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| Carolyn Towns |
The former director of a historic black cemetery south of Chicago was convicted Friday in a money-making scheme that involved digging up bodies and reselling plots, a development that left still-bitter relatives reliving the grief of not knowing their loved ones' final resting place.
Carolyn Towns, 51, of Blue Island, pleaded guilty Friday and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, according to the Cook County state's attorney's office.
Towns was director of Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip -- the burial site of lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington -- when prosecutors say she and three workers desecrated hundreds of graves. Prosecutors say Towns stole more than $100,000 from the corporation that owned Burr Oak by keeping the payments for burials and having workers stack bodies or dump remains in unmarked mass graves.
Till's grave wasn't harmed, but his original glass-topped casket -- a symbol of the civil rights movement because it was designed to show the world his mutilated body -- was discovered in a garbage-strewn storage shed during the investigation. It has since been donated to the Smithsonian Institution.
Prosecutors say Towns stole more than $100,000 from the corporation that owned Burr Oak by keeping the payments for burials and having workers stack bodies or dump remains in unmarked mass graves.
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