Burr Oak Cemetery Workers Plead Not Guilty To Reselling Old Plots

The four former workers at Burr Oak cemetery have pleaded not guilty to charges of unearthing bodies,  reselling plots and dismembering human bodies in a scheme that allegedly lasted for years.

Former grave digger Maurice Dailey, 59, Keith Nicks, 45, Terrence Nicks, 39, and former cemetery manager Carolyn Towns, 49, all declared their innocence in a Tuesday hearing. The next hearing will be on Sept. 25.

The four were charged on July 9 for dismembering a human body, a class x felony. Last month, they were indicted on seven other counts: desecration of human remains, conspiracy to dismember multiple human bodies, removal of a gravestone or marker, removal of remains of multiple deceased human beings from a burial ground, and two counts of theft $100,000 to $500,000.

Authorities say the suspects excavated bodies, choosing old graves that had not been visited, and dumped these along with remains of crushed burial vaults in an area of the graveyard used for collecting garbage. They also “double stacked” graves, by digging up an existing plot to make this deeper and covering the original vault in the grave with dirt.

The scheme lasted from Sept. 2003 to July 2009, and was done off the books to keep the cemetery owners from finding out.

Tucson-based funeral home and cemetery developer Perpetua Inc. is said to have contacted the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in May to investigate a report from an employee, leading to the arrest of the workers.

The arrests prompted a deluge of visits at Burr Oak by family members concerned about their loved ones. Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart’s office had also received tens of thousands of inquiries that could not immediately be answered because cemetery records were in disarray, with many partially destroyed and altered or missing altogether.

Dart’s office has completed an online database of headstones for family members to search, and the Chicago Burr Oak Cemetery Historical Society was created to develop a memorial to honor the deceased who fell victim to the scheme.

One of Chicago’s first black cemeteries, Burr Oak is now under a court-appointed receiver. The cemetery is home to about 100,000 graves, including Queen of Blues Dinah Washington and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy whose murder while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.

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