Who’s not leaving Las Vegas? Find celebrities who made Sin City their final resting place

A celebrity residency in Las Vegas can last for months or years.

Some are eternal.

You may be familiar with the longest running shows on the Strip, or even performers who didn’t stick around.

But which famous people are never leaving Las Vegas?

Those who worked and performed in Las Vegas and ultimately made this desert their final resting place include A, B and C listers, flashes in the pan, long-forgotten and miscellaneous public figures.

They’re people from Las Vegas’ near and distant past, well-known and less so, former musicians, politicians, pro athletes, Strip performers, casino operators, Hollywood movie and TV actors. Many were once household names.

Their remains are buried next to a grave marker, lying in sealed crypts at mausoleums or cremated ashes stored in shelved niches at columbaria.

We’ve created interactive maps compiling the grave sites of bona fide and pseudocelebrities, those once-celebrated, infamous, legendary, lost to history, venerated and notorious.

You can find William Peccole, developer of high-end neighborhoods Canyon Gate, Queensridge and Peccole Ranch, who got his wish in 1999 to be buried wearing a full New York Yankees baseball uniform, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal story that year.

Or Billy Guy, lead singer for the 1950s pop group The Coasters – “Charlie Brown,” “Yakety Yak.” He died in Las Vegas on Nov. 5, 2002, but no one claimed his body and a mortuary held off placing him in a three-coffin pauper’s grave until a fundraiser won him a funeral and burial that Nov. 25, the Las Vegas Sun reported.

The list also includes Liz Renay, cult movie actress, racy bombshell model, devoted girlfriend of 1950s Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen and author of books including “My First 2,000 Men.” She is buried in a tidy grave near downtown a stone’s throw east of North Las Vegas Boulevard, the website findagrave.com reported.

Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, a comedy team once the toast of Broadway with 1,400 performances of their raunchy musical “Hellzapoppin’” from 1938 to 1941, and then in several Hollywood movies in the 1940s, lay in graves side-by-side. After Ole died in 1963, his family asked he be buried next to Chic, who died while on vacation in Las Vegas in 1962.

At the funeral for Harry James, renowned 1940s big band leader and trumpeter who settled in Las Vegas, prior to his 1983 interment in the mausoleum at Bunkers Eden Vale Memorial Park downtown, singer Frank Sinatra, whom James discovered in New Jersey in 1941, delivered an emotional eulogy, UPI reported.

Mere feet away from James’ remains in the same mausoleum are those of Las Vegas early settlers Archibald and Helen Stewart, their children Archie, Hiram and William, and the stacked tombs of Vegas casino family royalty Benny, Teddy and Ted Binion.

What about the Rat Pack? Nope. They opted for California. Frank is buried close to his best buddy Jilly Rizzo in Cathedral City outside Palm Springs, Dean’s crypt at Westwood Memorial Park is just down a walkway from Marilyn Monroe’s and Sammy lies at Forest Lawn in Glendale next to his father, Sammy Sr.

And, no, the remains of neither Siegfried Fischbacher nor Roy Horn of Strip white-tiger-and-magic fame are interred in Las Vegas. But two of the three 1950s-hit singing McGuire Sisters (Phyllis and Christine) are.

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter.