Chicago Area Local News

ALSIP, Ill. (CBS) ― Thousands of relatives hoping to find their loved ones continued their search this weekend.

Saturday, officials closed the gates to families seeking answers at Burr Oak Cemetery. By Sunday, relatives of the deceased were sent to Eisenhower High School,12700 Sacramento Ave., in Blue Island, where offiicals continued to gather information.

A sheriff's department spokesperson stated "the disastrous record keeping at the cemetery is hampering their efforts to match names and office information."

In five days, the Cook County Sheriff's Department has received more than 7,000 written requests for help in finding loved one and only 400 requests have been processed by department employees, authorities said.

The sheriff says more than 100,000 people have been buried at Burr Oak Cemetery making this one of the largest crime scenes in the history of Cook County.

"The John Gacy case was a contained basement excavation that went on," said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. "That took six months. Look at the size of this – perspective wise. I'm unaware of something bigger."

Dart says it's his job to try and bring some sanity to a situation where there has been very little. Gail Cooper hopes he can because she can't find her daughter who was buried in a section known as "Baby Land."

"My baby has been there for 25 years and now they tell me she's not there," Cooper said. "I'm very concerned, that disturbs me a lot."

Tara Johnson's twins were buried here some 13 years ago. They died when they were just 24 hours old.

"At 10:30 last night I found out that Baby Land was included and it just took me for a loop," she said. "I already hadn't slept in three days and now I have more to worry about."

Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Patterson walked "Baby Land" Saturday.

"Everybody is saying "Baby Land" was all this," Patterson said. "Personally, was just back there and there's not much there."

"Baby Land," was particularly poorly documented, Dart said.

A release from Dart's office stated more than 10 mothers have asked for information about their buried children.

Cooper's 7-year-old daughter was buried there in 1984. She was trying to check on the grave Saturday.

"I had trusted her to these people," said Cooper, 48. "How could you have someone so shady and underhanded to do something like this?"

Cooper fears her daughter is no longer resting in peace.

"To think that they might have took her and threw her in the corner like she was a piece of trash -- that was my baby," she said.

"Baby Land" is next to the latest section of the cemetery where bones were discovered. One man who had long suspected his mother was buried on top of another person had her grave dug up Saturday in an exhumation scheduled before the investigation started.

Workers dug down 7 feet. At 33 inches, the minimum depth allowed under state law, they found a casket, Dart said. Relatives recognized momentos resting on top and said the coffin belonged to Rachel Boone, the man's mother, the sheriff said. The casket was reburied without being opened, and relatives held a short memorial service.

But next to it, investigators found a burial vault that wasn't listed in any of the records.

"No marker of any kind, yet there was a vault right there," Patterson said.

Lillie Merrill's family helped her to the gates of Burr Oak Saturday evening only to find a closed sign and no information on her husband's grave available.

"I just couldn't stay home knowing this has happened," she said.

They pointed to an area where they think the remains 80-year-old Jackson Merrill should rest -- an area where his wife was hoping to be buried, too, someday.

So far as many as 300 graves are believed to have been robbed by these four suspects who are charged with dismembering human bodies.

Four people have been charged in the case. Carolyn Towns, 49; Keith Nicks, 45; Terrence Nicks, 39, all of Chicago; and Maurice Dailey, 59, of Robbins, have all been charged with dismembering a human body, a Class X felony punishable by 6 to 30 years in prison.

The four sold existing deeds and plots to unsuspecting customers, authorities said. They then allegedly dug up hundreds of corpses and either dumped them in a weeded, vacant area of the cemetery -- which authorities labeled the original crime scene -- or double-stacked them in graves.The burial plot buyer never found out, Dart said on Thursday.

Other times, coffins were pounded deeper into the ground so others could be lain on top of them, Dart said.

In many instances, the suspects dug up graves in remote areas, so as to conceal what they were doing, Dart said.

"There was some effort made to pick areas where people had been there longer, that there was no indication that people would be visiting," he said.

But other times, they went to higher-profile areas near walkways or entryways, "just because they want to sell that; get that amount of money from the innocent individual" buying a plot, Dart said Friday.

The cost to buy a plot at the location ranges from $1,300-$5,000, depending on the location. Those closest to an acess road, were more valuable. The transactions in question, which Dart said could reach as much as $300,000, were all done in cash and stretch back at least four years, authorities said.

In addition, records at the cemetery were destroyed, Dart said.

The purpose was to generate as much money as possible by using the same burial plots multiple times.

Towns is the office manager of the cemetery, while the other three are gravediggers. Towns was at the center of the operation, both pocketing the payments and directing the gravediggers, Dart said.

The owners of the cemetery realized there were financial irregularities in February. Towns was fired in March. The Cook County Sheriff's Office was asked to look into the matter in late May, according to Patterson.

Many of the bodies are believed to have been dug up and dumped in a fenced off area. The second possible dumping ground is behind it. Both areas and the entire cemetery have been closed off to mourners which caused tensions to boil over at times.

"Now I'm walking down slavery times again, come on now," said one cemetery visitor.

The sheriff says after his office has cleared certain areas of the 150-acre cemetery, he's hoping to open up sections of the cemetery possibly as early as late next week.

"It's a zoo, and it's going to be a zoo because every black person in Chicago has someone buried here," said Chicago resident Jennifer Gyimah, 51, who was waiting to check on family members' graves. "As a living human being, you give dignity to the dead. The dignity today has been shattered."

Anxious families have been coming to the cemetery in droves, many of them in tears or raising their voice in fury. Dart told CBS 2's Susan Carlson that he hopes families will be patient.

"We're expecting a lot more families today, especially coming up this weekend. We're pleading them for patience, because we had about 3,000 people here yesterday," Dart said, adding that the cemetery only has a skeleton crew working, and sheriff's officers are not trained in analyzing grave sites.

"Everything is going through my mind. I mean, how could somebody be this dirty and dig up the dead people?" Ottis Mannie said.

Angry family members filed in, some of them returned for a second day because Thursday's crowds were so large.

"This is the only place in the Chicago area you could bury a black person, and over the years… my whole family's here," Leonard Johnson said.

"We gotta check it since it's so many people, and some were buried in the back where they say the graves were tampered with. I wanna make sure because I have a brother that was buried there in the '40s," Vernita Harris said.

Cemetery administrator Shirley Washington says they have been working around the clock after getting requests to track down remains.

"We did find some of them yesterday after some of the people left so we will give them a call today to let them know we found the location of their loved ones," Washington said.

But the majority of relatives will not find the answers they're looking for for some time. It's expected to take investigators up to two months to sort through and identify all the remains that were disturbed.

Dart also said the only two burials scheduled at Burr Oak on Thursday were both "wrong" -- with one person buried in the wrong plot and another whose plot was already occupied by someone else's body.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson told CBS 2's Susan Carlson Friday morning that those with loved ones buried at the cemetery should consider filing a class action lawsuit. He also repeated some strong words about the consequences the orchestrators of the scheme should face.

"They should not be able to be bonded, bailed; they deserve a special place in hell, and jail for a long time," Jackson said. "This is so wrong, so wrong."

Burr Oak Cemetery is the final resting place for many prominent African-Americans, including Emmett Till. His plot was not disturbed. Till is the teenager from Chicago who was brutally murdered in 1955. His death in Mississippi helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.

Meanwhile, Till's casket -- in which he was buried prior to a 2005 exhumation during an investigation of his death, was found in a pile of litter in a shack on the cemetery grounds. Dart said a family of possums had made its home in the casket.

"To see his casket in this state of desecration and neglect is very shameful," Jackson said at a news conference Friday.

The cemetery is now owned by Tucson, Ariz.-based Perpetua Inc.

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. Fifteen people will be manning phones day and night, and four people overnight. Starting Monday, the Cook County Sheriff's Department will only be accepting requests for information over the phone or by email.

Anyone who donated money to the Emmett Till Historical Museum fund is also asked to call the number above.

An Aug. 6 preliminary hearing date has been set. All four have been booked into Cook County Jail, which means they did not post bail after their court sessions, according to Cook County Sheriff's Dept. spokesman Lonny Levin.

Officials said Towns was taken to the psychiatric unit at Cermak Health Services, the prisoners' hospital adjacent to the jail.

CBS 2's Mike Puccinelli, Susan Carlson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

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