Four Illinois Cemetary Workers Accused in Grisly Plot

Cemetary Desecration

Quote :

Three gravediggers and a cemetery manager unearthed hundreds of
corpses from a historic black cemetery south of Chicago, dumping some
in a weeded area and double-stacking others in existing graves, in an
elaborate scheme to resell the plots, authorities said Thursday. All
four were charged with felonies.
Frantic relatives of the deceased descended on Burr Oak Cemetery — the final resting place of lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington
— in hopes someone could tell them their loved ones' remains were not
among the pile of bones that littered a remote area of the property in
Alsip, 12 miles south of Chicago.
Some found apparently undisturbed plots, but others wandered, unable to locate loved ones.
"This is a mess. We can't find our people," said Ralph Gunn, 54, of Chicago, who filled out a report for authorities after a futile search for the headstones of his brother and nephew.

Quote :

The suspects, all of whom are black, were identified as Carolyn
Towns, 49, Keith Nicks, 45, and Terrence Nicks, 39 — all of Chicago —
and Maurice Dailey, 61, of Robbins. They each have been charged with
one count of dismembering a human body, a felony.
Bond was set at $250,000 for Towns, the cemetery's manager, and at $200,000 for the other three.
Authorities said Towns also pocketed donations she elicited for an Emmett Till
memorial museum. She has not been charged in connection with those
allegations. Court documents show she was fired from the cemetery in
late May amid allegations of financial wrongdoing.

Quote :

The investigation was prompted in May, when a groundskeeper
discovered skeletal remains in the part of the cemetery that wasn't
supposed to be used, and cemetery officials notified Alsip police.
Around the same time, the cemetery's Arizona-based owner, Perpetua Inc., called Cook County authorities to report the alleged financial wrongdoing.
Towns
allegedly took cash for new graves, then instructed the three
gravediggers to empty existing plots and move the remains inside to an
unused part of the cemetery covered with chest-high grass and dotted
with trees.

:shocked:

There is not enough in the world for this.

I guess I wasn't the only one squicked by this. I posted this article one minute before you did. Some people are not worth sharing air with.

We must've posted at almost the same time, because I didn't see it listed, and I figured someone here would've seen and posted it.

There are times I really hate humanity. This is one of them.

I just took my post down. No need to have it here twice.

Someone in this area recently went to a historic cemetery and damaged over 170 tombstones. Not as bad as this, but I hate any grave desecration.

That said, was the "plot" pun intended?

SokMunkie wrote:

Someone in this area recently went to a historic cemetery and damaged over 170 tombstones. Not as bad as this, but I hate any grave desecration.

That said, was the "plot" pun intended?

That was the title of the article, so...ask the Associated Press if they were making bad puns.

It would be a grave mistake for AP to be so disrespectful.

Knorg wrote:

It would be a grave mistake for AP to be so disrespectful.

Unless they're dead serious.

I suppose we ought to be thankful that given the apparant increase in racism of late, the AP didn't say anything outright offensive about this historic black cemetery.

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Oh yeah?

Quote :

The suspects, all of whom are black,

Is that relevant?

Quote :

move the remains inside to anunused part of the cemetery covered with chest-high grass and dotted with trees.

Um, please tell me they didn't just dump them there. Some sort of hole, yes?

Probably just stacked them about like at Tri-State_Crematory.

Gotta feel bad for the families.

grmblfjx wrote:

Oh yeah?

Quote :

The suspects, all of whom are black,

Is that relevant?

In an ass-covering way, probably. It's an historic, black cemetery. Specifying that the people desecrating it were also black precludes accusations of whitey disrespecting black history.

grmblfjx wrote:

Oh yeah?

Quote :

The suspects, all of whom are black,

Is that relevant?

Direct quote from the news article, so I have no idea. As Myeerah said, they may just be trying to cover their ass.

Also, an update:

Cemetary Workers Made $300K in Gravedigging Scheme

The mess just continues to grow. And Grmblfjx, from the way it sounds, they bodies weren't reburied, simply dumped in the weeds at the back of the cemetery. That's part of what's causing the anger amongst the families-there's no way to identify any of the bodies.

Also, in addition to this scheme, the woman who ran the cemetery stole money that was supposed to be used to build a memorial to Emmit Till, the 15-year-old black boy who was lynched in the 1950s for supposedly whistling at a white woman. No charges have been filed, but his body seems to be missing as well.

Rabid Badger wrote:

Also, in addition to this scheme, the woman who ran the cemetery stole money that was supposed to be used to build a memorial to Emmit Till, the 15-year-old black boy who was lynched in the 1950s for supposedly whistling at a white woman. No charges have been filed, but his body seems to be missing as well.

This won't end well for anyone involved.

Rabid Badger wrote:

grmblfjx wrote:

Oh yeah?

Quote :

The suspects, all of whom are black,

Is that relevant?

Direct quote from the news article, so I have no idea. As Myeerah said, they may just be trying to cover their ass.

Also, an update:

Cemetary Workers Made $300K in Gravedigging Scheme

The mess just continues to grow. And Grmblfjx, from the way it sounds, they bodies weren't reburied, simply dumped in the weeds at the back of the cemetery. That's part of what's causing the anger amongst the families-there's no way to identify any of the bodies.

Also, in addition to this scheme, the woman who ran the cemetery stole money that was supposed to be used to build a memorial to Emmit Till, the 15-year-old black boy who was lynched in the 1950s for supposedly whistling at a white woman. No charges have been filed, but his body seems to be missing as well.

Actually, his gravesite appears to be undisturbed. He was reburied in a new casket after being exhumed in 2005 in an investigation into his death. The original casket was rusting away in a shed, despite the fact that it was supposed to go into the memorial.

I think they should take the ill-gotten gains from these assholes and use the money to pay for DNA testing so the bodies they dumped can be identified.

My mom, dad and sister are all buried in the same plot (my sister's body was cremated, and we buried the ashes on mom and dad's grave). If I were to go put flowers on the grave and discover they'd been disturbed, then find out someone had dug up both my parents and their coffins and dumped the bodies in a field somewhere so someone else could be buried in that spot, I'd get a tad homicidal.

That's the new economy for you: make a buck wherever and whenever you can... screw the law or respect for the dead.

At least they weren't having sex with the corpses (that we know about at this moment.)

What I don't get: Why would someone buy a stolen cemetery plot when someone else's headstone is already there?

This is just the accompanying picture for the article on my email website. The article there doesn't say, and I don't feel like doing more research, but the picture seems to hint that there may not have been any original headstones.

Also, it says in the OP that some people were looking and unable to locate their loved ones' graves.

Although that begs the question, did nobody ever come back and notice "their" grave missing? How did this go undetected for so long- were they keeping track on whose graves hadn't been visited in several years?

Spoiler:

grmblfjx wrote:

Although that begs the question, did nobody ever come back and notice "their" grave missing? How did this go undetected for so long- were they keeping track on whose graves hadn't been visited in several years?

Entirely possible - I can't remember the last time my folks went out to grandma and grandpa's grave and we only live about 5-10 minutes from the cemetery.

Some people just don't want to deal with it. And there were some people who had suspicions (one woman on the news noted that despite continuing to sell gravesites, the cemetery itself never expanded), but either didn't know what to do with them or dismissed them as not really important.

grmblfjx wrote:

This is just the accompanying picture for the article on my email website. The article there doesn't say, and I don't feel like doing more research, but the picture seems to hint that there may not have been any original headstones.

Also, it says in the OP that some people were looking and unable to locate their loved ones' graves.

Although that begs the question, did nobody ever come back and notice "their" grave missing? How did this go undetected for so long- were they keeping track on whose graves hadn't been visited in several years?

Spoiler:

Okay, from the looks of it, it was one of those cemeteries where they don't have headstones, they have plaques that are mounted flush to the ground (the holes in them were to hold vases for flowers). In which case, it would be relatively easy to simply remove the plaques (IIRC, most of them are just screwed onto a cement base), then sell the site to someone else. I imagine a hole that's been dug to remove a coffin would look pretty similar to a hole that was dug to put a coffin into.

And what Spotts said was true-I live less than half-a-mile from where my parents and sister are buried, but I can't remember the last time I visited their grave. I'm ashamed to say my youngest son was the one who put flowers on there on Memorial Day. It's very easy, especially if someone's been dead a long time, to simply 'forget' about them.

Yeah, I've never even been to my father's grave since the day of the funeral. I haven't even seen the headstone.

I imagine what's happened here, as it so often does, is that people either live too far away to visit the graves on a regular basis (I've never even seen my maternal grandmother's grave, which is in a private cemetery in a town about 150 miles away), or they only visit on 'special occasions,' like Memorial Day or the date of the person's death.

Which would mean these people had a lot of time to do what they did. If they hadn't gotten careless and stupid (dumping the remains of the bodies in a ravine 'behind' the graveyard) and greedy (increasing the number of bodies they dug up to bring in more money), they could've conceivably continued to get away with it for several more years.

This reminds me of that crematorium case up in New Hampshire.