Chicago cemetery graves dug up and resold

Thu Jul 9, 2009 11:00am EDT
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Four Chicago-area cemetery workers have been charged with allegedly digging up graves and dumping the remains so the burial plots could be resold, prosecutors said on Thursday.
The Burr Oak Cemetery in suburban Alsip is the burial site for several prominent black Americans, including blues singer Dinah Washington, boxing champion Ezzard Charles, and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy whose brutal 1955 slaying in Mississippi stoked the civil rights movement.
Till's grave was not disturbed but Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said it was not immediately clear whose plots had been dug up.
Bones and smashed gravestones from the dug-up graves were dumped in an overgrown section of the cemetery.
"What we found was beyond startling and revolting," Dart told the Chicago Tribune.
At least one worker contacted the cemetery's owner, who notified authorities, the newspaper reported.
The scheme may have netted hundreds of thousands of dollars and gone on for four years, Dart said. The workers targeted plots that were older and had not been visited recently, he said.
(Reporting by Andrew Stern; Editing by Bill Trott