French police say they have found a bust of The Doors frontman Jim Morrison that was stolen from his grave in Paris in 1988.
Officers with a financial crimes and anti-corruption unit in the French Directorate of Judicial Police found the marble bust during an unrelated investigation, the DJP Paris branch said Friday on Instagram.
“This was a chance discovery during a search carried out in a fraud case,” the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office said, according to Le Parisien. The prosecutors did not say where the bust was found or how it had ended up there.
Morrison died in Paris at the age of 27 in 1971 and was buried in the city’s Pere-Lachaise cemetery. The bust, made by Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin, was installed in 1981 at Morrison’s grave to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his death, according to Rolling Stone.
“Obviously, it’s a piece of history, and one Jim’s family wanted there on his grave, so it’s gratifying to see that it’s been recovered,” representatives of Morrison’s estate told Rolling Stone.
Visitors had vandalized the bust with graffiti and chipped pieces off of its nose in the years before it was stolen. They also damaged Morrison’s original gravestone, which his parents replaced in 1990 with the epitaph reading “True To His Spirit” in Greek, according to CNN.
Pere-Lachaise cemetery curator Benoit Gallot told Le Figaro that police “have not contacted us, I don’t know if the bust will be returned to us.”
