thatvoodoochick's blog: "Mindless Ramblings Of Me"

A skeleton wearing a suit and tie sitting in an empty burial vault. Two bodies buried where there should have been one.

And a married couple buried together -- only now the wife is missing.

These were the latest gruesome details to emerge from the ongoing horror story at Burr Oak Cemetery, as investigators exhumed three graves Friday under court orders.

The unidentified skeleton was found in an unmarked vault that was only partially buried, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said.

A photograph taken before the exhumation "shows us remains of an individual sitting in a vault with no casket," Dart said. "We have indication to believe that there was a casket at one point."

Another site confirmed for the first time the practice of "double stacking," which investigators had suspected was a frequent practice at the cemetery.

Dart said cemetery workers dug up a woman who had been buried last fall, dropped another vault in, then placed the original occupant back on top.

"The family, as you would imagine, is very upset by this," Dart said. "They had made it clear that nobody was to authorized to be buried underneath."

The woman was reinterred with her sister present during a short religious ceremony Friday.

At another site where records indicated a married couple had been buried, only the husband was found.

"How in God's name this industry has been able to get away with having virtually no regulation or enforcement all these years is mind-boggling," Dart said.

Meanwhile, police records released to the Sun-Times on Friday confirmed earlier accounts that ComEd utility workers had reported problems at the cemetery to Alsip Police four years ago, but police concluded there was nothing seriously amiss.

The report from the utility workers prompted a brief investigation, which ended a week later with a meeting between police and then-cemetery head Carolyn Towns, who was fired this spring and is now accused of being the ringleader in a grave reselling scheme.

Towns, 49, had told Alsip police that bones found by the workers may have been accidentally unearthed or that animals may have brought the remains to the site.

Officers also found 100 dirt piles in the northern section of the cemetery with bones, marble pieces and broken concrete burial vaults, according to the police reports. Reports also stated that a ComEd contract worker surrendered a "skull" he found while doing work at the cemetery, but told authorities he "found the skull in an area that his company was starting to work in, but had not dug or disturbed."

The report about the meeting with Towns concluded that "the remains that were discovered were of some antiquity and had no police interest as a recent crime."

Among the police documents is an undated memo from Towns. In the memo, she instructs construction workers who come across remains to stop work and notify the cemetery office immediately.

"We at Chicago Burr Oak Cemetery feel that the disposition of remains, no matter how old should be handled with dignity and respect," Towns wrote.