Little Shop of Horrors?

Low-cost California crematories are charged with cutting corners

The business is gruesome enough: an assembly-line crematorium that makes up in volume what it cuts in price. But Harbor Lawn Mount Olive Mortuary, Cemetery and Crematory in Costa Mesa, Calif., is accused of even grislier practices. To handle its backlog of bodies, former employees claim, the mortuary crammed corpses five at a time into gas ovens built for one. The jumbled ashes were allegedly dumped into 30-gal. trash cans. Then, says Bob Kilburn, a funeral refrigeration-supply manufacturer who installed a cooler at Harbor Lawn three years ago, "they'd scoop up ashes with a pail and fill ten cardboard boxes, type up ten labels and proceed to make ten people." In other words, the remains of Aunt Felicia might be liberally sprinkled with the ashes of someone else's Cousin Harold or Uncle Fred. Says Kilburn: "I guess that's called genetic engineering."

Relatives of the deceased are not amused. Charging fraud, some 300 outraged customers are each seeking $3 million in damages from Harbor Lawn. Its chief supplier of corpses, the Neptune Society, a sea-burial service, is also named in the suits, along with more than ten local mortuaries that contracted out to Harbor Lawn.

The first complaints about Harbor Lawn came three years ago, when Audrey Cooper, 72, received a burial urn containing what she thought was the ashes of her husband William. A family friend named Jerry Read, who had once worked for Harbor Lawn but quit in disgust, told the widow that the remains were not her husband's. Says Read: "Bodies were doubled up on shelves in the refrigerator. When they got full, they'd stack the bodies on the garage floor and leave them there for days." Read and other former employees further charge that bins full of excess ashes were sometimes wheeled out to the cemetery grounds and dumped into still open graves. Cooper sued and eventually settled out of court, but her account of switched urns and mislaid remains led to lawsuits by other families.

The lawsuits tackle two of California's wealthiest and most prolific body-disposal entrepreneurs, John Dillan Flanagan, 67, whose Harbor Lawn charnel house handled almost one-half of Orange County cremations in 1981, and Charles Denning, 53, founder of the Neptune Society. Flanagan's lawyer claims that his client is an absentee owner who "wouldn't know how to operate a mortuary." Yet Millionaire Flanagan seemed to know plenty about the business's bottom line. In 1961 he was convicted of grossly overcharging the Veterans Administration for frill-free funerals. He was sentenced to two years in jail and served seven months.

Denning insists that the lawsuits are part of a "smear campaign" led by funeral directors jealous of his low-cost, high-volume business (last year the Neptune Society accounted for almost one-quarter of all California cremations). "I'm taking money from undertakers' pockets and putting it in the pockets of the living," says Denning, whose white goatee, folksiness, and success have earned him the irreverent nickname "Colonel Cinders." For less than $400, Denning promises that ashes of the departed will be taken out to sea on an elegant yacht, then scattered across the Pacific under flags at half-mast while a crewman reads appropriate poetry like Tennyson's Crossing the Bar.

Betty McMullen and Melvin Belli, the plaintiffs' principal attorneys, urged their clients to form a Dignity After Death Society; the group's tearful demonstrations outside Harbor Lawn have generated morbid interest. The two lawyers also placed ads in the Santa Ana Register in Orange County, looking for others with loved ones who were cremated at Harbor Lawn.

No matter what happens in court, the furor over Harbor Lawn has brought closer scrutiny of the cremation business. Next month a new California law goes into effect making it a crime to conduct mass cremations or commingle ashes. qed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.