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| A Cook County Sheriff's Police officer shuts the gates of the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) |
Posted: Tuesday, 14 July 2009 9:55AM
FBI to try to start ID'ing bones at Burr Oak Cemetery
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ALSIP, Ill. (WBBM/CBS) - Debris and weeds were cleared yesterday from an area in Burr Oak Cemetery, and now the FBI can move into the next stage of its investigation.
"This morning, the search is going to begin to try to physically locate and try to remove evidence, human remains, from the ground," FBI spokesman Ross Rice said.
RELATED NEWS
Workers at Burr Oak are accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies in a scheme to resell the burial plots.
Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes is cracking down on the company that owns Burr Oak. He's frozen the trust funds of Perpetua Holdings of Illinois.
Work at one of the largest crime scenes in the history of Cook County begins at 8 a.m. when investigators will be sweeping over 100,000 grave sites.
The cemetery has been closed to the public while investigators sort out the massive crime scene.
Cook County Sheriff's employees have already begun brushing off and photographing headstones in preparation for today's shoulder-to-shoulder operation to locate grave sites.
They're looking for every headstone and every grave to find any more that may have been disturbed.
Meanwhile, investigators in the cemetery office and FBI agents will begin the daunting task of trying to identify the bones of well over 300 bodies that were dumped in an overgrown area full of garbage and weeds.
Rice says about 20 FBI agents, 10 Cook County sheriff’s evidence techs and forensic scientists from the FBI lab in Virginia are involved in the early stage of the investigation at Burr Oak Cemetery.
He says the primary focus will be processing "what we consider to be a crime scene 1600 x 200 feet (320,000 square feet)."
That dumping area is being divided into four grids and the investigative team will examine the grids one at a time.
Rice says human remains found will be photographed, catalogued and kept in a refrigerated container that will remain at the cemetery. The FBI does not know if it will be possible to identify every remain. It depends upon how much the DNA has degraded in the remains that are found.
Rice says each member of the investigative team has different responsibilties. There are people in charge of physically mapping out area, people who are digitally mapping it out on computer, people photographing remains as they’re recovered and people who are doing the actual searching of the crime scene.
Ross Rice says some of the Chicago FBI agents involved at Burr Oak Cemetery also worked the investigation in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after 9-11.
The FBI’s Mobile Command Center rolled into Burr Oak Cemetery Monday morning for the start of lengthy evidence-gathering job.
No matter what the Sheriff’s Office eventually decides as far as allowing families back onto the cemetery grounds, the FBI will keep the crime scene portion off-limits until investigators are through there.
Meanwhile, relatives of those whose loved ones were buried at Burr Oak feel helpless. Lutia Payne showed up to the cemetery even though she had already filled out paperwork for the sheriff’s department and she knew she could not get in. She just felt like she had to do something, anything.
She calls what happened, "Very, very devastating, a shame before God. They trying to rest here. Someone is trying to interfere in your rest. That’s just ridiculous."
Clarisce J. Dortsch also showed up to the cemetery even though she had already provided information to the sheriff's office. Her father, cousin and sister-in-law were buried at Burr Oak.
Dortsch says, "The last time my nephew was out here to see my sister-in-law, he said he couldn’t find it so he went home." She says, he "didn’t think anything about it. Thought he was lost" when in fact the sister-in-law "probably wasn’t there."
Agents say they'll try to use DNA testing to try to identify the dumped remains, but they have their work cut out for them.
"There might not be any DNA to recover. If we are able to recover DNA, now we have the problem of matching it to a person," said FBI spokesman Ross Rice. "Some of these graves, as I understand it, are 50 years old. There may not be any DNA to go back and compare it with, so I'm not sure at this point what we're going to be able to do."
The search alone could take a month and a half at the very least. Burr Oak will remain closed until further notice.
But agents say the record-keeping at the cemetery was so bad, trying to identify every bone will be nearly impossible.
"If it looks like they may not be able to handle it with their own resources here from Chicago, we do have the option of calling in teams from other parts of the country," Rice said. "We haven't done that yet. We don't know if we're going to. We just have to wait and see."
Families looking for answers about their loved ones are encouraged to submit their information by e-mail or over the phone. No one is being allowed inside the cemetery anymore since it has been declared a crime scene.
If you have loved ones buried at Burr Oak Cemetery and want to check on their well-being, call (800) 942-1950, or locally, (708) 865-6070, or send an inquiry to BurrOakCemeteryInvestigation@gmail.com.
The investigation is expected to cost Cook County more than $200,000 in overtime alone. At this time they've already received over 50,000 requests for information about buried family members, and that number continues to climb.
The county has set up three support centers to try to counsel families with relatives buried at Burr Oak Cemetery.
So far, seven lawsuits have now been filed against Burr Oak by families with loved ones buried there.
Three people charged with dumping the bodies for cash are all being held on $200,000 bond. And the alleged mastermind of the scheme: office manager Carolyn Towns is being held on $250,000 bond.
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Contents of this site are Copyright 2009 by WBBM. CBS 2 contributed to this report.
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