Doors frontman Jim Morrison died in Paris at the much too young age of 27 in 1971. It was a tragic yet all too familiar case of a rocker’s hedonistic lifestyle leading to his demise. Upon Morrison’s passing in Paris, he was laid to rest in the city’s famed Père-Lachaise cemetery, where fans have made pilgrimage to pay their respects ever since. One such fan, Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin, took things a step further: in 1981 he carved a white marble bust of Morrison that sat atop his headstone… until thieves absconded with it seven years later in 1988! Sacré bleu! I don’t know how someone(s) just walks off with 280-odd pounds of iconic marble, but then again I don’t know how people stole that 216-pound golden toilet or those 22 tons of posh cheese; these wily European criminals have their ways. So, the bust has been missing all this time, until French authorities made a surprise announcement on Monday: after 37 years, the Morrison bust was found! On a completely unrelated fraud investigation, lol!
Conceived as a tribute to Morrison, the sculpture was carved after his death by the Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin. It was placed at his grave at Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery in 1981, 10 years after the singer died in the French capital at the age of 27.
While the exact circumstances of Morrison’s death remain shrouded in mystery, most early accounts say the singer died of cardiac arrest in his bathtub.
From its perch on top of Morrison’s headstone, the statue welcomed the throngs of visitors who came to snap photos, lay flowers and — before the hiring of a guard to watch the site — smoke pot and party with one of Père-Lachaise’s most famous residents.
Seven years after the bust was placed at the site, it disappeared. Rumours swirled over what might have happened: some spoke of two fans who had managed to cart off the bust, reportedly weighing 128kg, on a moped in the middle of the night; others repeated the seemingly baseless claim that authorities had hidden the sculpture in order to protect it.
In 1994, after years had gone by without any sign of the sculpture, two Americans were arrested for attempting to erect their own bronze version of the bust at Morrison’s grave site.
Todd Mitchell, who said he had travelled from Utah and spent thousands of dollars of his own retirement fund to resurrect the bust, said the security guard was initially confused when he came across him and his nephew scrambling to bolt the bust to Morrison’s headstone in the dark. “He just looked dumbfounded … Most people are destroying stuff in that cemetery,” Mitchell told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1994.
On Monday, as fans of Morrison celebrated what police described on social media as an “unusual discovery”, there was little news on whether the bust would be returned to the singer’s tomb. Benoît Gallot, the curator of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, told Le Figaro: “The police haven’t contacted us, so I don’t know whether the bust will be returned to us.”
If, like me, you were wondering why on earth that poor man from Utah was arrested for bringing a replacement sculpture, the answer is he (and his nephew) weren’t really arrested for trying to replace the bust, but more for the fact that they were drilling holes in the headstone to install the new piece. Still, I feel like there’s a quirky movie to be made of Mr. Todd Mitchell’s $1,700 misadventure. But getting back to the real sculpture… I’d like to highlight the full title of the police crew that recovered this lost treasure. Officially, they are: “The Financial and Anti-Corruption Brigade of the Directorate of Judicial Police of the Prefecture of Police, under the authority of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office.” How do they get all that on les uniformes? And for anyone wondering how they verified it was the original piece, its authenticity was confirmed by the particular graffiti adorning it, as well as its missing nose, two features that were there at the time it was stolen. (The nose was rumored to have been sliced off by souvenir hunters. Ouch.) I hope the police do return the bust to its rightful home atop Morrison’s headstone in Père-Lachaise cemetery. Come on, la police. The time to hesitate is through, no time to wallow in the mire.
After nearly 40 years, a bust of Jim Morrison stolen from his gravesite at the famous Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris has been found
More: https://t.co/sZutVlpEXk pic.twitter.com/gR8DuN7BPV
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) May 20, 2025
photos credit: Fabio Mazzarella/Agenzia Sintesi/Avalon, hermes images/Avalon, Getty and via Twitter