The Misery Machine - The Case of Jonathan Gerlach

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

This week, Drewby and Yergy do something a little different... We'll be discussing the case of 34-year-old Jonathan Gerlach of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, who was arrested in January 2026 for allegedly stealing human remains from the historic Mount Moriah Cemetery. Investigators discovered over 100 sets of human remains, including skulls and mummified parts, at his home and storage unit. He faces hundreds of criminal counts, including burglary, abuse of a corpse, and desecration of public monuments, and is currently held on $1 million bail.Note: Yes, I know we're pronouncing "Gerlach" wrong. We noticed after the fact while we were already away. We'd normally just re-record those parts, but we don't have the set up to do that overseas. This is why I probably shouldn't write or record with an active fever ever again... Oops. Since he's the perp, I think we should just call him "Jonathan Grossguy." 🍳Download Royal Cooking - ⁠https://t2m.io/The_Misery_Machine_Feb26⁠ 🌳The Friends Of Mount Moira Cemetery GoFundMe: ⁠https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-friends-of-mount-moriah-cemetery⁠Support Our Patreon: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠PayPal: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join Our Facebook Group: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: miserymachinepodcastTwitter: misery_podcastDiscord: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠#themiserymachine #podcast #truecrime

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This should be tons of fun. Marvel television's daredevil, born again, now streaming only on Disney Plus. The viewing in burial is about $8,300 in 2023, with a funeral with cremation only coming in just $2,000 less. However, if you've lost a loved one anytime recently, you'd know that these figures vary wildly. Now, with this in mind, you'd hope that once the funeral was over and your loved one's final tab was paid, they'd be resting in peace for all eternity, right? Now, unfortunately for many families in southeastern Pennsylvania, this wouldn't be the case. Between November 7, 2025 and January 6th of 2026, Detective Leah Chesnik of the Yadenboro Police Department

and Detective Chris Carr of Delaware County's Criminal Investigation Division responded to numerous calls regarding burglarized graves within Mount Moriah Cemetery. At around 8 p.m. on their final night of surveillance, The detectives noticed a suspicious Toyota Rav4 parked on a street near the cemetery. The vehicle contained a number of skulls and bones that were plain view visible in the backseat. It was then what looked like a scene out of an old horror movie that a man was witnessed leaving the cemetery holding what the detectives described as a burlap sack, a crowbar, and other assorted items. That man was arrested and later identified as 34-year-old Jonathan Christian Gerlack of Ephraud of Pennsylvania. Inside of the burlap sack was the mummified remains of two small children, as well as three skulls and other assorted bones.

He had to use the crowbar to break into a number of graves and even managed to get into the vaults by repelling down with a length of rope that he tied to a tree branch. After the authorities secured a warrant to search Jonathan's home located at 100 Washington Avenue, they found, and I quote, over 100 human skulls, numerous human long bones, mummified human feet and hands, two decomposing human torso. and other assorted skeletal items. Eight more sets of human remains were also discovered in a storage unit belonging to Jonathan. It's like my grandmother's dangerous. It is. It's gross. Look at the one hanging. Look at these ones, all the ones behind you. God damn.

Oh, that one's still alive. That's how long. It's all five. What, I want to get the hand. Oh, look at this. Oh, God. What the f***. Is that a pacemaker? In review of the evidence, the DA's office hit him with every charge they could possibly justify.

Those charges were as follows. Burglary, not adapted for overnight accommodation, no person present. 26 counts. Criminal trespass, 26 counts of felony three and felony two. Abuse of a corpse, 100 counts. Thiefed by unlawful taking 100 counts. Receiving stolen property, 100 counts. Intentional desecration of public monument, 26 counts.

Intentional desecration of venerated object, 26 counts. Intentional desecration of historic lots and burial places, 26 counts. Criminal mischief damaged property, 26 counts. Defiant trespasser, seven counts. But this was not Jonathan's first brush with the law. On November 10th, 2025, he was arrested in charge with retail theft after he allegedly stole $167 in goods from a business in East Earl Township on Halloween. What the business sold and what he stole currently remains a mystery at the

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Ready to prove you're a top chef, then download Royal Cooking for free today and start your culinary journey. Thanks, and back to the episode. Shortly after his arrest, first assistant district attorney Tanner Rouse held a press conference to discuss Jonathan's charges. We eventually watched and caught Mr. Gerlock as he desecrated yet another monument as recently as two years ago. But this was your run club era.

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registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk to principle regardless of the strategy used. Task performance does not guarantee future results. He was taken into custody, searchworts were executed in his home in Ephrada, where over 100 human skeletons were recovered. And that's in part, at this point, we are still trying to figure out how many of those are complete and what exactly we are looking at. A separate storage locker was found to be in Mr. Girolock's possession. That also was in Ephrada. We found there eight more human remains. Very simply, detectives recovered an awful lot of bones at this point, and we are still trying to piece together who they are, where they are from, and how many we are looking at. and it's going to be quite some time before we have a final answer.

He is aided on 26 counts of burglary, criminal trespass, and a host of other offenses. Kelly Wilson is handling our media affairs. It's going to pass out of complaints that you guys have the complete list of charges at your disposal. And it is a whole laundry list of charges, as we mentioned previously. One thing we didn't mention, though, is that Tanner was really sloppy while conducting these crimes. I'm actually shocked that they hadn't caught him sooner. Maybe they just really wanted to catch him in the act. Now, according to reports, he liked to leave cigarette butts in every.

empty cans of monster behind it the graves, all of which were gathered in swab for DNA. His Ravre 4 was also known to the police thanks to license plate readers. Very simply, detectives walked into a horror movie come to life the other night, guys. This is an unbelievable scene that no one involved from myself to the detectives, to the medical examiners that are now trying to piece together what they are looking at quite literally. None of them have ever seen anything like this before. When I was 16 years old, a friend of mine was killed in a car accident, and I personally have visited his grave site, as many people do when they lose a love one. I know his parents have also

visited that site. I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine what it would put them through to know that someone like this guy had dug up those remains and was doing God knows well with it. This is one of the main reasons that as the stewardess of my grandmother's ashes, I'm terrified to bury them. So I keep them locked away in my Billy bookcase. I don't want some weirdo leaving monster at her grave. It is, it is truly in the most literal sense. of the word horrific. I, I grieve for those who are upset by this, who are going through and who are trying to figure out if it is, in fact, their loved one or their child, because we found remains that we believe to be months old infants among those that he had collected. So our hearts

go out to every family that is impacted by this. Some of these are hundreds of years old. We are trying to figure out exactly what we are looking at. We quite simply at this juncture are not able to date and identify all of them. The Mount Moriah Cemetery was established in 1855, making it 171 years old in 2026. Some of the graves and mausoleums that Jonathan broke into were about that old, while other remains that were recovered contained pacemakers were more recently deceased. According to ABC6, Jonathan sometimes sold some of his oddities in a Facebook group called Human Bones and Skulls Selling Group. The post in which a buyer thanked him for mailing a possible teen and a baboon and a monkey have since been removed. And the admins have paused this group as of January

16th, 2026. Folks knew the colonel approved of his new honey chili crisp and jalapeno ranch sauces the moment he tasted them and said, that's right. No notes. Just absolute silence.

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Take these monkey skulls, for example. Most monkey species are protected under the ESA, which strictly prohibits the sale, interstate or international, of any part or product of an endangered or threatened species without a specific permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. buying and trading oddities is not the problem here it's the question of where is it sourced from because it certainly could be from somewhere nefarious you know that old joke about oh don't go to that part of town because you'll end up in a bathtub full of ice with your kidney missing well that isn't too far from this if you've not seen the episode of trafficked underworlds with mariana van zeller where she discusses this very topic than you should there is a whole black market thriving right under our noses where shady funeral homes and medical supply companies are stealing

body parts and marketing them as oddities or materials for spiritual practices. So I'd love to hear from you some of the darkest things that you've seen in this industry and the things that you think shouldn't exist. First and foremost, it is far too easy to get away with theft of either personal affects or body parts in the funeral business. There are plenty of opportunities if someone were so inclined to go in there with a scalpel or not even necessarily in the case of an autopsy, all of the organs are conveniently presented to us in a bag. What would a person do with a bag full of someone's insides? If they were so inclined, they could make wet specimens, put them in a jar, fix them with

formaldehyde or alcohol, and sell them. So there's a market for them? There is a market, yes, yes. You could do that and it would be totally legal for you to do that? It would not be legal to take the organ, but it is legal to buy, sell, and trade organs in 47 of the 50 states. And it sells for good money? There's an incentive? Oh, yeah. It can be very profitable. 43-year-old Jeremy Polly, a Thompson-Pensilvania man who is sentenced to 72 months in prison for conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen property, shared his thoughts on Jonathan in his case.

Keep in mind, Jeremy is the man who got in trouble for trafficking stolen human remains for his part in the Harvard. medical school scandal that operated from 2018 to 2022. I've said this many times about him since I've been asked about him. Either he's mentally ill or he has the biggest balls I've ever seen because to do what he was doing at the volume he was doing it, I can't fathom, you know, what would possess someone to do that. And obviously he was selling the stuff, you know, I don't know why he was collecting stuff and stuff such volume. It's really weird to me because I know he had posted about forming an LLC on forensic analysis

and things like that. So maybe the best case scenario, in my opinion, is in some warped way. Maybe that's what he was trying to do was to build some kind of database to learn. But that's giving him a lot of credit. I definitely think greed was a huge factor here. About eight years ago, prior to Robin Graves, Jonathan worked on a musical project called Blind Bird. In this clip here, he discusses his album entitled Vulture.

Perhaps he should have just kept doing that. So this new Blind Bird album called Vulture, started writing it last September in 2015. I went through a pretty rough breakup that kind of, it was abrupt, and it left me to really question a lot of things about myself, my faith walk. everything I kind of assumed about who I was as a man and as an individual. And I cooped myself up in my apartment for probably a good seven months just writing this album and getting it all out of my system. For the most part, the album started out as a reaction to the woman in question. who kind of left me very hurt and confused,

a lot of open-ended questions. And she and I met up a couple times in the middle of writing this album. And just kept digging things back up, and in the midst of that, other things were going on. I spent most of my time staring at a wall in my apartment writing. And I just kind of happened to ask myself the question,

what do I really believe? What do I believe about myself? What do others believe about me? And the album kind of expanded into this mixture of dealing with that broken relationship, dealing with things I hate about myself, and dealing with friends who walked away from me because I decided to be real about who I was and what I felt. So this album is a culmination of the past 10 months. In the wake of the recent disturbances, other area cemeteries wondered if they too might be victims of Jonathan's crimes. The photography and urban exploration Facebook page called A Lady Called Jonna made the following post on January 16th, which read in part. We visited the abandoned Good Shepherd mausoleum in Plains Township, Pennsylvania on September 13th, and witnessed that four bodies had been reloaded.

located by family members. And then right around the first week in November, we heard that someone had stolen two bodies from the chapel. Then the first week of January, detectives patrolling Mount Moriah Cemetery said they found a Toyota parked outside the cemetery with human skulls and bones in the back seat and caught a man walking back to the Toyota, carrying a crow bar and a burlap sack filled with a child's mummified remains. Jonathan Gurillatch, 34, was arrested and is facing more than 500 criminal charges following an investigation into repeated break-ins at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Yaden. Apparently, he left a trail of energy drink cans everywhere he went, and the police are testing

the DNA on those cans to compare to some of the energy drink cans that were left at the Good Shepherd Chapel to find out if he was the culprit there also. Just a day prior, News 8's Bailey Martin spoke with Tom Bowman, who lives right next to the now-abandon in Good Shepherd Memorial Cemetery in Luzerne County. And it was getting worse. Tom Bowman has lived on Westminster Road since the 80s, right down the street from a now abandoned Good Shepherd Memorial Cemetery in Luzerne County. Well, listen, I got sick of looking at it.

No, it was, it was a mess. And I figured, well, at least I could do is cut the grass. Tom says he's cut the grass and kept an eye on the cemetery, especially near holidays for the last several years. I said, Ava, I'll be down in a couple days to clean it up for veterans day. So when I went down there, I looked inside and the coffins were open. The one coffin they tried to pull out and they must have pulled the end off of it. And I'm assuming that was the one that they emptied.

Tom reported what he saw that day on November 6th to police. And then the next thing I noted it was, you know, a whole bunch of cops up there. There, the coroner was up there. Cigarette butts and two empty energy drink cans found near the Crips are now being tested by police to see if they're a match for effort of resident Jonathan Gerlock. Although he's not being charged just yet, police are now investigating if he could be in connection to two bodies stolen right behind those boarded up walls. The Crips that once held a Mary Capolini Paga and Leo Terrence were empty. It's getting very strange, but at my age, nothing. surprises me.

John Schmel Jr., who serves as the president of the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, started a GoFundMe campaign aimed at ramping up security and conducting repairs at the 171-year-old burial grounds. John, who is a fourth-generation caretaker who has personally reset over 500 monuments, sees his work as not just a duty, but a family legacy. His post read in part, the past eight weeks have been incredibly difficult for all of us. The friends have discovered several disturbed mausoleums and vaults on the property. I've personally placed nearly every 911 call regarding these incidents, ensuring that authorities were notified within minutes of any discovery.

While I cannot share specific details due to the active and ongoing investigation, please know that we are working closely with the appropriate authorities to address these violations of our sacred space. He continued, as a nonprofit that relies entirely on donations, we are currently at a crossroads. We want to move forward with these vital infrastructure improvements, but our current funds are stretched thin by these unforeseen emergencies. Mount Moriah is more than just a cemetery. It is a repository of our shared history and a final resting place for our families. These recent events have been a wake-up call that our aging infrastructure can no longer protect this sacred space on its own. If you're interested in supporting John's mission, we will post a link to the GoFundMe in our pin comment and video description. To date, the fundraiser has collected about 5% of its $100,000 goal.

The preservation of historic landmarks like cemeteries is important to us. so we will be making a donation as well. Art Anderson, who serves as the Secretary of the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, took Bailey Martin on a tour of the grounds to survey the damage. Somebody in trust. Have no fear. Chosen Foods is here to defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients. With cooking oils, salad dressings, and mayo, all powered by the good fats from 100% pure avocado oil

and simple delicious ingredients. Chosen foods. That also entrusted society, the community, the community. to let their people rest and now they're not resting. We walked the path that Gerlock is accused of taking for months where concrete now replaces stained glass windows on mausoleums. Mausoleums like this have been broken into... Bricks are thrown where they were torn from and vaults left open.

This is an example of one of those underground vaults that were broken into. You can see bricks everywhere. Scratch marks indicating that someone struggled to get this 9,000, pound top off the vault and get themselves down inside. I'm sure history is not going to stop this from happening, but we need to prevent it in the future. They now have installed cameras and have a GoFundMe set up so other families like Diane's can walk to their loved ones graves and not worry if they're still there. It's terrible to have to think about that somebody would do that. Pray that first of all it wasn't touched and second of all if she,

if it was, then we've got to go through the process and see. Jonathan is currently. being held at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility located in Delaware County on a $1 million cash bond. He has a preliminary hearing set for January 20th, 2026, and is currently being represented by Attorney Adams-Laggy, and I'm sure I'm saying that wrong. As this episode will be released after that date, any updates discussed in the hearings will be added to our pin comment. As Jonathan hasn't gone to trial yet, he's considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. In addition, the DA's office is asking anyone with any information about this case to please reach out to Detective Leah Chesnik or Chris Carr. Also, if you believe that one of your loved

ones has been affected by Jonathan's crimes, then the friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery wants to hear from you as well. We'll have all relevant information listed in our pin comment in video description for you. Now, I know this episode is a little bit outside of what we normally cover on the misery machine, but it's a topic that I'm familiar with and have a lot of opinions on. And honestly, it sort of brings me back to the topics that we used to cover on this channel in its early years. If you'd like to hear a similar bizarre story, then click here to check out the case of Anatoly Moskfen from Russia. Anatoly became obsessed with cemeteries and then took things too far after stealing the bodies of young girls and making dolls from the remains.

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