Modern-day grave robbing...
This will be on a second show of "60 Minutes" tonight, at 8pm Eastern.
(CBS News) Problems at America's cemeteries, including exhuming bodies so plots can be resold, are raising questions about whether this part of the multibillion dollar "death-care" business needs more monitoring. 60 Minutes examines this largely unexamined industry, which in many cases is controlled by large corporations, and which consumer advocates believe may be taking advantage of people at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives. Anderson Cooper reports this story for a special edition of 60 Minutes Sunday, May 20 at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT.
In one of the most egregious cases, workers at Burr Oak Cemetery near Chicago had been removing headstones and coffins and dumping bodies in mass graves so plots could be resold. Says Sheriff Tom Dart, "This was all about greed and overarching that is the fact that these areas are so horribly unregulated, it allows for that to happen," he says. "There was no record of anything...how many people are supposed to be buried here...and truly, in any cemetery do you know...who is under there?" asks Dart.
"It's sort of the Wild West," says Josh Slocum, executive director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, a non-profit watchdog group. Slocum believes more monitoring of cemeteries is necessary. He says that since 1984 the Federal Trade commission has required funeral homes to provide bereaved consumers with clear price lists and other disclosures. "You can think of that as a consumer bill of rights at the funeral home," Slocum says. "But those rights stop at the cemeteries."
A number of the cemeteries featured in Cooper's report belong to Service Corporation International, or SCI, the largest provider of funeral and cemetery services in North America.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57436612/cemeteries-draw-complaints/?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
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PB
A friend of mine found something similar because he used to live near the cemetery way out on Donald street in Eugene. He found a bunch of the most amazing weird metal pieces- they were fabulous looking, kind of like something art deco from the movie Metropolis. Being a Eugenian (god bless him!) he tried to turn one of them into a marijuana pipe. That's one of the things we do in Eugene with found objects: Try to turn them into something we can smoke weed out of, LOL!
Anyway, neither of us could figure out what the metal pieces were and they were fucking up his drill bits like mad, so he started doing research on the word "vitallium" (which was stamped on the side), to find out why what the fuck these indestructible, odd-looking metal things were.
It's then that he realized they were artificial hip joints!
We assumed later that they probably weren't dumped improperly, but they were from cremations and they just wanted to keep the ashes for the families instead of all the metal bits from their health problems in life. So they just tossed them out on the neighboring property, which was kind of wooded.
IIRC, he did manage to turn one of them into a pipe but he had to kill a number of pricy drill bits to get through the ball. Looked like something out of steampunk. Smoked a little hot for my tastes, IIRC.
That was almost 20 years ago, now that I think about it. Shit, someday soon, someone's going to be finding my bits and pieces and turning them into a marijuana pipe!
That's the circle of life in Eugene for ya!
PB
