Authorities stop getting evidence at Ill. cemetery
ALSIP, Ill. — Investigators stopped collecting evidence Friday at a historic black cemetery in suburban Chicago where workers allegedly dug up corpses and resold burial plots, acknowledging they’ll likely never know the identities of all the remains that were removed.
Detectives found more than 1,100 human bones, some tossed on the ground and covered with dirt and others strewn amid overgrown weeds, since the grave reselling scheme was first revealed last month. Splinters of pine boxes and chunks of burial vaults — including one with a skeleton wearing a suit and tie inside — were discovered dug up and stacked on top of each other.
“This will be next to impossible to ever identify all the people who were disinterred,” said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart at a news conference at Burr Oak Cemetery.
The cemetery in Alsip is the final resting place for perhaps 100,000 people, including civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till, boxer Ezzard Charles and blues singers Dinah Washington and Willie Dixon. Authorities have said there is no evidence that any of those graves were tampered with.
Dart shut the cemetery to the public weeks ago and labeled it a crime scene. He said Friday there’s no reason to keep the cemetery closed and to keep collecting bones.
“It would serve no purpose other than torturing more people, and there’s no need to do that,” Dart said.
Officials said they don’t know when Burr Oak will reopen, or whether it will ever be an operating cemetery again, said Roman Szabelski, who has been appointed to run day-to-day operations.
Burr Oak could be turned into a memorial, though no decisions have been made, and officials need to consider requests from people who still want to be buried alongside their relatives, Szabelski said.
Four Burr Oak workers were arrested last month and charged with dismembering human bodies. Earlier this week, they were indicted on more charges, including theft, conspiracy to dismember human bodies and desecration of human remains.
Three of the four remained in custody on Friday, with only one of them out after posting bail.
Authorities say the scheme went on more than five years and estimate that they made more than $300,000 reselling plots. Dart said authorities haven’t ruled out additional charges against the former workers.
When the investigation started, authorities said they believed about 300 people were improperly moved. They haven’t increased that number because the additional remains have all been found in the same areas, said Thomas Trautmann, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office.
Trautmann said officials don’t plan to conduct DNA testing on the remains that have been found.
“Even if we could’ve obtained the DNA profile from bones … then we have the problem of who we compare that to, not knowing who those bones belong to,” he said.
When the investigation began, Dart said he’d hoped that families of those buried at Burr Oak would have some kind of closure. But on Friday, he said that goal won’t be reached.
“For those individuals who are looking for every part of human remains that were disinterred to be recovered, that is not going to occur, it cannot occur,” Dart said.
He said the bones will be returned to the cemetery after the criminal proceedings are completed.
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