Relatives Want Answers From Burial-Plot Scam Cemetery

ALSIP, Ill. – 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. "As a living human being, you give dignity to the dead. The dignity today has been shattered."

• Click here for photos.

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 had 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 7-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. At 33 inches, the minimum depth allowed under state law, they found a casket, Dart said.

Relatives recognized mementos resting on top and said the coffin belonged to Rachel Boone, the man's mother, the sheriff said. The casket was reburied without being opened, and relatives held a short memorial service.

Earlier in the day, an attorney for the cemetery's owner told Cook County authorities they would find two bodies in the grave, a sheriff's spokeswoman said. It was not clear what the attorney based that statement on.

"That makes us ask, 'Where was that one that you thought was double stacked?'" Patterson said. "The record-keeping was so poor that we don't think they know. We don't know if we're ever going to know."

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 — which authorities labeled the original crime scene — 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 suspects, who are being held on bond, are former cemetery manager Carolyn Towns, 49; Keith Nicks, 45; Terrence Nicks, 39; and Maurice Dailey, 61.

In an e-mailed statement Saturday, Patterson said the cemetery's owners fired Towns in March after finding financial irregularities. He said the sheriff was asked to investigate in late May.

• Click here for more on this story from MyFOXChicago.com.