The Crown: 'Body' floating in South Yorkshire canal turned out to be stolen prop from Netflix show

Police thought they had stumbled across a grisly murder scene when they were alerted to a body floating in a South Yorkshire canal.

The facts turned out to be stranger than fiction.

The partially-submerged corpse was a mannequin - stolen from the props department of Netflix's The Crown series!

The dummy was amongst £150,000 worth of items pinched from the back of vehicles parked near the set, back in 2022.

This week South Yorkshire Police said the case had now gone cold.

However, the officer in charge of the investigation did confirm that a mannequin had been recovered from a nearby canal.

The thefts and 'body' discovery happened during the filming of season five of the blockbuster, briefly threatening its multi-million pound filming schedule.

Dominic West, the actor who played (the then) Prince Charles said all the props used in the show had been chosen with an "extraordinary level of detail."

The Sheffield-born actor also jokingly asked Crown set decorator Alison Harvey, on film, if she'd been part of an "inside job" which she good-naturedly rejected.

The props will likely have been sold on the black market.

Or they may have been simply tossed aside and could be in a landfill site, according to Alison, who said that police had been busy with the mistaken canal-murder when they initially reported the items stolen from three vehicles at Pastures Road in Mexborough, Doncaster.

Replacements were hastily brought in.

The extravagant hit series - which cost around £300m to create and develop - was enhanced by a dazzling array of props that brought authenticity to the story.

They ranged from expensive flooring, and ornate portrait paintings, all the way to carefully selected Blue Grass perfume, a Royal paper knife and a Game Boy video machine used by Charles and Princess Diana's sons in the series.

Researchers went so far as to check what brand of fountain pen the Queen had used.

One dress worn in the first series, a replica of Elizabeth’s 1947 Normal Hartnell gown, was recreated at a cost of £30,000.

On top of the props, stagehands had to create almost 2,500 sets from scratch in locations around the world.

Police said the case has been filed "pending any new lines of inquiry.”