, she’s not in our system anymore here,” said the jailer at the Tippecanoe County calaboose. He seemed relieved.
During a moment when my mind was wandering from one odd fence post to another, I ran into one-time Crown Point resident Ila Solomon and the ghost of her latest late husband, Gerald “Scooter” Gavan, while researching how weird things happen to people even after they die.
The announcement of her freedom in Lafayette reinforces that even dying doesn’t get you completely free of life’s oddness.
Indeed, while you might think that reaching the Great Beyond is some magical protection against humiliating indignities, that’s not true.
Take Charlie Chaplain, for example. The most embarrassing outcome inflicted on the first great movie star came after he died.
Body snatchers dug up his body and held it for $600,000 ransom in Switzerland three months after Chaplin died. That resurrection occurred just after Christmas, 1977.
Good plan. But his widow and eight children wouldn’t pay. Not a dime. That left the Little Tramp’s body snatchers with an 88-year-old corpus and a limited market to sell it.
Police tracked down the grave robbers 11 weeks later, and returned Chaplain’s remains to the cemetery where he’s now buried under six feet of concrete.
Scooter would have sympathized with Charlie. Among the worst things that happened to Scooter also occurred after his 2013 death in Lafayette.
Ila was his 55-year-old newlywed bride, though they had lived together for a decade. She originally was a Lake Countian who married Crown Point’s Wendell Solomon in 1979 and launched an active marrying and widow career.
She claimed Scooter, 88, was her first husband, except for the three previous marriages that records revealed she had ignored. Ila and Scooter’s love affair was sort of an April-Death romance.
Neighbors wondered why they hadn’t seen Scooter for some time. When police finally went looking for Scooter in 2014, they found his decomposing body in the living room Ila had wrapped him in a rug, thoughtfully sprinkling lime around the corpse.
Medical examiners said he’d been dead for at least nine months.
You’d been tempted to wonder what life was like in Scooter’s house for those months. Not many dinner guests, I’d bet.
Her theory — and she stuck to it — was that he had died just a few days earlier, and she was fulfilling his last wishes to fling open the widows so birds could consume him. He’d wanted her to tote him to a hill for the bird event. “Too heavy,” she told the court.
As Ila told it, Scooter claimed that’s what happened to his GI buddies who died on the beaches of Normandy. “Everyone has a death wish,” she told local TV newsies. “I opened up the door so the birds could come in and eat him. He wanted to see the world again through a bird’s eye view.”
Perhaps she meant “dying wish.” But in Ila’s case, it’s hard to tell.
The bird funeral didn’t work.
During the nine months of his terminal inertia on the living room floor, Ila insisted Scooter had attended the Kentucky Derby, got regular haircuts and strolled the mall and, perhaps only coincidentally, she had been cashing his Social Security and veterans pension checks every month – $20,000 total.
She even took his monthly World War II Purple Heart checks.
Her ultimate plan was — no kidding — to send him to a “body farm in Texas” where he’d be eaten by buzzards in some sort of freaky Viking/Zen/Texas ceremony. I do not know if there actually are such places in Texas, but I can offer no evidence against it, either.
A year and a half of legal dickering later — while bringing posters of Scooter to court every day and wearing his dog tags in solidarity — Ila eventually took a plea deal that included two months in jail, probation and returning the money.
Tippecanoe County’s legal machinery spent a year trying to figure out what happened to Scooter. They still don’t know how he died.
Indiana law has limited remedies, punishments and enthusiasm for dealing with dead relatives you left lying around your living room. It’s usually a creepy misdemeanor handled more as really bad manners than a crime.
As for Ila, she’s a relatively young woman. And she seems to have no romantic entanglements. Maybe she’ll come home to Lake County.
Husband No. 5 could be just around the corner. You’ve been warned.
