9.
A GREEDY UNDERTAKER
Bobby Wilks was the owner and funeral director who worked as the undertaker of Robertson
County, Tennessee for over two decades.
He customarily told grieving families that it was best not to watch their deceased loved
one being lowered into the ground and asked them to leave.
In October 1988, some pall bearers watched as Wilks strangely began burying someone without
placing the lid on the vault.
Others had reportedly witnessed similar acts, and Wilks was reported and later arrested.
Around 70 graves were examined, and at least 40 of them were missing caskets!
In some cases, there was even trash from the funeral home that had been buried with the
corpse!
Some bodies were buried with nothing at all, and one was simply wrapped in an outdoor rug.
After charging devastated families for proper burials, including caskets and vaults, Wilks
had carelessly thrown human remains into a hole in the ground and filled it with dirt.
Police arrested him on a slew of charges, 48 of which he pled guilty to.
Wilks died in prison in 2017 at age 81 while serving a 28-year sentence for his crimes.
8.
TRI-STATE CREMATORY SCANDAL
Ray Brent Marsh took over his family’s respected crematorium business in 1996 when his father
fell ill.
Located in the family’s backyard in Noble, Georgia, the Tri-State Crematory’s operations
fell apart under Ray’s leadership for unknown reasons.
A utility worker called police in 2000 and reported seeing bodies laying around the property,
but authorities failed to follow up on the tip.
The following year, the Environmental Protection Agency supposedly investigated a similar tip,
but found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Law enforcement finally began taking the claims seriously when, in 2002, someone found a human
arm while walking their dog in the woods surrounding the crematorium.
Police found 339 bodies that were never cremated as they should have been, with some having
sat at the site for as long as five years!
Some bodies were in caskets, while others were carelessly strewn about the property.
Others were dumped in holes in the ground or piled on top of one another.
Out of all the bodies, 133 were never identified.
Ray’s lawyer argued that his mental state was foggy from mercury poisoning, causing
him to fall behind on work.
Prosecutors, on the other hand, believed that Ray never wanted to be involved in the family
business and was more-or-less just lazy.
He was charged with 787 felonies, including 149 counts of tampering with a corpse, and
received a 12-year prison sentence.
He served his time and was released in 2016.
The clean-up process at the site came at the hefty cost of $10 million, with taxpayers
footing the bill.
7.
CREMATORY CONTROVERSY
An unlicensed Miami-based business known as Damiano’s Cremation Services International
flew under the radar for years before being busted for mishandling ashes and bodies.
Damiano’s arrest came following the discovery that a crematorium in rural Georgia had dumped
over 300 bodies into the forest after its equipment broke down.
The case prompted Florida authorities to inspect the state’s 146 crematories.
This led to suspicions against 65-year-old Damiano, who somehow remained in business
after being accused of illegally renting out corpses to a local mortuary school and facing
legal judgments to the tune of $39 million.
Two funeral homes had accused Damiano of letting students practice embalming on the bodies
of Jewish individuals, which is explicitly forbidden according to the religion’s customs.
Moreover, Damiano had allegedly opened up a side business under an employee’s name
to evade legal allegations against him in another part of the state.
Even worse, former employees claimed that Damiano often mixed the ashes of different
people together and that he ordered employees to add extra ashes to the remains of infants.
When a woman named Heather Smith accused him of doing just that to her five-month-old daughter
in 1998, Damiano didn’t even show up to court.
He was also accused of losing a woman’s ashes and dumping people’s ashes in the
parking lot of his business, rather than scattering them according to their loved ones’ wishes.
A 2002 investigation found that Damiano had rented out as many as 600 dead bodies for
$110 each, and it came to light that prosecutors had a tough time pursuing him because many
of his businesses were in other people’s names.
In fact, numerous people had won cases against Damiano, but unfortunately were never able
to cash in on their settlement.
Damiano was arrested for trafficking and operating without a license, but this apparently didn’t
stop him from continuing to scam the general public.
In 2016, news headlines revealed that he had started a cremation service out of Colorado,
and that customers were accusing him of mishandling ashes, making them wait for months to receive
their loved ones’ ashes, and even holding people’s ashes for ransom!
What do you think should happen to Damiano aka the most disrespectful guy ever?
Let me know in the comments below and don’t forget to like this video and subscribe if
you haven’t already!
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6.
A CONVENIENT BURIAL
In 1999, when a Deltona, Florida funeral director, Mark Villella, decided he no longer wanted
his wife, Exelee around - he murdered her and buried her corpse in a casket beneath
an elderly woman’s body.
Exelee had reportedly admitted having an affair, asked her husband for a divorce, and threatened
to leave him with their 18-month-old child in August of that year.
After stabbing her to death in the couple’s bedroom, supposedly out of rage and to avoid
a costly divorce and contentious child custody dispute, Villella put Exelee’s body in a
cooler at the Deltona Memorial Funeral Home.
Three days later, he buried her with the body of a deceased 89-year-old woman in a closed
casket ceremony.
When questioned by authorities about Exelee’s disappearance, Villella said that she disappeared
in the middle of the night and may have skipped town.
Investigators didn’t buy the story, especially since Villella had made no efforts to find
his wife, whose car was still in their driveway, and left it up to her concerned coworkers
to report her missing.
Consequently, authorities examined the funeral home’s recent burial records and threatened
to exhume the elderly woman’s grave, suspecting that Exelee might also be in there.
Knowing the walls were closing in on him, Villella confessed to the crime.
His defense attorney argued that the killer expressed genuine remorse in video footage
of the confession, but prosecutors claimed that Villella only admitted to his wrongdoing
“to lessen the sting” when he knew there was no getting away with the crime.
Investigators dug up the grave and found Exelee’s body as expected, concealed beneath a white
sheet.
A jury convicted Villella of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison.
Exelee’s family brought a lawsuit against Villella for their slain loved one’s wrongful
death and also sued the funeral home for failing to properly supervise Villella as an employee.
5.
A MISSING HEAD
When Anthony Parisi, the co-founder of a wholesale grocery company, passed away in 1986 at age
83, his body was taken to Yannantuono Funeral Home in Mount Vernon, New York.
Employees went to prepare his body for burial the next day, only to discover that someone
had skillfully removed the elderly man’s head with a sharp surgical tool, such as a
scalpel or a razor.
For some unknown reason, someone had entered the funeral home during the night, decapitated
Parisi, and damaged other parts of his body in what appeared to be a professional job.
Oddly, however, there were no signs of forced entry, and the property’s caretaker had
checked on the site several times throughout the night, according to Deputy Westchester
Medical Examiner Louis Roh, who spoke with the Associated Press following the horrifying
incident.
Even more bizarre was the fact that nothing else in the funeral home was disturbed or
out of place, suggesting that whoever went in there and mutilated Mr. Parisi was on a
very specific mission.
The missing head was never found and the case remains a complete mystery to this day, with
police remaining baffled over why someone committed the disturbing act.
Authorities investigated numerous theories and leads, including cult activity, revenge,
or perhaps the doings of a mentally deranged person.
But none of these ideas panned out, leaving your guess as good as anyone else’s when
it comes to explaining the bizarre beheading.
4.
STEALING FROM THE DEAD
David Sconce was a fourth-generation crematory owner in Altadena, California who took over
the family business in 1985 with his wife, Laurieanne.
The couple operated the company, the Pasadena Crematorium, with their son, David, who got
his embalmer's certificate after dropping out of college.
David advertised shockingly low cremations to attract business from local funeral homes,
hoping to compensate for the meager prices with a high volume of customers.
The plan worked, and to keep profits high, he began stuffing as many as 18 bodies at
a time into the company’s two ovens.
His greed intensified, and David started harvesting gold fillings and organs from bodies that
were sent to him for cremation without the families’ consent, forging their signatures
on the paperwork.
The body parts were sold on the black market and a local jeweler bought the gold fillings,
paying the family up to $6,000 per month.
One day in 1986, the facility’s employees crammed 19 bodies into an oven, leading to
a fire that burned the entire business down.
David shifted operations to a nearby warehouse he had purchased for manufacturing ceramics
and simply began burning the bodies in the kilns there.
In early 1987, someone called the local fire department complaining of the smell of burning
human flesh nearby and reported that smoke was pouring from the chimney of the ceramics
warehouse.
It was then that the fire chief discovered what was really going on there.
David received a five-year prison sentence and was released in 1991 after serving just
two-and-a-half years, but his newfound freedom was anything but enjoyable, between being
hated and penniless after compensating families for mishandling their deceased loved ones.
He was put on lifetime probation, which he violated multiple times, landing himself back
in prison, this time with a sentence of 25 years to life.
3.
BURIED BY THE KILLER
When 90-year-old retired coal miner Joseph Kly began experiencing serious health issues
in 1982, he made end-of-life arrangements with local funeral home owners Walter and
Helen Pestinikas.
The Scranton, Pennsylvania couple offered to let the elderly man live out his remaining
days in the converted patio area of a former bar that they owned.
Kly obliged, and sometime thereafter, the Pestinikases gained access to his bank account
and drained nearly all of the $35,000 in it, using the funds to finance their local political
endeavors.
In the meantime, they reportedly tried to conceal Kly’s whereabouts, telling concerned
family members that they didn’t know where he was.
Two-and-a-half years after Kly moved into the defunct bar, he died.
At just 62 pounds, he had essentially withered away to nothing, and an autopsy revealed that
he passed away from starvation and dehydration.
The room he spent the last years of his life in lacked insulation, a telephone, a refrigerator,
and a bathroom.
Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding Kly’s death, police handed his corpse over
to the Pestinikases, since they had a burial contract with him.
Authorities accused the Pestinikases of holding Kly captive and killing him by depriving him
of food and care that they had agreed to provide him with.
The couple was also suspected of tampering with Kly’s body after an initial autopsy
found his stomach empty by swapping the organ out for one that contained food.
Both husband and wife were convicted of several charges, including third-degree murder, and
each received a 10-year prison sentence.
They maintained their innocence, despite the glaringly obvious signs that they had mistreated
and neglected Kly during his fragile end-of-life stage.
2.
A VANISHED CORPSE
25-year-old Julie Mott tragically lost her battle against cystic fibrosis in August 2015.
After her memorial on what would have been her 26th birthday in San Antonio, her body
was taken away with plans to send it to a crematorium.
But the next morning, staff found Julie’s casket empty and with damaged hinges.
There were no signs of forced entry into the building overnight, leading investigators
to believe that someone stole Julie’s remains during a three-hour time period after the
memorial service ended and before the chapel was locked at the end of the day.
Volunteers searched tirelessly for the body, and there was even a $20,000 reward offered
for information leading to its recovery.
But Julie’s vanished corpse was never found.
Based on his behavior during and after the memorial, Julie’s ex-boyfriend, Bill Wilburn,
is the prime suspect.
He reportedly remained near her casket for some time after other visitors had left, and
in the weeks and months following Julie’s death, he harassed her family and the staff
at Mission Park, where the memorial was held, calling both parties hundreds of times.
Police eventually banned Wilburn from entering Mission Park, but he was never charged with
stealing her body.
Dick Tips and his wife, the owners of Mission Park, were also suspected of foul play.
They allegedly had a poor reputation for customer satisfaction, even having mixed up two bodies
at one point, and subcontracted services that they claimed to provide themselves, leading
detectives to wonder what else they were capable of.
The couple also supposedly allowed employees to be there unsupervised during after-hours,
suggesting that a lack of oversight may have enabled the crime.
Investigators remain stuck at square one, with no new information coming to light about
the disappearance of Julie’s body, leaving them unable to identify the culprit.
1.
AN OVERSTOCK...OF BODIES
After winning a hefty settlement for job-related asbestos poisoning, 49-year-old electrician
Robert Winston decided to change careers and started a funeral home business.
But the McKeesport, Pennsylvania resident apparently lacked business skills, and by
2000, he was deeply in debt.
Winston’s mounting financial woes caused him to do the unthinkable and store the remains
of dozens of deceased babies a local hospital had sent to him for cremation.
He didn’t get caught right away, though.
When Winston’s license was suspended for three years in 2004 for running an unlicensed
funeral home and the business was closed, he transferred the bodies to his garage.
Acting on the suspicion that he was doing just that, his ex-wife called the police the
following year.
Inside Winston’s garage, police found the remains of 300 fetuses, 19 newborns and 253
biohazard containers filled with unspecified fetal remains.
Authorities charged the man with 19 counts of abusing a corpse and theft, for which he
received four years of probation.
Winston’s friends claimed that he was a good person who was overly generous with his
services and failed to reach out for help when he himself needed it, which may have
been what led to his financial downfall.
After remaining silent for three years about the case, he finally spoke out in a Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette interview in 2008.
Winston admitted that he had poor money skills and let too many people slide on their funeral
bills.
He said that before he got caught, he planned to get his license back and dispose of the
remains properly, but never got the chance to do so.
And he was left feeling bitter after he found himself in peril and received no help from
the countless people who owed him money in unpaid funeral expenses.
Thanks for watching!
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