Elmira City Police are currently searching for clues as to who carried out the attack. According to Star Gazette, cemetery Superintendent Bryce Cuyle has said that someone visiting Twain’s gravesite over the holiday weekend left a voicemail on the cemetery office’s telephone saying the plaque was missing from the 12-foot high granite monument that commemorates Twain, along with his son-in-law Ossip Gabrilowitsch.
Ossip Gabrilowitsch was a Russian-born American pianist, conductor and composer. He married Mark Twain’s daughter Clara Clemens and he was the founding director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Mark Twain is far more widely known that his son-in-law. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, and writing under the pseudonym “Mark Twain”, he penned a number of works of which the most famous are arguably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
With the unexpected and so far mysterious attack, the bronze portrait of Mark Twain on the monument is missing. The bronze piece was placed on gravestone, some 12 feet from the ground, in 1937. The piece is large, and being cast in bronze, heavy. The perpetrators would have needed to use a ladder, or other tools to remove it.
The piece may have been taken by a collector; however it is more likely that criminals have taken the piece to melt down for its scrap metal value.
