Richard Poncher’s eternal sleep will soon be disrupted.
The one-time Beverly Hills resident, who died 23 years ago at age 81, will be moving out of the crypt above Marilyn Monroe’s resting spot at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery. Poncher’s wife intends to sell the crypt, said to have once been owned by Monroe’s former husband, Yankee great Joe DiMaggio.
So while the plaque on Poncher’s crypt reads: “To the man who gave us everything and more,” his wife, Elsie, is hoping he has just a little more to give. She wants to use the money to help pay the $1.6 million mortgage on her 1 3/4 -acre Beverly Hills home.
She says they lived a colorful, outsize life after meeting in Chicago and moving West. “He knew all the gangsters,” Elsie Poncher says. Elsie Poncher plans to start the bidding at $500,000 when she places the crypt on eBay, making it — per square foot — one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on the market.
Richard Poncher was a serial entrepreneur, to hear his wife tell it. She claims he built two bulletproof cars for Al Capone. Elsie Poncher says her husband bought the crypt from DiMaggio during his 1954 divorce from Monroe. Richard Poncher had no way of knowing what an icon Monroe would become.