It’s bad enough that social media such as Facebook and Twitter can harvest our information and use it as they wish, but now it’s dead tree media and obituaries? In Barnstable, Massachusetts, a crook based his decisions on where he would hit next by scanning the local paper’s death notices and would break into the mourning family’s home while they were at the funeral, or attending a viewing of the body at a mortuary. Randy Brunelle was indicted on three counts of felony breaking and entering during the daytime, three counts of larceny from a building and one count of attempt to commit a crime. He was only caught because a 78-year-old widow was too frail to make it to her husband’s burial, so she stayed home, and called police when a suspicious man was outside her home. This isn’t the first time Brunelle was accused to prey on grief-ridden families. He served 18 months in 2012 for breaking into the mother of a Sandwich police officer’s mother’s home on the day of her funeral.
If you’ve ever flown into the Savannah/Hilton Head airport, your plane probably taxied over the graves of Richard and Catherine Dotson. They didn’t perish in a crash at the airport, or have anything to do with aviation. As a matter or fact, both the Dotsons died decades before the Wright Brothers performed the first powered heavier-than-air airplane at nearby Kitty Hawk. They were farmers who were buried in a family cemetery on their land in the late 19th Century. When the airport started expanding in the 1980s, the cemetery was acquired by eminent domain, and all the bodies were exhumed and moved to a new location…except Richard and Catherine. By a court order, they were left intact on the land where they lived and died, their headstones embedded into the airport’s Runway 10.
K.L. Hawkins, a funeral director in Decatur, Texas, has an issue with the way funeral directors have been depicted in TV and movies. Too many of them, she says, are depicted as out to take advantage of people. “I’m not going to say that every funeral home worker is a paragon of morality,” she tells mystery writer E. Young. “But the ones that are shady are more banal, like funeral director at the end of ‘The Big Lewbowski’ who is trying to sell Walter and The Dude an expensive urn for Donnie that they didn’t want or need.” And don’t get her started on “Six Feet Under,” the acclaimed HBO series that took place in a family-owned mortuary in Los Angeles.
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