The Latest Thing In Grave Robbing
by Kevin Nance
NOVEMBER 16, 2009 TAGS:
Grave robbing has a long and, no doubt from the robbers’ point of view, distinguished history. For at least two millennia, the real-life models for Indiana Jones and Lara Croft have ransacked ornate burial vaults from Egypt and China. Artists (perhaps including such illuminati as Michelangelo and Leonardo) and medical students snatched dead bodies out of crypts and graveyards for anatomical study from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, grave robbers in South America steered their craft in the direction of dentistry, specializing in the extraction of gold teeth from those who, after all, wouldn’t be needing them anytime soon.
This being the highly innovative 21st century, a new generation of grave robbers has given the profession a surprising twist. Increasingly, what tempts the larcenous isn’t what a grave contains; it’s the grave itself, which is scooped out and resold to the unsuspecting survivors of a new tenant. And instead of breaking into cemeteries and mausoleums from the outside, these enterprising folks simply reach into their own pockets for the keys. These days, grave robbing is increasingly an inside job.
Chicago residents got a close look at such grisly entrepreneurship this year, when four workers at Burr Oak Cemetery, a historic African American graveyard in southern Cook County, were indicted on charges of digging up about 300 corpses and re-selling the grave plots over several years. According to the indictment, the workers desecrated the graves by dismembering multiple human remains — often in older and/or unmarked graves that were rarely visited — and dumping them at the rear of the cemetery, along with their gravestones and markers. In some cases, the workers stacked burial vaults on top of each other. Their scheme allegedly brought them a net profit of about $300,000.
In a particularly ghoulish development, the casket of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy whose racially motivated mutilation in Mississippi in 1955 helped fuel the civil rights movement, was found rusting and tattered in a shack on the cemetery grounds, surrounded by ripped-up headstones and piles of garbage. The casket, which had been open at Till’s funeral and seen by thousands of mourners, had been in this haphazard storage since his body was exhumed during an investigation of his death in 2005. (He was reburied in a different coffin.) The original casket was supposed to be displayed as part of a memorial to Till, but that never happened, and the money donated for the cause has disappeared.
Besides Till, several other prominent African Americans — including blues and jazz legends Dinah Washington, Willie Dixon and Otis Spann, along with Inman Jackson, once with the Harlem Globetrotters, and a number of Negro League baseball greats — are buried at Burr Oak. (None of their graves is believed to have been disturbed.)
The fallout from the Burr Oak scandal is still developing. When the grave desecrations were first discovered, the Cook County Sheriff closed the cemetery, leaving distraught family members outside wondering whether their loved ones were still under ground. The cemetery’s owner, Perpetua Holdings of Illinois, has been inundated with lawsuits from outraged families, including that of Till. The company filed for bankruptcy and gave up control of the facility to the state, which moved to freeze more than $6 million in trust funds the firm controlled. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn established a Cemetery Oversight Task force to explore how state law might be amended to prevent some of the horrors at Burr Oak.
Last month, the Illinois House of Representatives voted 89-27 in favor of a bill aimed at stricter oversight of for-profit cemeteries. If passed by the state Senate and signed by the governor, as expected, the new law will require cemetery managers to be licensed and allows state officials to audit their operations. Cemeteries would be required to maintain careful records and submit them to a statewide database.
On the federal level, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D. Ill., introduced a bill that would expand federal oversight of cemeteries. The Bereaved Consumers Protection Act would force cemetery directors into higher levels of accounting and transparency, requiring stringently kept burial records to be made available to the authorities. The legislation would also establish a consumer Bill of Rights for cemeteries, forcing them not to mislead patrons about the prices of and contracts for funerals and related products and services.
The alleged conspirators at Burr Oak aren’t the only ones accused of digging up corpses as part of a lucrative relocation scheme. In 2001, several families in Florida sued Menorah Gardens, a cemetery in West Palm Beach, for allegedly recycling graves after the original burial plots were oversold and/or misplaced. As evidence, attorneys offered photographs and video footage of battered burial vaults and human bones strewn in the nearby woods. In 2008, the Miami Herald reported, the cemetery’s owner, the Houston-based Service Corporation International — the nation’s largest operator of cemeteries and funeral homes — settled out of court for an estimated $100 million.
This being the highly innovative 21st century, a new generation of grave robbers has given the profession a surprising twist. Increasingly, what tempts the larcenous isn’t what a grave contains; it’s the grave itself, which is scooped out and resold to the unsuspecting survivors of a new tenant. And instead of breaking into cemeteries and mausoleums from the outside, these enterprising folks simply reach into their own pockets for the keys. These days, grave robbing is increasingly an inside job.Chicago residents got a close look at such grisly entrepreneurship this year, when four workers at Burr Oak Cemetery, a historic African American graveyard in southern Cook County, were indicted on charges of digging up about 300 corpses and re-selling the grave plots over several years. According to the indictment, the workers desecrated the graves by dismembering multiple human remains — often in older and/or unmarked graves that were rarely visited — and dumping them at the rear of the cemetery, along with their gravestones and markers. In some cases, the workers stacked burial vaults on top of each other. Their scheme allegedly brought them a net profit of about $300,000.
In a particularly ghoulish development, the casket of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy whose racially motivated mutilation in Mississippi in 1955 helped fuel the civil rights movement, was found rusting and tattered in a shack on the cemetery grounds, surrounded by ripped-up headstones and piles of garbage. The casket, which had been open at Till’s funeral and seen by thousands of mourners, had been in this haphazard storage since his body was exhumed during an investigation of his death in 2005. (He was reburied in a different coffin.) The original casket was supposed to be displayed as part of a memorial to Till, but that never happened, and the money donated for the cause has disappeared.
Besides Till, several other prominent African Americans — including blues and jazz legends Dinah Washington, Willie Dixon and Otis Spann, along with Inman Jackson, once with the Harlem Globetrotters, and a number of Negro League baseball greats — are buried at Burr Oak. (None of their graves is believed to have been disturbed.)
The fallout from the Burr Oak scandal is still developing. When the grave desecrations were first discovered, the Cook County Sheriff closed the cemetery, leaving distraught family members outside wondering whether their loved ones were still under ground. The cemetery’s owner, Perpetua Holdings of Illinois, has been inundated with lawsuits from outraged families, including that of Till. The company filed for bankruptcy and gave up control of the facility to the state, which moved to freeze more than $6 million in trust funds the firm controlled. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn established a Cemetery Oversight Task force to explore how state law might be amended to prevent some of the horrors at Burr Oak.Last month, the Illinois House of Representatives voted 89-27 in favor of a bill aimed at stricter oversight of for-profit cemeteries. If passed by the state Senate and signed by the governor, as expected, the new law will require cemetery managers to be licensed and allows state officials to audit their operations. Cemeteries would be required to maintain careful records and submit them to a statewide database.
On the federal level, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D. Ill., introduced a bill that would expand federal oversight of cemeteries. The Bereaved Consumers Protection Act would force cemetery directors into higher levels of accounting and transparency, requiring stringently kept burial records to be made available to the authorities. The legislation would also establish a consumer Bill of Rights for cemeteries, forcing them not to mislead patrons about the prices of and contracts for funerals and related products and services.
The alleged conspirators at Burr Oak aren’t the only ones accused of digging up corpses as part of a lucrative relocation scheme. In 2001, several families in Florida sued Menorah Gardens, a cemetery in West Palm Beach, for allegedly recycling graves after the original burial plots were oversold and/or misplaced. As evidence, attorneys offered photographs and video footage of battered burial vaults and human bones strewn in the nearby woods. In 2008, the Miami Herald reported, the cemetery’s owner, the Houston-based Service Corporation International — the nation’s largest operator of cemeteries and funeral homes — settled out of court for an estimated $100 million.
This year, even as the Burr Oak shenanigans were being revealed, a large Jewish cemetery in southern California, also owned by SCI, was being accused of similar outrages. Workers at Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills — where the permanent residents include Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce — were the targets of a lawsuit alleging that they dug up and moved as many as 500 bodies to clear out graves for new occupants. According to the lawsuit, cemetery workers were told to use backhoes to crack open concrete interment vaults. In the process, the lawsuit says, parts of human bodies would sometimes fall out, then be scattered or thrown away.
An SCI spokeswoman denied the allegations, even though a worker at the cemetery, speaking anonymously, confirmed them to CNN.
Whatever happened at Eden Memorial Park, the Burr Oak and Menorah Gardens travesties indicate that a grim and cynical trend seems to have taken hold in the nation’s theoretically peaceful fields of the dead. In the dark hearts of at least a few gruesomely opportunistic funeral industry workers, the profit motive has brought human behavior to a new low. As Lucy Van Pelt from the comic strip Peanuts used to say, there’s nothing like real estate, but this is ridiculous.
The guilty parties, it seems to me, might be wise to think of arranging in advance for the postmortem disposal of their own remains. My advice? Consider cremation.
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Susanne Feigum wrote on November 16, 2009 11:30am
When I was in Norway, they have magnificent centuries-old churches but I noticed none of the graves were more than 150 years old. When I asked our guide how that could be, and he replied that the Norwegians were very practical people...that no one remembers the average person after 100 years anyway, and space is limited, so they were just re-burying the new on top of the old. I asked him if the family was notified, what happened to the headstone of the previous occupant...he didn't know. [Report Comment]
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