Burr Oak Cemetery is guarded by police today as the investigation begins.
In a nightmare story from the windy city, as many as 300 Chicago area graves were pulled out of the ground, their markers smashed, and the bones and caskets piled up in a wooded area, all in a scheme by the employees of Burr Oak Cemetery to resell plots.
Investigators called it “beyond revolting.”
Similar to the sentiment that led to tennis fans parking over the graves of forgotten loved ones last week at St. Mary’s Church in Wimbledon Village, those in charge of the cemetery got away with the disinterment and plot resale scheme for four years because no one was coming to visit the graves. The Chicago cemetery took it one step further when they realized visitors were generally unaware that the graves of the selected dead victims were now occupied by different people. That was before Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and his police swarmed in on this dark and stormy day at 4400 W. 127th St. in Alsip, Ill., arrested four employees and began the grisly investigation.
The Sheriff’s office was quick to point out that it was the owners of the cemetery who tipped them off to malfeasance on the property and are cooperating with the investigation. An unidentified gravedigger had dug up bones while practicing his excavation skills with a backhoe in an unused part of the cemetery and began making discreet inquiries of other employees, leading up to notifying the attorney for the cemetery who came out to see for herself and subsequently blew the whistle. In addition to the shallow burial of miscellaneous skeletal remains, a jawbone with teeth, rib cages, and other body parts belonging to at least 29 people were found on the surface in the mass grave.
Police Chief DeWayne Holbrook points to the area of the mass grave.
Bones were also found lining the internal cemetery roads leading from the main grounds to the mass grave where careless gravediggers had allowed exhumed bones from shattered coffins to fall off the dump truck as illegally disinterred remains were hauled away to the “dump area”.
“If they went back there, they would have definitely seen it. There would have been no doubt in my mind,” Sheriff’s Police Chief DeWayne Holbrook said, referring to bones littering the ground, easily spotted by anyone.
Burr Oak was the Chicago region’s first black cemetery. Civil rights protester Emmett Till and legendary blues singer Dinah Washington are buried there. It’s unclear if the graves of famous people have been desecrated, Dart said. The damage seems to be exclusive to older, less visited graves that the cemetery employees deemed safe bets to remove.
After making a series of arrests and cordoning off the area, the officers alerted the media and families began to inquire in droves about the fiasco, trying to find out if their relatives were disturbed.
Distraught relative Tiffany Robinson tells her story to the media.
“He was a United States Marine,” Tiffany Robinson told a gaggle of reporters through tears about her cousin’s grave, which simply disappeared. “They said they didn’t know where he was. How could you not know where someone is?”
Four dozen FBI agents have been called in to assist with the project, making a grid of the area, excavating the bones and debris, and piecing together the puzzle. Experts say this is a four to five week process.
“There are a lot of remains scattered around. This wasn’t a surgical effort where individuals lifted up bodies and delicately placed them. They were dug up with backhoes and then they were discarded at different locations,” Sheriff Dart said. His office is seeking several felony charges, including dismemberment, disinterment, and theft.
Burr Oak Cemetery conducts 800-1,000 burials per year, and is owned by Perpetua, Inc., a corporation based in Dallas, Texas. Perpetua also owns Cedar Park Cemetery in Calumet City, Ill., whose secretary is also implicated in the Burr Oak scandal, according to documents released by the Cook County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
The sheriff’s department has opened a toll free line to call and inquire about loved ones buried in Burr Oak Cemetery. That number is 1-800-942-1950.
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