Body-dumping accusations spur outrage, grief

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This article was published 12/07/2009 (6108 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ALSIP, Illinois — A constant stream of relatives hoping to find their loved ones showed up Saturday as officials exhumed one grave in a cemetery where four former employees are accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies in a scheme to resell plots.

One body was found in the exhumed grave at the historic black cemetery, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said, despite an earlier report that two bodies were there. The former workers also have been accused of burying some bodies in shared graves.

Authorities closed Burr Oak Cemetery, home to the graves of civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singer Dinah Washington, on Friday and declared all of its 150 acres a crime scene after Dart found bones while walking on the site. On Saturday, families carrying photos and old crumpled funeral programs stood in snaking lines to talk to officials. Some cried, others were angry and many were stoic.

“It’s a zoo, and it’s going to be a zoo because every black person in Chicago has someone buried here,” said Chicago resident Jennifer Gyimah, 51, who was waiting to check on family members’ graves.

Officials said they would try to respond to families in the next week, but Dart said the investigation was hampered by a lack of maps for large sections of the cemetery. Many of those his staff found were hand-drawn and sketchy, he said.

“You might as well be talking about hieroglyphics here,” he said. “This is unheard of.”

He said he believes that at least 300 of the cemetery’s 100,000 graves have been dug up.

A portion of the cemetery devoted to children, called “Baby Land,” was particularly poorly documented, Dart said.

Chicago resident Gail Cooper’s seven-year-old daughter was buried there in 1984. She was trying to check on the grave Saturday.

“I had trusted her to these people,” said Cooper, 48. “I don’t want her here anymore. It’s no longer sacred.”

Dart said more than 10 mothers have asked for information about their buried children.

One man who had long suspected his mother was buried on top of another person had her grave dug up Saturday in an exhumation scheduled before the investigation started.

Workers dug down 7 feet (2 metres). At 33 inches (83 centimetres), the minimum depth allowed under state law, they found a casket, Dart said. Relatives recognized mementoes resting on top and said the coffin belonged to Rachel Boone, the man’s mother. The casket was reburied without being opened, and relatives held a short memorial service.

Three former gravediggers and a former cemetery manager have each been charged with one count of dismembering a body. The four sold existing deeds and plots to unsuspecting customers, authorities said. They then allegedly dug up hundreds of corpses and either dumped them in a weeded, vacant area of the cemetery or double-stacked them in graves.

The four made about $300,000 in a scheme that stretched back at least four years, authorities said.

While Till’s grave site was not disturbed, investigators found his original glass-topped casket rusting in a shack at the cemetery, police said Friday. He was exhumed in 2005 during an investigation of his death and reburied in a new casket. The original casket was supposed to be kept for a planned memorial.

— The Associated Press