Chicago Area Local News

ALSIP, Ill. (CBS) ― The Cook County Sheriff's Department and the FBI continued working side by side Tuesday to try to identify every single body at Burr Oak Cemetery, one grave at a time.

CBS 2's Susan Carlson reports that work at one of the largest crime scenes in the history of the county began at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning when investigators began sweeping over 100,000 grave sites.

Chopper 2 HD was live over the scene in Alsip where crews combing through the cemetery stopped and had to mark questionable sites. Workers inspected individual grave sites, looking for any indication of tampering, resulting from a massive scheme to re-sell occupied cemetery plots.

And about two dozen Cook County Sheriff's cadets marched into Burr Oak to join police, cemetery employees and workers serving community service sentences in an unprecedented canvass of the entire graveyard.

"We're conducting a great search of the cemetery. We've got more personnel out here and they're gonna go shoulder-to-shoulder to comb every inch of the cemetery," said Cook County Sheriff's Dept. spokeswoman Lisa Gordon. "They're looking at all the headstones and just searching the grounds with the investigation."

Authorities also probed the earth, looking for bad graves.

"We've had quite a few instances already where they've gone down just a foot, two feet. They're supposed to be down nine feet. Could that be double burials? Possibly," Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said.

The cemetery has been closed to the public while investigators sort out the massive crime scene.

Sheriff's employees have already begun brushing off and photographing headstones in preparation for today's shoulder-to-shoulder search.

They're looking for every headstone and every grave to find any more that may have been disturbed.

Sheriff's police are conducting what they're calling a "grid search" by sectioning off areas of the 150-acre cemetery and marking headstones that have already been inspected.

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.

Agents say they'll try to use DNA testing, 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.

"It's a very long, daunting process, day-to-day," Gordon said.

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 asked to submit their information by e-mail or over the phone. No one is being allowed inside the cemetery since it has been declared a crime scene.

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.

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.

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

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