Garden Gravestones & Naughty Yachties | 4M #157

Welcome to the hundred-and-fifty-seventh edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #157, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

Gravestones in the garden

A South Carolina woman recently unearthed several pieces of broken gravestones belonging to two veterans while planting flowers in her garden. She shared her discovery on Reddit, asking if there might be bodies under the stones and (of course) if the family might be haunted for digging them up  — and Redditors responded with an array of explanations and assurances. Many said this wasn’t unusual at all, saying that when a stone has an error or is being replaced the original is often discarded or “used as a stepping stone.” A contracted engraver for the VA added that he “messed up thousands” of stones during his tenure… and received dozens of calls from “panicked people” who stumbled across the originals.

Not a Love Story?

When actress Farrah Fawcett died in 2009, she was buried in Hollywood’s Westwood Village Memorial Park; a gravestone bearing on her first and last name — with no dates of birth or death — was later placed atop the plot. When Fawcett’s longtime partner, actor Ryan O’Neal, died last year, he was buried in the same plot, and his name, birth year, and death year were added to the stone, along with Fawcett’s birth and death years. Recently, Fawcett’s friends have shared their anger about, well, all of the above. First of all, they say Fawcett wanted to be cremated, not buried. Next, they say she would absolutely rage against the fact that O’Neal shares her resting place, as they weren’t as close as the public assumed they were at the time of her death. Lastly, they allege that O’Neal’s omission of Fawcett’s birth and death dates on her stone until after his information was added was a last-ditch effort to show that he was the more “important” of the two, which friends say is absolutely false. Leave it to two award-winning actors to still be the center of a drama even after death.

Return to Nature update

Return to Nature owners Jon and Carie Hallford, who were arrested in November 2023 after nearly 200 decomposing bodies were found in their Penrose, Colorado “green” funeral home facility, have changed their pleas to 15 of 286 criminal charges against the pair. Last week, it was reported that the two have changed the “not guilty” pleas they filed on April 18 in response to 15 counts of federal wire fraud to “guilty,” thus vacating the federal jury trial that had been slated to start in October. 

Friends in fraudulent places

Seven friends of a convicted Taiwanese felon who is described as a “funeral business tycoon” have been arrested for trying to help the man jump his $16 million bail and flee the country. Chu Guo-rong, president of Global Funeral Service Corp. Ltd., failed to appear at a September 2023 hearing to appeal his pending eight-year sentence for stock speculation and insider trading. His friends are accused of facilitating various elements of the fugitive’s planned escape, from purchasing and delivering a yacht, serving as the yacht’s captain or crew, arranging flights for Chu and his family, and posing as Chu to obtain a passport.