Richard Poncher, a onetime 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 in Los Angeles. 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 off the $1.6 million mortgage on her 1¾-acre Beverly Hills home.

"I can't be more honest than that," she says. "I want to leave it free and clear for my kids."

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, who made a fortune with a variety of electronics firms and once sold surplus U.S. Army airplanes and parts. She claims he built two bulletproof cars for Al Capone and owned 12 Rolls Royces in his lifetime. "He wasn't afraid to tackle anything," Elsie Poncher says. "Besides that, he was a helluva nice guy."

She says her husband bought the crypt -- two of them, in fact -- from DiMaggio during the former ballplayer's 1954 divorce from Monroe. She isn't sure how her husband knew DiMaggio. "He knew a lot of people," she says with a wave of the hand.

Wearing gray sweats and with long, pink fingernails, she admits to being in her 70s but is quick to add, "I do 20 laps in the pool every day." She says when she sells the crypt, she'll put her husband's remains in the one reserved for her, and when her time comes, she'll be cremated.