On this day, Aug. 29, in 1977, three men were arrested and charged with trying to steal Elvis Presley's body. As a result the singer's body was moved to Graceland.
The thieves' plan was to ransom the corpse for $10 million, but the plot was foiled when one of the thieves, an FBI informant named Ronnie Lee Adkins, tipped Memphis police and a TV reporter to the scheme.
The charges were dropped after the prosecutor declared that Adkins was too unreliable.
Twenty-five years later, Adkins confessed that a Shelby County deputy Billy Talley staged the corpse-snatching hoax so the Presley family could convince county officials to allow them to move Elvis to Graceland for security reasons.
In a bizarre twist, Adkins later helped put away Talley in 1997 for conspiring to murder an FBI agent.
-- Scott McCabe