A memorial park operation in my area has put on some memorable sales-generating events, offering a free Butterball frozen turkey to anyone who comes by to view the property or restaurant gift cards to those willing to listen to pitches describing the newest sections. (As with any major purchase, do not go to a cemetery sales conference alone.) Since people are always happy to accept freebies, another ploy that has worked well is to offer a free grave for any veteran whose spouse has paid full price. Of course, after fees and taxes, full price for the second grave is the price of two graves anyway. The most targeted group is senior citizens, who already are hit hard by phone solicitations for replacement windows, credit cards, and new mortgages—and now cold-calling cemeteries.
The mean-spirited news media love to rake the funeral industry over the coals, and many national headlines are sordid enough to justify scrutiny. The recent crematory scandal in Georgia is one example. An operator was found to be leaving bodies to rot in sheds instead of cremating them because the cremation chamber was allegedly inoperable. He kept the scam going by presenting people with containers of dirt rather than the cremains of their loved ones.
Part of the reason reporters relish such scary stories is our industry’s checkered past—coupled with the fact that we deal with people at their most helpless. In the classic movie House of Wax, the proprietor of a wax museum (Vincent Price) is horribly disfigured in an accident, so his hands are not as capable as they once were. Since he is no longer able to craft his wax figures, he resorts to stealing bodies from cemeteries. But the bodies, he discovers, are more decomposed than he would like, so he turns to murder and later retrieves his victims from the local morgue. The fresh kills are then covered in wax, making for very realistic museum fixtures. Perfect horror fare—to the average person, it’s believable.
Body snatching and grave robbing were once the only ways for medical schools to obtain specimens for study and dissection. In Cincinnati in the 1800s, one man was notorious for supplying prolific corpses. He would take out his wagon nearly every night to frequent not only small cemeteries but also Spring Grove, the second largest in the United States at the time and the burial spot of many famous Cincinnatians. At $25 per body, he developed quite a business.
Although the authorities were aware of his actions, they did little to stop him until he removed a seven-year-old child from her grave and her corpse was spotted lying in the grave robber’s wagon. This act was hideous enough to prompt the state to enact legislation to allow hospitals to solicit family members’ permission to acquire their loved ones’ dead bodies.
A California medical school was in the news recently for allegedly conducting a scheme to sell human body parts. They removed hearts, lungs, kidneys, and even eyes from donated bodies and retained them in formalin-filled jars for future study. It was discovered, however, that many parts were being shipped elsewhere, still in their preservative states. Other medical schools and even some peculiar individuals were buying human organs.
Someone close to the case reportedly said that private purchasers were displaying the parts on bookshelves as macabre conversation pieces. Someone from New Jersey even requested a complete pristine human brain. It was to be sealed and shipped in a preservative-filled container. But it was packed improperly, and the odor was detected in the shipping service’s warehouse. With the return address marked clearly on the label and a small amount of detective work, the jig was up.
Since vital organs for transplantation must be removed before death and under sterile conditions, the organ snatchers were clearly profiting by operating a human chop shop—sort of like stripping stolen cars and selling off the parts. Some local coroners’ offices have been admonished for removing the corneas of decedents without the relatives’ permission. And in Cincinnati, a photographer was charged with abuse when he visited a morgue to shoot pictures of corpses holding such objects as keys and musical sheets and then calling it “art.” Family members were repulsed—and very angry.
In the early 1980s, I was a member of a committee that coordinated the disposition of mass casualties after natural and human-error disasters. In the three years I served, no such disaster occurred, so I never used my training. But we were shown videos from two separate airline crashes that shocked me—not because of the utter destruction but because of the actions of the first responders.
Some were firefighters and police officers; others were merely gawkers who happened on the scene and were put to work. They were spotted, plain as day, plucking watches and rings from severed arms and emptying cash from wallets. After they jammed the money into their pockets, they tossed the wallets back on the ground to be discovered later for identification purposes.
A more detailed response is no doubt in force today, as such a disaster would be deemed a crime scene and therefore more vigorously secured. Still, I have witnessed many thefts at accident sites over the years, ranging from a police officer snatching a pack of cigarettes from a victim’s shirt pocket to actually removing money. The police pull a wallet from someone’s pants pocket to establish identity through a driver’s license, so I suppose that makes it incredibly easy to make a “withdrawal.” Bereaved families have complained to me that they know money was stolen, but they lack any way to prove it. That’s why I always make sure that a minister or family member is in the chapel with me at a funeral’s conclusion, so that when the casket is closed, anything that is to stay with the deceased stays there—keepsakes, photographs, or money. If any item is to be handed back to a family member, it is done so immediately and in the presence of a witness.
When making funeral arrangements, the topic of jewelry is always discussed in detail beforehand to ensure that all desires are carried out. When meeting with the elderly, I have noticed that they emphatically insist that all jewelry worn by the deceased be returned. Many of them assume that the funeral director is planning to abscond with any valuables. Such atrocities must have occurred frequently years ago, because that concern seems to be paramount in their minds.
Only a generation ago funeral directors were notorious for stealing. One director friend told me that a coworker back in the 1950s earned a substantial living on the side by removing gold fillings and inlaid crowns (the real McCoy back then, not the plated material used today) from the teeth of decedents awaiting burial. He even claimed that the families gave him permission to do so!
I once delivered a deceased person to a funeral home in northern Ohio, and upon my arrival, the elderly owner offered to give me a tour of his facility. As we casually trod through the grand old mansion, he pointed out the impressive curved staircase, the stained-glass windows, and the thick carpet that had been delivered by a London manufacturer in 1949. The tour’s end found us in a dark, dingy basement that housed the preparation room and a cubicle that contained shelf after shelf of unclaimed boxes of cremated remains. On the opposite wall were several plastic bins full of bloody clothing. On each bin was a typewritten sheet giving a full description of the contents and how they came to be soiled. Why someone would keep bins full of biohazardous material on their premises was beyond me, yet this gentleman seemed proud to show off his collection. He then pointed to a large box full of old hearing aids and another full of chrome-plated heart pacemakers. He told me he planned to sell the medical devices back to the manufacturers someday and net a tidy profit. I left shortly thereafter, thinking that the guy definitely needed to seek qualified psychiatric help.