For example, cemetery owner Jemar Lambert allegedly figured he could save money by burying a bunch of people in the same plot of land, stacking them on top of each other like a decomposing Connect Four. Lambert's cemetery was running short on space, so when he wasn't putting together bodies like short stacks of pancakes, he was apparently just cramming them in wherever he could find a few square feet of space, whether he owned the land or not. That ended up getting him ten years of probation.
Workers at Illinois' historical Burr Oak Cemetery tried a similar cost-cutting method when they simply dug people up, tossed out the tombstones, and sold the spaces all over again. They ended up being convicted of desecrating bodies, because most people in society aren't on board with treating human remains the same way you'd treat tree stumps.
While people stacking bodies or reusing plots of land could be considered lazy descrators, there are more proactive ghouls in the world as well. A human body is a gold mine to the right person, and you're just going to throw it away like expired deli ham? Not funeral home owner Michael Francis Brown. He realized medical research was a booming industry that had a serious supply and demand issue. How do the doctors and scientists of tomorrow learn what your brain looks like if there aren't enough brains to go around? He stepped in to fix that issue by chopping up the bodies that he was supposed to be burying, and selling them literally piece by piece for scientific research, without actually obtaining consent to do so.
Now, how does a guy like Brown get the idea to sell off body parts like they were tamales at a ballgame, which may or may not be a thing that happens outside of TV shows I saw in the '80s? He could have been inspired by the LA coroner's office, which was caught selling the corneas of literally thousands of bodies to an eye bank without obtaining consent from families.
Canadian morticians, who you'd think would be all "So sorry for your loss, allow us to bathe the dearly departed in maple poutine," may be even worse, if these shenanigans from Calgary are any indication. These shifty bastards sold expensive caskets to families, and then swapped them for cheap ones for cremation so they could resell the expensive ones. The husband and wife duo were charged together, and the husband copped a plea to fraud to drop all the other charges, which included cutting the finger off of a body so they could steal a ring. That's some low-class shit right there.
So I say again: When it comes time to die, just arrange an explosion. It will save everyone a lot of trouble, and the kids will love it.
Uh, were y'all aware you can just buy toe tags for bodies? Yikes.
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For more, check out 5 Horrific Things You See Collecting Dead People As A Job and 5 Horrifying Truths About Funeral Homes (From An Undertaker).
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