…your boss.”
The daughter’s name was Laura. She asked me to meet her at a coffee shop the next morning. A man in a grey suit was sitting beside her. He showed me an FBI badge.
Laura’s father, Henry, wasn’t dead. He was a retired medical examiner. A year ago, he’d noticed that several bodies sent through our funeral home for cremation had been the wrong weight, according to the crematorium’s paperwork. He suspected my boss, Mr. Grady, was secretly selling bodies to illegal brokers who supplied medical research labs, and filling caskets and urns with sand.
Henry went to the FBI. Together, they set a trap. Henry would “die” of a heart attack. The FBI would provide paperwork. A sealed casket would be sent to Mr. Grady’s funeral home for a viewing. If Mr. Grady believed there was a body inside and tried to sell it, they would have proof.
“The casket was empty when it arrived,” the agent said. “If he’d filled it with sand, it meant he’d already sold the ‘body’ on paper to his buyer and was covering it up.”
That’s exactly what I’d seen.
I told the agent everything I knew from my twenty-three years at the funeral home: odd invoices, families who complained that urns felt “too light,” a back door that was always locked.
Mr. Grady was arrested two weeks later. The investigation found that he’d illegally sold the remains of more than sixty people over eight years. His buyer was arrested in another state.
Henry came back to life, legally speaking, a month later. He came to my house with flowers and apologized for scaring me.
I didn’t get my old job back. But the families of the victims asked me to help them recover what records could be found, and I’ve been working with the investigators ever since. It’s the most important work I’ve ever done.
