Cemetery workers charged after allegedly dumping corpses

Four cemetery workers have been charged with illegally dismembering human bodies after digging up more than 300 corpses and dumping them in a pit in order to resell the graves.

Illinois police discovered the decomposing bodies at the historic Burr Oak cemetery in Alsip where a number of prominent African Americans are buried, including Emmett Till, the 14 year-old boy whose lynching in 1955 for flirting with a white woman helped galvanise the civil rights movement, and blues legend Dinah Washington.

"What we found was beyond startling and revolting," the Cook county sheriff, Tom Dart, said.

The police say the bodies were dug up and dumped in an overgrown area fenced off from the rest of the cemetery, 20 miles south of Chicago. The graves were then resold with the four arrested workers believed to have made about $300,000 over several years.

Relatives of the dead descended on the cemetery to discover if their loved ones had been disinterred. They included Simeon Wright, a cousin of Till, who told the Chicago Tribune: "I've got several generations of my family buried there, and I've never had any problems. ... But this is a pretty ghoulish story."

Dart said that Till's grave appears to have been undisturbed but he was not sure about Washington's or that of the heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles.

The principal target appears to have been older graves that had not been visited for many years so that the removal of the bodies would not be noticed by relatives.
Dart said the FBI has been called in and that forensic medical examiners are working to identify the remains.

"I've been in this business for 35 years, and I have never heard of employees committing these kinds of terrible acts," Vickie Hand, treasurer of the Illinois Cemetery & Funeral Home Association, told the Chicago Tribune. "There's no words that can express it; it's just absolutely unbelievable."

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