The official records were a bit of a mess, to say the least, but the ensuing investigation revealed that the cemetery had room for 130,000 graves, with 140,000 to 147,500 people listed as buried there. And some areas were apparently never used for burials. The cemetery’s then-director, Caroline Towns, grounds foreman Keith Nix, Nix’s brother Terrence, and another employee, Maurice Daly, were charged.
The only reason they were caught was because they had become more and more careless about robbing their own graves, going so far as to use a backhoe to dig up older graves, tearing the skeletons to pieces as they did so. About 1,500 bones were recovered and identified as belonging to at least 38 individuals, but according to official estimates, 200 to 400 graves were desecrated. Emmett Till’s decomposing coffin was found covered with a tarpaulin and surrounded by debris in a garage behind the cemetery. (The reconstructed coffin is now housed in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History.)
evidence of moss
Small pieces of dirt and moss, collected at Burr Oak Cemetery in 2009, were a key piece of evidence in the criminal case.
Credit: Field Museum
Small pieces of dirt and moss, collected at Burr Oak Cemetery in 2009, were a key piece of evidence in the criminal case.
Credit: Field Museum
Prosecutors still had to prove their case. In addition to the skeletal remains, the FBI collected broken mulberry branches and pieces of buried grass for expert analysis. Von Konrat was just going about his museum business in 2009 when the FBI called and asked for expert advice on the pieces of moss his team had found, which were inexplicably buried eight inches below the topsoil. They needed their help in identifying the species as well as determining how long it had been buried. This would provide the FBI with an important timeline as to when the remains were reburied.
“Moss is a little weird,” von Konratt said. “Mosses have an interesting physiology, where even if they’re dry and dead and preserved, they may still have active metabolism, some cells that are still active. The amount of metabolic activity deteriorates over time, and that can tell us how long ago the moss sample was collected.” The key was chlorophyll, which is a green pigment for photosynthesis. As the decaying plant cells stop functioning, chlorophyll degrades, so the museum team could measure how much light was being absorbed by chlorophyll in control samples whose age was known (both fresh and dried). They could then compare those measurements to the forensic sample.
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