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[pouring wine]
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[glasses clinking]
[light haunting music]
Mr. Hillerich.
[light haunting music]
[multiple voices speaking]
- [Bob] Right on top of the dirt pile in plain view,
in everybody's sight was a skull intact
and I went back and told the supervisor,
I said hey man, you've gotta come look at this.
He said, "Cover it up with a tarp
"and put it back in the hole."
- Here's what's happening, we're going out there
and we're having to hide skulls with tarps,
so these family members will not see
that there's other bodies in the dirt,
that's going to be refilled into the grave,
there's lots of bones and bodies.
- I'd heard stories
about how they were finding bones in different places.
I did contact the Attorney General,
at that point I was a stay-at-home Mom,
so I was able to put some time into it
and I remember contacting the Attorney General
and he did go down to check the grave
and said that if he's there, if that was him,
he was only buried inches down,
but he couldn't guarantee that either
and so at that point I really did just came to terms with it
and just still continue to not go down there
and celebrate his life in other ways.
- I mean, I was shocked, I was devastated,
I mean, to know that possibly all the loved ones
was buried on top of my loved one, which is my Mom,
so that was quite devastating.
- He did not purchase that plot
knowing that he was gonna have other people on top of him.
- It's actually known coast to coast
as the nation's most grossly abused cemetery,
I mean, you Google Eastern Cemetery, Louisville, Kentucky,
you're gonna find an article from the LA Times
or a newspaper in New York
talking about the horrible things that went on.
- I mean, there are people who still own plots,
they're supposed to be empty, but they're probably not
and I mean, you can't really make that right honestly.
- And you had hundreds and thousands of family members
coming up wanting to know once this broke news,
is my family buried with somebody else?
- He pulled out a loaded .38 caliber revolver
and stuck it in my face
probably no more than a foot or two away from me
right between the eyes,
this guy was easily in his 70s,
if he wasn't in his early 80s
and I could see the chambers were loaded on the pistol.
- It's part of my faith, we bury the dead with dignity
and that did not happen.
- You know, they walked him out of it
and I thought no, this is not right, this is not right,
they're gonna walk, ain't nothing's going to be done.
- There's just bones everywhere,
the joke was when we got the investigation going full blown,
you couldn't swing a dead cat in Eastern Cemetery
without finding a disturbed burial.
- We had the bare bones of the story
and then as we kept working, we kept uncovering
more and more scraps and more and more scraps
and it's a much, much bigger story
than I think anybody could've imagined.
- When you would go there, it's like that place,
just it wanted help, like it was begging for help.
[multiple voices speaking]
[mellow country music]
♪ Yeah, there's holes in the ground ♪
♪ Yeah, where the cars passed by ♪
♪ Yeah, there's holes in the ground ♪
♪ Yeah, where they're piled high ♪
♪ Piled high
♪ So where's your angel of redemption ♪
♪ Way up in the sky
♪ So now where's those good old intentions ♪
♪ Yeah, 'cause the bones don't lie ♪
♪ The bones don't lie
♪ Another shot of whiskey
♪ And another shot of ale
♪ Another nail through the casket ♪
♪ Another lonely day
♪ So drop an egg into the basket ♪
♪ The hair of the dog, you're tisky tasking ♪
♪ Here we go down to the bottom ♪
♪ Here we go where the bones don't lie ♪
♪ So where's those angels of redemption ♪
♪ Way up in the sky
♪ So now where's those good old intentions ♪
♪ Yeah, 'cause the bones don't lie ♪
♪ The bones don't lie
[multiple voices speaking]
- [Narrator] Eastern Cemetery consists of 29.6 acres of land
and is located in the Irish Hill neighborhood
of Louisville, Kentucky.
Founded in 1843 by two Methodist churches,
Eastern and its sister cemeteries, Greenwood and Shardein
were owned by the Louisville Crematory
and Cemetery Company for 145 years.
Following an investigation by the Attorney General's Office
in 1989, the company ceased operations
and charges including over burial and grave desecration
were brought against three of its officials.
Only about 16,000 gravestones
can be found in Eastern Cemetery,
but records exist for over 138,000 burials there.
Some sections have been re-gridded and reused over and over
and some individual graves
had been buried as many as eight times.
The defunct Cemetery Company was placed
on a court order receivership until 2001,
when Maurice Phillips was removed from the position
following allegations that he had abandoned his duties
and mismanaged cemetery funds.
- You know, when I first went over there in 1974,
I saw these sunken graves
and so I was wondering about that
and I talked to my predecessor
and then other people at Cave Hill
and the reason that happened is because they didn't require
a concrete vault for the casket.
- At Eastern Cemetery they would charge people
and get paid to put the concrete vault in,
but most of the time they wouldn't put 'em in,
the reason they wouldn't put 'em in
is because they knew they'd be digging there again
in the not so distant future.
- So as I go through the records again,
I'm doing the research with the records,
this is under the court order,
I'm acting at checking the graves
and I wanna find out what kind of paperwork do we have
and I started seeing this notation, OG, OG, OG
consistently throughout the records and it's Old Grave,
they're burying people in old graves.
- The casket decomposes, there's no family members,
no monument, no flowers on Mother's Day or Easter
and so they would reuse that grave space.
- And at some point they had 10 years' worth of graves
that hadn't been visited,
so they reconciled that with the maps
and they said okay, section A, row 26 through row 32,
there's only two people over there that have been visited,
so let's go on and clear all the stones out of there
and resell them.
- Starting in the 1850s,
they systemically start reselling entire sections,
they sell individual lots over and over and over again,
it's an incredibly complex
and they kept multiple sets of books.
But like I said, we now,
the standard for burial is 1,000 to 1100 bodies per acre,
it's a 30-acre cemetery,
that's what, 30,000 to 40,000 bodies, right,
we right now were not done yet,
have 138,000 recorded burials in Eastern Cemetery.
- [Narrator] Eastern Cemetery is home to more than 100,000
unmarked and disturbed burials of individuals,
who entrusted the care of their final remains
to a business which considered them expendable.
As early as 1858, records indicate
multiple burials in the same grave.
The practice of over burial and resale of occupied graves
became standard procedure for the company,
until cemetery worker, Bob Allen reported it
to the Kentucky Attorney General's Office in 1989.
- So Bob Allen, when he went to work there,
he said that these people didn't hide what they were doing,
they weren't out there in the middle of the night doing it
like I'd always thought, like you didn't wanna think.
He said that they did it open, plain as day,
never made excuses, never told anybody to cover anything up,
it's just how business was done.
- [Narrator] In the years following the investigation,
Eastern Cemetery was abandoned,
its grounds had become overgrown,
gravestones had been destroyed or stolen
and the chapel, garage and stone vault
had been broken into and vandalized repeatedly.
- I think they had the urns, where you could stick flowers
and of course back then you bought great quality of things
and he has marble, he has the marble
and the brass and things had been taken,
my uncle who lays there next to him,
his things have been removed
and it was so decayed because right in the middle,
I have a cousin right there,
but we were unable to put a marker there,
because the ground was so trashed up and decayed,
so there's an unmarked grave of a relative there
right in the middle of them.
- Like Mother's Day, Memorial Day Weekend,
my father would have to take his weed eater
and make me a path,
that's the only way I would be able to find where she was,
he would go first and then he would tell me,
"I made you a path, so as soon as you pull in,
"park on the side, get out and you'll see my path
"and that will lead you to where she's buried."
- And he actually went through the files,
that they still had inside
before the building was bricked over
and pulled out index cards
and tried to lead us in the right direction,
even though it was a complete mess out there
and we did end up finding her Dad, which was my Grandpa,
Hewart, but was unable to find anybody else.
- [Andy] Nobody's here, nobody's doing anything,
you've got this huge cemetery right in the middle
of Louisville's historic district
they we're supposedly so proud of
and look at it, it's an embarrassment, it's a shambles.
- [Narrator] The care of those at rest
in these neglected cemeteries
was left up to their families and loved ones,
who were taken advantage of
in one of the most difficult times of their lives.
- My husband and I are just local amateur historians,
we've been all over the city
and after a visit to Cave Hill one day we said, oh look,
right across the wall there's a whole other cemetery,
how do you even get into it?
Figured out how to go around and get into it
and we were expecting more of what we've just seen,
you know, manicured lawns and landscapes, trees,
a beautiful cemetery and it was not that at all,
it was really heartbreaking.
A lot of the same names on both sides of the wall
and yet you go from perpetual care to neglect and vandalism.
- My guys were just standing there
and the Eastern employees
didn't realize that my men were there.
So they dug down, hit a grave, maybe a 20-year old grave,
there was a thigh bone and they thought it was funny,
so they just threw it over the wall into Cave Hill.
- [Narrator] A red brick wall stretches
along the southeast border of Eastern Cemetery.
On the other side is Cave Hill Veterans Cemetery,
Louisville's oldest and most prominent burial ground.
A beautifully kept garden cemetery
in the popular style of the mid-19th century,
Cave Hill is home to over 5,500 graves
of Union and Confederate soldiers spanning 296 acres.
In 2002 Cave Hill had about 120,000 people interred there
with space remaining for about 22,000 more graves.
By comparison, Eastern Cemetery has less than 30 acres
and over 138,000 recorded burials.
- It wasn't that he had any prior experience
with running a cemetery
and I know he leaned some on Lee Squires,
he would try to consult with him and ask advice and so forth
about just day to day operational things or about equipment
or about the guys who were working there
and they would have conversations,
but my Dad may have been just in over his head.
- You know, I would talk to Mr. Amos about the burials,
I'd say how can you have so many spaces still available
and Cave Hill was about at that time probably 80% full,
we had 300 acres, Eastern was how many acres,
do you recall? - 29.6.
- Yeah, I said how can you still be burying people?
He said, "Oh, we just find spaces, you know."
[gentle melodic music]
- [Narrator] In 1843 parishioners of two churches
came together each donating seven and a half acres of land
and the Methodist burial grounds were formed
for the interment of members of those congregations.
Articles of incorporation were drafted in 1848
and approved by the General Assembly of Kentucky
on the 4th of March, 1854
forming the Eastern Cemetery Company.
The charter states that a board of nine trustees
would be nominated,
half from each of the two founding churches,
that all profits remaining after the cost
of payment to officers and laborers,
capital improvements and other expenses
would be equally divided between the two churches,
Fourth Street Methodist, now Trinity Temple United Church
and Brook Street Methodist,
now Christ United Methodist Church.
- You know, I heard all along that the Methodist church
was the owner of the property and the cemetery,
which makes it even more appalling
and all the managers were Methodists,
so I assume that's correct.
But it was appalling to all of us at Cave Hill.
- What they would do, the operators of the cemetery
would take the money,
the profits from operating the cemetery,
take half of it for the continued operation of the cemetery
and then take the other half
and split it amongst these Methodist churches
and this was recorded in the trustees' minutes
for as long as I could find in the minute books,
that I was able to get my hands on.
When it came to the court situation,
there was actually an attorney,
who was hired by the Methodist churches
or one of the Methodist churches,
who any time anyone said during the proceedings,
they tied the cemetery to the churches,
it was his job to object
that they were not legally tied together,
though it's pretty clear that the trustees of the cemetery
were all members of these churches
and the proceeds were going there
whether they were part of the same corporation or not.
- The Board consisted of a lot of elderly men
throughout the neighborhood, but they had to be a member
of one of those churches in order to be on the Board.
They would have a Board meeting and I think they got $50
and a chicken dinner when they showed up
and I think some of them
had to be woke up before it was over.
- The Methodist church I don't think
claims any responsibility for any of it,
that's very disturbing to me
and of course all the family members,
that had the problems with their loved ones
in their graves desecrated.
- [Interviewer] Absolutely.
- And if the Methodists were responsible for it,
that's a real shame.
- [Narrator] Eastern Cemetery has a history
of public concern for over burial and grave desecration,
as early as 1885, the local journal
reported on complaints about the burial grounds
citing filthy conditions
and graves that were only a few inches deep.
In 1912, JW Hardin told the Courier Journal
that when he came to visit his parents' final resting place,
the grave of a William Clark had been placed on top of them.
In 1915 a lawsuit was filed against the cemetery
by lot holders alleging that $4,500
had been misappropriated to the beneficiary churches
instead of the Perpetual Care Trust Fund.
In 1948 Edna McDaniel's suit for a plot she had purchased
including one her husband was already buried in
were resold by the cemetery.
- Mid-19th century, Thomas Shanks,
he was the guy in the 1850s,
who was the sexton of the cemetery, either he or his wife,
they kind of swapped off the jobs, alright.
Thankfully she kept the records,
'cause she had beautiful handwriting
and during that period of time
and I'm pretty certain that this is the guy
that discovered that as Louisvillians were moving west
during the westward expansion of the United States,
okay, the 1850s, he was buying up family lots.
So let's say you owned a family lot,
that you had paid 25 or $30 for, a 10-grave lot
and maybe you had children that were buried there
or a couple of family members,
well, you know, you're moving out west,
I'll give you $25 for your lot
or $15, we really don't have the figure,
but what we see was he was buying the lots
and that's kind of convoluted too,
they would either be bought back
in the name of Eastern Cemetery
or they were bought by Thomas Shanks personally.
Louisville was a small town, you would move west, okay,
so it was in the paper, you and your family moved west
to find your fortune, you've gone to St. Louis,
maybe you wrote a letter back,
it would get into the local papers.
At that point old Thomas would go,
hm, they're off the scene now, your whole lot
with the two or three graves would go up for sale, okay.
He was also apparently one of the individuals
or the individual that discovered,
hm, people aren't coming back and visiting this section,
we'll just rebury it completely.
So this Thomas Shanks starts actually reallocating
parts of the cemetery as new sections,
we have the Old Slave Grounds just completely disappeared,
the Cheap Willow, the Elm Tree division,
there are entire sections of that cemetery that are gone.
- [Andy] When I've gone out to Greenwood,
which is half the size of Eastern
and basically the same conditions.
- So we were at Greenwood and we were walking around
and there literally are bones on the surface of the ground,
you can walk round and be well, that's part of a fibula,
that's like an occipital at the back of the skull
right there by that tree.
- Greenwood feels like it wants to be left alone,
it feels,
it feels defeated,
it's a sad, sad place.
- [Narrator] In 1903 the Board of Trustees
of Eastern Cemetery loan the Union Land Development Company
composed primarily of prominent
African-American undertakers
$20,000 for the purchase of lands
and mapping out of a new cemetery, Greenwood.
Three iterations of maps exist for Greenwood Cemetery,
1903, 1932 and 1984,
these maps depict the majority of the grounds
having been reburied,
in some cases entire sections of Greenwood
completely disappear and in others,
new sections have been carved out of old ones.
- Many of the black undertakers formed a corporation
and they borrowed money to start Greenwood Cemetery, okay,
the reason I know this is from reading the minutes
of Eastern Cemetery's Board of Directors,
they formed, they had Stonestreet and Ford
lay out the cemetery.
The roads, this was rural Jefferson County
at the time were unpaved and in the summer
they wrote a letter to the Board of Aldermans
saying that the dirt roads, the dust,
'cause this was when you were following
a horse-drawn hearse to the cemetery,
the dust would choke the mourners
and then in the wintertime, the mud was quagmire.
The members of Eastern Cemetery
had so much political pull,
that they kept the road from being macadamized,
as a result of that,
or at least the black undertaker consortium went under.
The property was bought at a Sheriff's auction,
there are minutes that state they hired an individual,
who was not directly associated with the Eastern Cemetery
to buy Greenwood Cemetery at the Sheriff's auction,
they did, they brought the deed to the cemetery
and it was transferred within a day or two
to Eastern Cemetery Corporation
and then on top of that all,
the note that was outstanding by the black undertakers,
the operator's fees for the cemetery called the note
and they wanted the cash for the loan.
- [Narrator] In May 1935 the Eastern Cemetery Company
built Kentucky's first crematory at a cost of around $8,000.
As demand grew, the newly renamed
Louisville Crematory and Cemetery Company
cornered the market on cremations
and continued plans for expansion.
In September 1957 construction began
on a new structure in the back of Eastern Cemetery,
which would house the offices, chapel, crematorium
and columbarium at the cost of $79,737.
The construction of the building and a new access road
was directly over what had previously been
the Old Colored Odd Fellows section
and the remains of numerous burials
were shifted into a condensed area,
which would later be re-designated
as section 19 or Babyland.
[light melodic music]
In 1984 Paul and Shirley Barr
sued Louisville Crematory and Cemetery Company
when their son, Michael couldn't be buried in a plot
they had purchased in 1979, because it was already occupied.
The family was awarded $10,000
and the court determined that the defendants
had done a sloppy job, recommending a survey
be done on all graves sold pre-need.
In a Board meeting on February 27th, 1987,
the Barr case was discussed.
It is clear from the minutes of this meeting,
the Board understood they were going to have more problems
with reserved graves, they needed to secure
additional burial space for the future.
Present were Clifford B Amos,
President of the Board of Directors and Charles Alexander,
Executive Director in charge of day to day operations.
- Charlie was nice, he could be very, very nice
as far as running a company,
no, he depended on,
he wasn't great at management, he wasn't great,
we all knew our jobs and we all kind of did them,
he was very good at manipulating the guys.
- You put that grave there no matter what,
I mean, that's their policy,
they're not gonna call a funeral director
and tell a funeral director
the grave you just called in for so-and-so is not there,
we got to do this and that, they're not gonna do that,
you know, they're not gonna talk to the funeral director,
they're not gonna tell a family,
they're not gonna tell nobody
you put the grave there at whatever cost.
I mean, for some, if you're digging through one,
dig the grave deep enough, put the skeletal remains back in,
make the burial on top of it.
- [Narrator] Louisville Crematory and Cemetery Company
office staff included Barbara Ray, bookkeeper since 1987
and Beth Selch, receptionist since 1984.
Bob Allen worked alongside two other gravediggers,
Ronnie Aubury and JR Miles.
For years Bob Allen complained to his supervisor,
Charles Alexander that every time he dug a grave,
he found signs of a previous burial.
Finally in 1988 Allen went before the Board of Directors
with his concerns, a policy statement about the problem
was to have been issued, which would have protected
the gravediggers from legal repercussions,
but no such document ever materialized.
- You know, when they found I was bringing it up
and he said, "Well, I'll approach the board with it,
"I'll talk to Amos and Copley about it,
"I'll get some answers and I'll get back to you all."
but it never happened.
- When the guys started coming in,
probably early '89 talking to us finally,
saying here's what's happening, we're going out there
and we're having to hide skulls with tarps,
so these family members were not seeing
that there's other bodies in the dirt
that's going to be refilled into the grave,
there's lots of bones and bodies
and we told them we don't care
what the Board members are telling you,
we don't care what Charlie's telling you,
what you're doing is illegal.
- Charlie had a seat, he had a sign that said
Don't Worry, Be Happy
and we kept on talking and talking
and I thought how the hell are you gonna be happy,
because I'm done, I'm done with it, you know,
so I got off that day at noon,
I come home and first thing I did
was call the Attorney General's Office.
- They sent, the AG's Office sent an accountant in
to look at the books and this other guy,
this other guy turns out to be a detective
for the Attorney General's Office
and he just kind of hangs out with the guys for two weeks
and literally there are McDonald's bags under the front seat
with femur heads and human bones
and there's just bones everywhere.
- [Narrator] On the morning of Tuesday May 30th, 1989,
Jim Caldwell entered the cemetery offices
under the guise of performing the annual tax audit
along with Rick Morris, an auditor from the AG's Office.
- Jim Caldwell came in with Rick,
Rick was an auditor with the Attorney General's Office
and Jim Caldwell came in
and immediately Barbara and I knew he was not an auditor.
- Jim, the first time I met him,
Jim, you could see the cop coming out of him,
I mean, you know, he was strictly business.
- I knew he was a police officer the minute he walked in,
nobody wears brown polyester except for a police officer.
- When I met Jim for the first time,
he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt
and a leather shoulder holster with a .357 Magnum
with a sixer and eight-inch each barrel.
- [Narrator] Under normal circumstances,
graves were always dug the day prior to a funeral,
but after Jim Caldwell's arrival,
Charles Alexander instructed the ground crew
to hold off on preparations for the burial of James Dudgeon,
which was scheduled for the following day.
- [Bob] Okay, he told Ronnie and JR not to dig it,
while they were there, he said, "Wait."
He said, "While they're in the cemetery, don't do it, wait."
So they dug it the next day by the office.
- There was going to be a burial and a rose garden
right outside of my office the following day
and they knew they would find something,
they absolutely knew, they always did.
So it was gonna be set up to where Jim Caldwell came up
when they had dug the grave.
- They hit all kinds of previous burials in there,
it was loaded on the dump truck, taken back and dumped,
it was just normal procedure, you know,
they dug through whatever it was, went on the truck,
dumped it, covered it up
to make the burial the next day.
- From what Bob Allen had told me
about that specific burial, there were I believe
three to four bodies in the grave,
where Mr. Dudgeon was supposed to be placed.
The Attorney General's Office came back in two days later
actually carrying almost a backpack filled with bones.
- [Narrator] Around seven a.m., Thursday June the 1st, 1989,
Bob Allen unlocked the front gate
and let Jim Caldwell back to the stone vault,
Caldwell entered with a flashlight
and found what was later determined to be
a human tibia on one of the stone shelves.
Later Charles Alexander told Caldwell
that the cemetery was very, very old
and unidentified bodies were laying in some locations.
When remains are found
in what is thought to be an empty grave,
the procedure is to allow for the new burial anyway.
- Jim, the morning he come in there
and I turned things over to him,
he went to the Coroner's Office to make sure it was human.
I know he told me one time, he said,
"I'll put yellow tape around this whole building
"and lock every one of them up."
- [Narrator] After taking the remains to the County Coroner,
Jim Caldwell returned to conduct
a more thorough investigation,
he found human remains in a golf cart, a tool box,
some strewn on the ground near the office building,
others in a garbage can, while some remains were discovered
rolled up in a fast food bag
stashed in a truck's glove compartment.
- I mean, I think they were told you know,
if you're out there, find something, pick it up,
but some of it wound up in the pick up truck,
some of it wound up on the backhoe,
it's just where people went through and they picked it up,
you know, not trying to hide it,
but they knew it was out there on the grounds.
- [Narrator] The Kentucky Attorney General's Office
brought charges against the then 145 year old company
and its three chief officers,
Clifford B Amos, Robert Copley and Charles Alexander.
All three men pled innocent in July 1989
after a grand jury indicted them on over 60 counts
including corpse abuse, grave desecration,
improper handling of burial payments
and failure to keep adequate funds
in Perpetual Care Trust accounts.
If convicted on all criminal charges,
Louisville Crematory and Cemetery Company
face fines up to $1.1 million
and Amos, Copley and Alexander were subject
to sentences of up to 268 years in prison.
- It was in total contradiction
of everything my Dad stood for,
I mean, he was just such an upstanding type of individual.
I certainly could imagine that it could have taken place
without his knowledge or awareness,
he really probably should not
have been in the role that he was in,
he did not know anything about cemeteries.
- [Narrator] An injunction filed July the 21st, 1989
prohibited any new burials at Eastern or Greenwood,
except for the 3,200 pre-need plots already sold.
The order also stated every burial
would have to first be examined
by an archeologist from the University of Louisville.
- [Phil] A relatively large percentage of the graves,
that have been sold as reserves as we investigate them,
the grave right behind you as a matter of fact
was occupied by three individuals
and then by the time we got to the third individual,
all we had was the pelvic region
and they had been just cut
and basically a third of the individual
had been cut off with a backhoe.
- [Bob] Phil DiBlasi is an incredible man,
I mean, the knowledge that guy's got is incredible,
I mean, they used him
because when the investigation was going on,
they had to have somebody that was qualified to go in
and check that grave and make sure it could be used.
- I was involved with the investigation
under the Attorney General,
the court order said you people are operating a cemetery,
but you can't violate the law,
so to keep you from violating the law,
we're gonna have an archeologist come in here
and every time you open a grave, he's gonna look at it
to find out if it's previously occupied.
- [Narrator] Phil DiBlasi began his investigation
of Eastern and Greenwood Cemeteries in July of 1989,
digging up about two graves a day,
usually side by side with Jim Caldwell and Bob Allen.
By November DiBlasi reported checking about 70 sites
and only a few failed to produce remains
from previous burials.
- [Phil] As we were digging the grave for Esther C Nelson,
we encountered the pelvic region
and lower extremities of individual one.
- [Narrator] In one case at a family member's request,
the remains of Jesse W Melson and Ivy Irene DeSpain
were disinterred and identified
for relocation to another cemetery.
During the excavation of the grave,
remains of more than a dozen previous burials were found.
- We have individuals, these are all,
the 10 of these that we've indicated here
are John or Jane Doe, they were buried prior to 1870.
The individuals I'm going to point out now
are individuals who are on the modern grid.
- [Narrator] The re-designation of cemetery sections
is clear as the modern burials face the road,
but the ancient burials are facing east
in continuity with Christian burial traditions
in the 19th century.
- There are approximately,
well at first there was intended to be
and for a while was maintained
a Perpetual Care Fund by the cemetery,
that Perpetual Care Fund I am informed by witnesses,
who are prepared here to testify,
but will do so by affidavit, is about $100,000 short.
Now the nature of a Perpetual Care Fund
is that when one purchases a burial site in the cemetery,
a certain portion of that purchase price
goes to setting up a fund,
that theoretically the interest and income from that fund
over the years will be sufficient
to maintain cutting the grass in the cemetery
and even maintain it in the years
after the cemetery becomes full.
- [Narrator] The Perpetual Care Fund for Eastern Cemetery
was estimated to be missing over $117,000,
which by law was to be used for the upkeep of graves,
monuments and cemetery grounds.
The cemetery had also been illegally charging
family members for annual care,
although these services were never rendered.
- You shouldn't have to do that,
if the money is being put into the Trust Fund
like it should have been,
there wouldn't be a need to charge the family
or whether it was legal or not,
probably not to charge these families $50 a year,
75, $100 a year to maintain their graves.
- [Narrator] After building Kentucky's first crematory,
Eastern Cemetery held a monopoly on the cremation business
throughout the 20th century.
On August the 8th, 1966
the University of Louisville Medical School
sent over several cadavers for cremation
and by the 1980s, Eastern Cemetery was solely responsible
for all medical waste cremations from U of L.
- We received bodies every year,
if you donate your body to the Medical School,
they use your body for science,
after a year your body is cremated
and it is returned to the family,
that is what is supposed to happen.
- Jim Caldwell was upset
with the way the med schools
were treating the human remains
that were coming in for cremation.
There were 20 or 30 sets of remains at a time,
they were supposed to come back
in individual boxes and individual
and I understand that they were coming back kind of mixed.
- The year that we got bodies over there,
a body came out of the box, the box it was sent over in,
that box, Bob Allen came up and got me
and he said, "We have a problem."
When I went downstairs there were probably in that box
five heads, 22 toes
and 18 mice in one box.
- They were cremating, they were accused of cremating
more than one body at the same time,
so technically if you cremate
parts of two or three people
from a med school medical waste as one,
is that breaking the law?
- And I said stop what we're doing,
I'm calling the Attorney General's Office,
finding out what we need to do.
Jim Caldwell had to come over,
we had to open each and every box,
because each body is supposed to be returned
to the family, a whole body,
in one of the boxes we found probably 15 babies,
that had notes on the box,
these babies were no doubt over 365 grams,
they were not abortions, all of them were babies
that should've had proper burials.
It was declared that everything in those boxes were okay,
basically the Attorney General's Office
did not in any way, shape or form
wanna take on the University of Louisville Medical School.
- [Narrator] Over the course of the investigation,
cemetery workers told Jim Caldwell
that about 70 infants' bodies
were buried less than a foot beneath the surface
in section 19 or Babyland.
- And a couple of times I was told to come to court
to testify about Baby ground, Babyland, some other thing.
I get down there, no, no, no, they don't need you,
you know, we're not gonna get that for that spot,
we're not gonna get there,
you know, it's like they don't wanna hear it, man,
you know, they don't wanna hear it.
- Babyland as we call it, section 19,
there are several babies buried there,
a lot of them still don't have tombstones,
they still have just the classic pieces of paper
and a lot of those babies were buried
maybe nine inches deep, maybe 12 inches deep.
- [Narrator] Caldwell found that infants
were routinely buried in wooden containers
constructed of one inch pine boards
and the identified graves
ranged from 10 to 24 inches in depth.
- I did a disinterment there and literally took my trowel
and scraped the grass off and hit the lid
of the wooden box the stillborn was buried in.
- [Beth] The babies were absolutely,
I actually have pictures of one baby
and like I said, that was put into a jar
and put into a grave maybe nine inches deep.
- I made a couple of burials back there,
all of us did, Ronnie did some,
JR's done some, I done a couple,
but I know one I did when I was digging the grave,
because the little baby grave you dig by hand with a shovel,
you know, 'cause you're usually gonna go one by two,
one foot wide and two foot long, maybe two foot deep,
a foot and a half, two foot deep,
but when I dug, I didn't get that far,
when I hit a leg bone, pretty good size femur
and I just stopped right there, I said no, this is it, man,
I stopped and I went to get Charlie, you know,
I said you ain't got that far to walk,
come out there and take a look,
so he walked down, he looked, he said, "Pick it up,
"finish digging the grave deep enough to get by
"and put that back in there on the bottom."
[somber melodic music]
- [Narrator] Addah Herdt, a longtime member
of Christ United Church accepted a seat
on the Board of Directors in 1974
and in 1980 took a full time job
as office manager at Eastern Cemetery.
Addah's daily responsibilities
included sales of burial monuments
and billing for the annual and lifetime care plans.
- I had a lady that came to my hospital room
and offered to "Take care of it," as she put it
and at that point I'd had a really terrible delivery.
So I was just at a loss what to do,
so I let her take care of it, take care of the burial
and I can still see her face today,
'cause I think she knew what was happening down there.
- [Narrator] In the mid-1980s,
Addah Herdt began soliciting the mothers of stillborn babies
while still recovering in their hospital rooms
offering them closure through the burial of their child
at Eastern Cemetery for the very reasonable cost of $75.
She would sit bedside
and write out the bill of sale on a hospital napkin.
- Well, she came down as a representative of Eastern
and so she just came in the room and said,
you know, she did the normal, "I'm sorry what happened,"
blah blah blah and then said,
"For $75 we can take care of the burial,"
and at that point, like I said I had a rough delivery
and I didn't know what to do, so I let her
and as soon as I was able to, I went down there,
to where I thought he was buried.
- Because she had talked to this lady for a couple of hours
and shared the most intimate details of her life
with this woman who seemed to be so nice and caring,
to sit there and listen, that you know,
I mean, who would fake something like that?
Who would make up that stuff to deceive you?
Who would act like that and have an ulterior motive,
when you've just been through so much.
The people of the Louisville Cemetery Crematory Incorporated
would, that's who would, that's who did
and because of that, she chose to have her baby buried there
and felt good about it for a very short time.
Needless to say when she stopped going,
because she heard of what happened there.
- I saw it on the news
and I thought that nightmare of a delivery just got worse
and that was my first thought,
that this nightmare, it just became worse.
- Who in the hell takes advantage
of a person in that situation?
I mean, what's wrong with somebody that,
and not even somebody, a business,
I mean, it was their practice,
that's how they conducted their business
by preying on people like her,
who every single one of them is gonna be going through
one of the hardest times of their lives.
- My big thing was just not being able to go down there
and I also just felt like a fool for a long time,
thinking I've been going down there and who's there,
if anyone and it just felt dirty.
- [Narrator] After the news
of the over burial of Eastern Cemetery broke,
the families of those resting there were outraged.
Attorney General, Fred Cowan said more than 200 people
called to file complaints or seek information
within the first week of the indictment.
- You have to understand,
you had hundreds and thousands of family members
coming up wanting to know once this broke news,
is my family buried with somebody else?
Is my grave still available?
No, your grave's not available,
your grave's not available,
because there's probably 13 people in your grave also
and do you get a refund on this?
No, you don't,
the cemetery doesn't have any money to pay you back.
Oh well, I'm gonna move my husband out of,
okay, well, you can do that,
but you have to pay an archeologist
or an investigator to identify the body,
plus you have to buy a grave in another cemetery.
- We were out in the cemetery doing an exhumation
and this pick up truck came and somebody,
one of the crew members from the cemetery
realized who it was, this guy pulls up,
sticks a double barrel shotgun out the window at us
at which point everybody is kind of like diving for cover
and he said he wanted to know where the boys were,
where his children were and then he drove off.
- [Bob] When we were still working and cremating people,
I had to lock the front door,
them girls left, they couldn't take it no more,
I mean, the phone calls were unreal,
threats, threats, people beating on the doors,
that the only thing they'd know
is what they'd read in the paper,
they didn't know that I'm still there,
Beth's still there, Barbara's still there
trying to keep the place going, I mean, why, I don't know,
because there was no future for it,
but I just felt obligated.
- That's what we said, we felt an obligation
to try to deal with these families on some sort of level.
You had families bringing weapons up there,
they might also have told you that,
but you had families bringing weapons up, they were angry,
I certainly would be, if it had happened to me,
my father's dead and buried
and they were very angry and they were very frustrated
and there was not any answers we could give them,
the Attorney General's Office didn't wanna talk to them,
they were sorry they had ever gotten in the middle of this,
they were sorry any of this had ever been,
they wished all this would just go away.
- [Narrator] After the removal of Charles Alexander
and the resignation of all the remaining Board members,
the Cemetery Company was placed in receivership.
In October of 1991, Beth Selch
was appointed to oversee the company by the court
only days after her marriage to Jim Caldwell.
- Jim and Beth Caldwell, [laughing]
Jim came together with Beth Selch,
she was the secretary, she was a very becoming young lady
and it was kind of funny,
because you'd watch the funeral directors
and they were all kind of sniffing around and being nice
and bringing her coffee and stuff like this
and then you know, these are guys that are making big bucks,
they're driving around in great big Mercedes Benzs
and stuff like this, but old Jim, he pulls it through,
he ends up marrying her.
- And when I went to court,
I had gotten married and of course that was,
it was gonna be not that good of news anymore,
because I had actually married Jim
and it wasn't the illicit affair
that they were trying to say we were having
and Judge John said and I will never forget this,
I went in and he said "Okay, Miss Selch,
"I'm gonna ask, I've had a name change,"
and you heard 22 attorneys actually be quiet.
- [Narrator] Jim Caldwell resigned
from the Attorney General's Office
under pressure from his superiors
after the investigation of Eastern Cemetery.
He began working alongside Beth
positively identifying dozens of bodies disinterred
by concerned family members for burial in other cemeteries.
- Yes, sir?
- I did not realize until relatively recently
the number of disinternments,
that Jim was involved with after I had left.
He was in quotes positively identifying individuals
and I find that extremely disturbing,
I don't think he was capable of doing it.
- [Narrator] Unable to sell any more graves
and with the cremation business rapidly declining,
Beth couldn't maintain adequate funds to upkeep the grounds,
compensate employees or pay utility bills.
Finally in 1992 the gas and electric
were shut off for the final time
and Beth Caldwell stepped down as receiver.
- [Bob] Me and Jim was trying to do everything we could,
I was trying to run the backhoe,
he was trying to watch for me
and it just got to the point,
where I mean, I went back to the office
and one of the funeral directors from Indiana called,
gonna bring a body over and Beth said he'll be here shortly,
I said okay, I'll go down and open the door.
Well, they turned the gas off
and they turned the electric off,
so the dude shows up to the back door
and I go up and tell her, I said,
well, we're not gonna do nothing, I said,
'cause I can't get the door open, we don't have no electric
and we don't have no gas.
The only thing I regret to this day,
I mean, that place took a toll on me,
I mean, when I went to work up there,
I had blond hair and when I left there I had gray hair.
Threats, the people treating you like a dog,
you know, we turned into the criminals,
you know, we stayed to help and the criminals walked free.
- [Narrator] On August the 26th, 1991,
the criminal case against Clifford Amos, Robert Copley
and Charles Alexander was dismissed
after finishing a six-month pre-trial diversion program.
As part of the conditions, the three men were
to no longer be employed by the Cemetery Company,
nor participate in its operations.
Defense lawyers have contended that Caldwell
first came to Eastern Cemetery in May 1989
without a search warrant
and intentionally misled cemetery staff.
Much of the evidence and testimony was deemed inadmissible,
because Caldwell had been led on to the grounds
before business hours by cemetery worker, Bob Allen.
Over $100,000 in cemetery funds
was paid in legal fees for the defense
leaving nothing to compensate victims
in a class action lawsuit against the Cemetery Company.
A statement issued by the Attorney General's Office
expressed that the prosecution
agreed to resolve the criminal case
not because of the challenge to Caldwell's methods,
but because the defendants were elderly
and had never been in trouble before.
- You know, his life was solid,
he was just this solid person,
who believed in doing the right thing, not the wrong thing
and there was no motive for him to do the wrong thing
and that's why I still believe that he was innocent
of wrongdoing in this scenario,
where wrong things were done.
[somber melodic music]
- The Attorney General's Office
didn't fully disclose what they were there to do,
therefore they were there under false pretenses,
which made all of the evidence
and everything else worthless.
- When the indictment come down,
they were taken out of there,
they hired Frank Haddad's law firm,
I think they used cemetery money
and they walked 'em through the book
and they didn't even stay in jail,
you know, they walked 'em out of it
and I thought no, this is not right, it's not right,
they're gonna walk and nothing's going to be done.
- We went through all of the legal machinations,
all the pre-trial hearings,
we were ready for the trial date, we met,
I was there because I was expected to testify
every time the trial date was
turned out to be a pre-trial hearing
in which the judge ripped the AG's Office a new asshole
and explained to them what a warrant to search was
and threw the entire case out the window.
- They did, they had an excellent attorney
and they had money
and when they were actually charged with the crimes,
they walked through the jail system,
but never spent one minute,
they didn't even have to be bonded out of jail
and never paid back one penny, never,
nothing ever happened to them, nothing.
- They went on just forever asking questions,
just trying to get anything they could
to where this would go away in the court and it did.
The three men charged with these crimes,
Mr. Amos, Mr. Copley and Mr. Alexander
never spent one day in jail,
not one day.
- [Bob] I don't know what was going on,
but somebody was covering up something,
because they had Beth and Barbara do a sworn deposition,
them girls worked in the office,
they handled the books and stuff and answered the phone,
they wasn't out on the ground,
they didn't see them bones in a grave,
they didn't see people getting dug through and pounded on.
They didn't once through the whole investigation
get me, Ronnie or JR on a sworn deposition.
Finally I told 'em, I said I want a meeting
with the Attorney General's Office,
I said I wanna find out why this is going on,
you know, I think if they did not want
us from the ground crew to tell,
because they done knew where that case was going,
they knew it wasn't gonna go nowheres,
you know, they're gonna shaft Jim Caldwell and they did,
because he come in there without a search warrant,
they hammered on him, hammered on him, finally he resigned.
[somber melodic music]
- Okay, yes sir, you've been trying to get a word in.
[somber melodic music]
- One day I was at Greenwood Cemetery
and this gentleman walks up and he says,
"I'm Maurice Phillips, I'm the overseer of this cemetery,"
and it kind of raised a red flag with me
and I said well, what are you overseeing?
This is the first time I've ever laid eyes on you
and he says, "Oh well, I appreciate everything
"you all are doing down here,
"this helps us stretch the money a little bit further,"
and I said what money?
And he said, "Oh, I get money from the state
"to maintain the cemetery, as I'm the overseer."
- He had this old beat up Dodge van,
he would go and pick up the guys from different charities,
at that time they were using
Eastern Cemetery equipment to mow the cemetery.
- And I question where was the money going,
because we were using volunteer labor,
we were using money from my discretionary account
at City Hall to maintain the equipment,
so where was the money going?
And so I started asking questions
and I really didn't like the answers I was getting.
- I know he was accused of mismanaging money,
I thought it was small potatoes,
I thought it was maybe three or $4,000,
I hear now that the numbers were much larger than that.
- [Narrator] In the Spring of 1997,
the court appointed Maurice Phillips
receiver over the three cemeteries,
which had been abandoned for nearly five years
since the resignation of Beth Caldwell.
In March of 1998 Maurice Phillips had tons of dirt
and construction debris dumped on about a quarter acre
of marked and unmarked graves
in section four of Eastern Cemetery.
Phillips reported he needed the dirt for filling sinkholes
and open grave shafts left by disinterment
and for grading the ground
where burials were too close to the surface.
The debris came from a condemned distillery
nearby on Payne Street, which was being demolished.
- Then we all of a sudden got a phone call
saying there are piles of debris,
it wasn't dirt, but debris,
so we rolled over there and there's piles
of rock and brick and wood and someone said,
"Well, we were trying to fill in
"where these graves have fallen in."
But that's garbage, you're dumping garbage here.
- Mo had a backhoe and he had a dump truck,
so he went over and talked to I guess, the contractor
and said, "Look, I'll haul off your dirt
"as you guys are doing all this construction,
"I've got a place to dump it, you know,
"you guys give me this amount and I'll take care of it."
- He had somebody doing some work somewheres
and he was letting 'em dump over there for so much a load
and I understand that he was getting paid
per truckload that they brought in there.
- Well, I was getting answers that this Mr. Phillips
was given this money to maintain three cemeteries,
Eastern, Shardein and Greenwood,
Shardein's a very small cemetery,
so it wasn't much to maintain that,
but Greenwood was massive and Eastern was massive.
When I looked at the records, I was shocked to see
that money was being punched out of ATMs
at two o'clock in the morning at 4th and Oak,
at one o'clock in the morning at 18th and Broadway,
which is why I raised a red flag
and said no one's cutting cemeteries that time of night,
something's going on with this money,
which then in turn led me to the Commonwealth
Attorney's Office to start asking questions.
- [Narrator] On February the 14th, 2001
Maurice Phillips was removed by the court
following allegations by the Attorney General's Office
that he had abandoned his duties
and mismanaged cemetery funds.
In July Phillips was indicted
by a Jefferson County grand jury and charged
with 26 counts of theft and 25 counts of forgery.
Between January 1999 and February 2001,
Phillips stole or misspent
at least $98,541 of cemetery money
making deposits in six bank accounts
held at L&N Credit Union by Phillips and his wife.
Among the alerted transfers was $19,796
from the State Transportation Cabinet for land
purchased from Shardein Cemetery to widen 7th Street Road.
Two of the accounts in question were closed immediately
after a restraining order was issued
to freeze Phillips' assets.
- I mean, I gave every bank record
to the Commonwealth Attorney's Office,
reported to him about the issue of using this crematorium.
We would receive phone calls over to Shardein,
Shardein backs up to a neighborhood,
we would receive phone calls in my office,
where they would call us and say somebody was back there
at two o'clock in the morning digging a grave
and I was like, what?
And we'd go out there and there would be a fresh grave,
so I explained to Dave Stingle what I do believe
is that this man is trying to run
some type of cemetery business
and burying people and charging families for it
and there was not supposed to be
any burial in those cemeteries.
- [Narrator] On July the 24th, 2001
Phillips was booked at the Jefferson County Jail,
but was released on his own recognizance later that day.
Maurice Phillips died July the 29th, 2005
with no resolution to the charges
that had been brought against him.
There has been no receiver appointed by the court
for the three cemeteries since.
[somber melodic music]
- [Narrator] With no one left to oversee the cemetery,
break ins to the chapel, garage
and the stone vault became frequent,
hundreds of gravestones were toppled over
and century-old monuments were destroyed.
Brass name plates were pried off of gravestones
and sold as scrap metal,
fires were set throughout the basement
and even inside the incinerators themselves.
- I think it was also a really convenient place
for teenagers in the Highlands that wanted to come party
and do drugs, drink, whatever they come and did,
because you know, 28 acres,
it wasn't hard to find a private, quiet little spot,
where nobody was gonna see them,
especially with the grass as tall as it was,
the trees and bushes as overgrown as they were.
- I do remember
seeing the broken into
and littered crematorium
and I remember seeing the vases of ashes,
they were scattered and that sort of thing,
so I do remember that
and I do remember hearing complaints
from someone like AD Porter Senior,
an African-American funeral director,
who actually lived in the neighborhood,
adjacent, Cherokee Triangle
and I do remember meeting with him as I recall
and always always trying to conjure up ways
that money and care could be provided
to what was essentially an abandoned and bankrupt cemetery.
- [Narrator] The chapel and offices
located in the back of Eastern Cemetery were broken into
and vandalized countless times over the following years,
the walls filled with graffiti
and the cremains stored in the columbarium
were stolen, dumped out or destroyed.
On July the 28th, 2003,
Professor DiBlasi petitioned the court
and recovered and moved 244 sets of urns,
some unlabeled or containing multiple sets of cremains.
- Phil at some point went over to the columbarium
and noticed that people had broken in
and when he walked in,
he went to the area where the columbarium was,
which the columbarium was basically
an ornate, glass shelving system
and people could when they had a relative cremated,
they had nice little bronze urns.
People had smashed the glass, they had gotten the urns
and dumped out the ashes on the floor.
- You know, this is her Mom,
so I call her up on the telephone
and I'll be honest with you,
by the time I was done with the conversation,
I was crying too and I was like,
I'm not letting this happen again, okay.
So I went to the judge,
went to the Attorney General's Office to get a court order
and we brought all the cremated sets of remains here.
- So Phil started packing 'em up
and to put it in perspective, he had a full size van
and these little urns,
being that they're brass, bronze or what have you,
they probably weigh eight to 10 pounds,
the cremains inside probably weigh three pounds.
He loaded up the van three times completely full,
packed them down to U of L and unpacked 'em all in a day,
that's how much it meant to him,
that no more got dumped out.
These were people that he had no connection to,
that's just the person he is, that's how he thinks.
- What we had was we had a couple of dates set up
and they could call here and what they would do
is they would come in and they would sign an affidavit
that said they were the nearest next of kin
and we would get them, we would go get their ashes
and we would bring them out on one of the steel carts
and we would give them to 'em.
- He was able to over the course of the last 10 or 15 years,
he's been able to contact the families
and I think that to date he's almost got half of 'em
reunited with their families,
so they've come and picked 'em up, which is huge.
- [Narrator] In a court order
issued February the 14th, 2001,
the University of Louisville Program of Archeology
took possession of the written records
for Eastern, Greenwood and Shardein Cemeteries,
which included burial index cards, day books, range books
and maps, some dating as far back as 1843.
- He got a ton of records, he found all kinds of records
and he took all those down to U of L with him
and he at some point a lady who was critically ill,
who had family in Eastern came down
and she's like, "Look, I've got $50,000,
"I wanna leave it to Eastern
"and I wanna put that towards
"getting the grass cut and maintained,"
and Phil says, "All due respect,
"that may cut the grass for one year
"and the next year, it's all gonna be back,"
and he's like, "Longterm where that money
"would best serve the cemetery
"is to set up an endowment for the records,"
which she listened and trusted him enough
to follow his lead on that
and with that, the records have been preserved
and they're being put into a digital form,
a little bit every year with students working on it.
- We're gonna scan all of the records,
because the paper is acid
and literally people are disappearing
off the bottom of the page
and you know, to me, that's probably all
that was ever written about that human being.
- [Narrator] 25 years after the news
of over burial broke at Eastern Cemetery,
Andy Harpole decided something had to be done.
He formed the Friends of Eastern Cemetery
based on the belief
that those buried within the cemetery walls
should receive the perpetual care
they had not only paid for, but deserve.
- The Friends of Eastern Cemetery is a really great group,
you have a lot of incredible people, who care a lot
and that's an incredible basis I think
for what we're trying to do
is having that group of people,
who really are passionate and care
and when they hear the stories of these families,
they are more compelled to want to do more
and I just think that's a great quality
to have in a group of people.
- I've been involved in different volunteer groups,
this is the real deal,
they're not doing this to get anything out of it
and they work so hard when they're there,
I just feel like it's one of those groups,
where you can see progress being made
and they're all in for the right reasons.
- There's lots of odd things you can do volunteer wise,
that may be a little bit more self gratifying
or quicker results
and just the fact that it's a cemetery, you know,
I tell people, I'll be talking to my Dad or whoever,
I'll be working in the cemetery really, what are you doing?
Just working in the cemetery,
why are you working in a cemetery?
So I mean it takes a different kind of people, I think,
that are willing to do this.
- I mean, I think fundamentally
everybody has this kind of empathy for what happened there
and we kind of see a reflection,
something, an idea that I've heard mirrored a lot,
that I believe is you can tell a lot about a society
by the way it treats its dead
and so it's a fundamentally important ritual to have
and it hasn't been upheld.
So one of the ways that we describe ourselves
is that we're caretakers for a cemetery,
that doesn't have a caretaker.
- [Narrator] On December the 3rd,
the Friends of Eastern Cemetery was incorporated
as a non profit organization.
The group hosts a number of events annually
including historical tours led by Joel Berndt,
Preservation Training seminars taught
by nationally recognized expert, Jonathan Appell
and flagging ceremonies on Memorial and Veterans Days.
In addition to general landscaping and maintenance,
the volunteer group also repair and reset toppled monuments
and clean eroded gravestones
using a non-corrosive D/2 biological solution.
- The very first time I went there,
it was just a vast variety of people
doing anything and everything you could possibly think of
and everybody was welcoming,
we were all there for the same purpose
just to see what we could do to help
and it was great, we spent all day there
just cutting grass, raking, trimming for hours,
you don't even realize how long you're there,
until at the end of the day you're like
really, you know, it's five o'clock?
- Every time you show up
and the same people are there again,
you're like oh, thank God, you know,
they're gonna stay, 'cause you never know
and it really is a community effort,
you need a lot of people.
- Now the upkeep that's going on now, it's helpful
and I'm sure it lifts up other people's spirits.
- When I started with Friends of Eastern Cemetery,
every grave that I came across
that had that Cunningham name on it, I would just cry
and I would be like that's mine, that's mine,
you have that last name,
I don't care where you fit in the tree,
that belongs to me.
- Knowing what this group is doing is amazing
and to be a part of the group
and to share in the experiences with the families
that come and see the work that we've done
and how much they appreciate it,
just share the hugs and the tears and the joy
when they're able to walk finally to their site,
that they couldn't do forever,
because the grass was literally as tall as your chin.
So that part of it is just amazing
and I would not do that, 'cause I know that this group
is a great group and hopefully it will be around,
I mean, this is our third upcoming season
of working there and we have big plans.
- I've met a lot of new friends, you know,
that are family to me now, the Friends of Eastern Cemetery.
I can point people in directions now and they pull through
and be like this is the section you need to be in,
oh, I've seen that, I've just cut around that gravestone.
- I'm trying to get us to do more events,
more tours, try to get schools involved,
try to get more local groups involved,
because there's such a great amount of history there
and the more people you bring in,
the more people you talk to about it,
they're going to tell more people
and I'm just hoping that raising that awareness
can keep growing the non-profit
and that's also how you can start fundraising,
because the more people learn,
the more that they do want to help.
- We just need more help,
we need more funding,
we are a small group
that is trying so hard to get the cemetery
not obviously back to where it once was,
you can't just recognize one person in that plot,
it's not fair,
but to get it back, where families can come in
and be happy that it's being taken care of.
- One of the things we would like to do,
we were all young when my mother passed
and we would like to purchase a headstone,
but at the time what I do remember is my father,
he was a bricklayer and he wasn't paid much,
but he put a red brick as a headstone
to mark where they had laid her
and when we went back to try to find that,
that's what we couldn't find.
- With finding out about Greenwood's abandonment situation,
just like Eastern's,
we thought it would be fitting to help them get a stone,
because I guess they never were able
to get a stone made for her,
so we contacted Evan's Monument Company
and they were willing to donate a gravestone for her
and so we got the burial records
and the position of the burial plot for Mary Cobb
and we went over and set her stone,
so that when the family came on Memorial Day Weekend,
or just before, they had a nice surprise waiting for them
rather than what they normally come there for
and had to deal with.
- You know, those are, well, it's our loved ones
and not only ours, but other people's loved ones,
so I can speak for my family
that we're truly grateful, that someone cares.
You know, we were young back then,
but we would like to be able
to know where my Momma is,
I mean, we would like to put a headstone up
after all these years, it would mean a lot to us,
it was five of us, four girls and a boy
and we don't even know where she's laid at there,
we just know she's there.
- Well, a cemetery is supposed to be the guardian,
you know, of deceased family members
and it's supposed to be a reverent place,
you're not supposed to disturb graves.
- You have who's who of Kentucky's history
and Louisville's history buried back there,
so why isn't anyone approaching those folks?
There's no ownership,
until someone takes ownership of the property,
I don't think you're gonna get much of a change.
- We can't take ownership of it,
because if we take ownership of it,
we inherit the liability, which in 1989,
because of all of the pre-need sold graves,
which right now there's supposed to be
somewhere around 5,000, the estimate in 1989
after DiBlasi and the Attorney General's Office
kind of put all their resources together
after reading the records
and doing some archeological digs is $59 million
and that's 1989 money.
- We are gonna make this work, it's going to work,
this is not a one-year plan, this is not a 10-year plan,
this is a forever plan, you know,
this is a forever commitment that we all
as Friends of Eastern Cemetery have made.
- There's just a lot of great people
trying to do great things
for families that some people don't even know,
I mean, you know, I have family there,
but there are people there that there's no family there,
they're just good people trying to do right
by years and years and years of things that have gone wrong
and I just would hope that they would give us the chance
to continue the good work that we're doing,
'cause it is good work, you know,
I just want people to know that we're there
and it's okay, it's okay, you know.
- You know, we're a longterm,
I wanna see a memorial museum in there
with every single name of every single person
that we can find, that was buried there,
so that their family can come and at least see their name.
- I put everything on the line, you know,
I mean, I've said it before,
I mean, I should've kept my mouth shut,
I should've went looking,
found me a job and got away from it.
They would have got busted sooner or later,
it couldn't last forever,
I mean, it lasted for the turn of the century
up until 1989, so it had to end somewheres
and it would've ended, I mean they would've hung their self
and the outcome might have been different, you know,
if I wouldn't have did what I did and I'd have left,
they would've kept on going, things would've got worse,
Ronnie would've kept on doing what he was doing,
nothing would have changed, they'd have got caught
and chances are that one would've stuck,
something would've really happened to 'em.
I mean, I could've just walked away.
- This is a person who had a final wish
and they have a family, who supports this final wish,
who needs this ritual and this space to come
and to be at peace with what happened to them in their life
and that's sort of lost,
that's the part that I don't understand,
look, I just don't know
how you could get over that hump, you know.
- I don't know how widespread that is historically,
I don't know whether it's a total criminal aberration
or whether it was something that culture has done
more frequently than we realize.
- Things are never gonna be right at Eastern Cemetery
and that's I hope,
obviously it's gonna be there after I'm gone,
I'm just hoping that people will not allow it
to be abused over and over and over again.
[light melodic music]
[multiple voices speaking]
[melodic country music]
♪ Three days in a cave
♪ Friend to be saved calling out to Mother Mary ♪
♪ Asking for a raise
♪ Four nights on the road
♪ Coming back home, travels in these soulless cities ♪
♪ Wring about familiar pities in restless prose ♪
♪ To just bones
♪ Time will beat on
♪ With its perfect drums and pantomimes ♪
♪ Switching buttons and pushing lines ♪
♪ The spotlight fades to pull the punch ♪
♪ And say
♪ That life will roll on
♪ With its undercurrents and overtones ♪
♪ Whistling winds through dried up bones ♪
♪ A mother with her arms wide open sings ♪
♪ That you
♪ You are not alone
♪ The universe laughs in the face ♪
♪ Of those who dare to tackle grace ♪
♪ And burn the midnight candles for a while ♪
♪ Drifting on the edge of time
♪ A stone's throw from oblivion ♪
♪ You'll meet your shadow self face to face ♪
♪ See that it's just fear you embrace ♪
♪ Time will beat on
♪ With its perfect drums and pantomimes ♪
♪ Switching parts and pushing lines ♪
♪ The spotlight fades to pull the punch ♪
♪ And say
♪ That life will roll on
♪ With its undercurrents and overtones ♪
♪ Whistling winds through dried up bones ♪
♪ A mother with her arms wide open sings ♪
♪ That you
♪ You are not alone
♪ She puts you on your knees
♪ As you're begging, darling, please ♪
♪ Release me so I can baby step away ♪
♪ She whispers back to me
♪ Magic moments only works in threes ♪
♪ And all you have to do is live to play ♪
♪ And the sun will rise to shine another day ♪
♪ Time will beat on
♪ With its perfect drums and pantomimes ♪
♪ Switching parts and pushing lines ♪
♪ The spotlight fades to pull the punch ♪
♪ And say
♪ That life will roll on
♪ With its undercurrents and overtones ♪
♪ Whistling winds through dried up bones ♪
♪ A mother with her arms wide open sings ♪
♪ That you
♪ You are not alone
[melodic melancholic music]
- [Bob] The only thing that I would really like to say
is the way the families have been ripped off,
I mean, hundreds and I told the Attorney General that,
I said these families bought these graves in good faith,
knowing they had a place to go if something happened to 'em
or something happened to their loved ones
and then when the time comes,
they're told there's no room, they can't use it,
you know, that's not right,
thousands, there's gotta be thousands of 'em out there,
that own property there, they can't use it,
they paid for it and they're not gonna get their money back,
they're not gonna get another site to replace it,
the money's not there,
I mean, they've been shafted big time
and I think everybody turned their back on 'em,
I think the Attorney General turned her back on 'em,
they didn't go far enough to help 'em.