METHUEN – Four men who made national headlines by claiming they dug up a buried treasure in a back yard were charged Friday with stealing the cache of old currency while doing a roofing job at someone’s home.

The arrests came after the men made several appearances on national television, and police noticed how the story seemed to change each time.

Two men were arrested early Friday, and a third turned himself in to police Friday night.

Authorities said Barry Billcliff, Timothy Crebase and Matt Ingham were repairing a barn roof in Newbury when they discovered the stash, which included 1,800 bank notes and bills dating from 1899 to 1928 and is worth up to $125,000.

The roofers came up with a story about finding it in a box while digging under a tree in the back yard of a house Crebase rented from Kevin Kozak, and convinced the landlord to go along, police said.

Lawyers for Billcliff and Crebase said Friday their clients were sticking to their account.

“There is no evidence, none, that my client committed any crime,” said Billcliff’s lawyer, Alexander Cain.

Crebase, 24, and Billcliff, 27, of Manchester, N.H., pleaded innocent Friday to charges of receiving stolen property, conspiracy and accessory after the fact. Crebase posted $1,000 bail and was released. Billcliff was released after posting $5,000 bail.

Kozak, 27, of Methuen, surrendered and posted bail Friday night, said Police Lt. Thomas Fram. He was scheduled to be arraigned on the same charges on Monday.

Ingham, 23, of Newton, N.H., was also sought on the same charges. Methuen Police Chief Joseph E. Solomon said that Ingham was believed to be in Florida.

Police said Crebase confessed to finding the money stuffed in rusting tin cans in the gutter of a barn they were repairing. Investigators said they were not convinced it was found in a barn and that it might have been taken from the barn owners’ house.

Crebase’s lawyer said Friday that the confession was not recorded and should be thrown out.

“The people who own the house were not aware the money was there,” said Solomon, adding that most of the money was recovered, but some was probably already sold.

The family that owns the property on which the money was found was surprised, their lawyer said in television interviews Friday.

“They have been following the story, as we all have over the last several days with interest, and obviously I think they were quite surprised to find out they were thrust into the middle of the story,” attorney Joseph Sullivan said.

The arrest of Billcliff and Crebase interrupted their planned appearance Thursday night on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” because they were being booked by police around the time the show was airing. They were to have been interviewed from the yard where they claimed they had found the money while digging.

Police also noticed that the money appeared to be in remarkably good condition for being buried a foot below the ground through decades of New England weather.

“We would have expected the money to be a lot more deteriorated,” Solomon said.

Police received an anonymous call on Tuesday from a woman who said the story the men had been telling was a lie, according to an investigative report filed in court.

They interviewed neighbors who said they hadn’t seen anyone digging in the backyard of Crebase’s house in Methuen, a blue-collar town on the New Hampshire border. And a coin shop owner who examined the money told investigators the men gave him conflicting accounts of how they found it.

When police asked Billcliff to show them the box he said the cash had been in, he claimed he had thrown it away, the report said.

Police said Crebase stuck to his story when he was first interviewed on Thursday night. But when detectives told Crebase they had new information and pressed him, “Mr. Crebase’s face became red” and he confessed, the report said.

But Crebase’s lawyer, Michael Ruane, said the confession was not recorded and should not be allowed as evidence.

“If the commonwealth can’t show a location from which the money is taken, or even if it was taken, there’s no case,” he said.

Under Massachusetts law, Solomon said, you can be convicted of receiving stolen property even if the victim doesn’t know it’s been stolen. “When you’re working on my house and you find it on my property, you’ve got to tell me,” the police chief said.

The materials had a face value of about $7,000, but prosecutor Gabrielle Foote Clark said the men had been offered $125,000 by a collector.

The men gave conflicting reasons for digging in Crebase’s yard. They told one reporter they were preparing to plant a tree. In other reports, they said they were trying to remove a small tree or dig up the roots of a shrub that was damaging the home’s foundation.

Even Billcliff’s name was the subject of confusion. He complained to the Eagle-Tribune that some media had misspelled it Villcliff, but told The Boston Globe that he had purposely given the wrong spelling so that “people wouldn’t try to track me down or come looking for me.”

Christine Tetlow, of Manchester, N.H., who identified herself as a longtime friend of Billcliff, defended him.

“They did not steal this money,” she said. “He’s the nicest guy in the world. He’d give the shirt off his back to anybody. If you need money, he’ll be the first person to step up and give it to you and never ask to get it back.”

Solomon said authorities might never have suspected anything had the men not sought publicity.

“Had they kept quiet … they probably could have sold the money and no one would have ever known,” he said. “It just got away from them. Sort of like the snowball rolls down the hill and it keeps going and crushes you.”