Cemetery scheme netted $300,000
Authorities said three gravediggers and a manager cast aside hundreds of corpses.
ALSIP, Ill. - Four former employees accused of digging up bodies and reselling plots at a historic black cemetery near Chicago made about $300,000 in a scheme believed to have stretched back at least four years, authorities said yesterday.
Three gravediggers and a manager at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip are accused of unearthing hundreds of corpses and either dumping some in a weeded, desolate area near the cemetery or double-stacking others in graves. The cemetery is the burial place of civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington.
While Till's grave site was not disturbed, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said that investigators found his original iconic glass-topped casket rusting in a shack at the cemetery.
The 14-year-old Chicagoan was killed in 1955 after reportedly whistling at a white woman during a visit to his uncle's house in Mississippi. Nearly 100,000 people visited the casket during a four-day viewing in Chicago, and images of his battered body helped spark the civil rights movement.
When Till was exhumed in 2005 during an investigation of his death, he was reburied in a new casket. The original casket was supposed to be kept for a planned memorial to Till.
Thousands of families have come to the cemetery since Thursday looking for answers about their loved ones, authorities said. Hundreds of relatives, some clutching maps of the 150-acre site, were seen at the cemetery yesterday.
Dart said that officials have assisted the families in locating relatives' plots, and family members have reported at least 30 cases of disturbed graves and missing headstones.
The sheriff said two burials planned for Thursday also have gone wrong - with one person initially buried in the wrong plot and another whose plot was already occupied by someone else's body.
"This is a heartless act, these graveyard robbers," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday. Jackson called on the cemetery's Arizona-based owner, Perpetua Inc., to answer for the conditions.
The Illinois official who regulates cemeteries said yesterday that the process of revoking the cemetery's license had been started. Comptroller Daniel Hynes also said that his office was investigating whether the money that families paid for future cemetery needs was still safely held in a trust.
The suspects were identified as Carolyn Towns, 49, Keith Nicks, 45, and Terrence Nicks, 39 - all of Chicago - and Maurice Dailey, 61, of Robbins, Ill. 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 others.
Authorities said that Towns also pocketed donations she elicited for a 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. The cemetery's owner had originally contacted authorities.