Science & Nature

New Details Emerge in Burr Oak Cemetery Grave Robbing Scandal. Here’s How a Clump of Moss Led to Convictions

It was a scandal that stunned the nation: a macabre story of modern-day grave robbing at a suburban Cook County cemetery, with human remains scooped from their burial sites, dumped elsewhere and the plots resold.

The crimes at Burr Oak Cemetery, a historic graveyard in Alsip, came to light in 2009. Four employees were ultimately found guilty of desecration, among other charges.

Now, a decade after the first convictions were handed down, the full story has emerged surrounding a key piece of evidence in the case against the defendants.

In a newly published research paper, Matt von Konrat, head of the botany collections at Chicago’s Field Museum, recounts how a tiny clump of moss helped investigators reconstruct events and establish a timeline for the crimes.

“One day in 2009, I answered the phone, and it was the FBI, asking if I could help them identify some plants,” von Konrat said.

He met with agents and was handed a specimen of moss, found embedded with disturbed human remains in a rear section of the cemetery.

“The investigators wanted to know what kind of moss it was, and how long it had been buried in the soil,” von Konrat said.

Believe it or not, this is the specimen that, under microscopic examination, helped investigators crack open the Burr Oak Cemetery case. (Courtesy of Field Museum)

To the untrained eye, moss is moss, but there are hundreds of different species in the Midwest alone.

“When you look down the microscope, especially, you see all sorts of anatomical detail that distinguishes between these different mosses,” down to the cellular level, von Konrat said.

He compared the moss extracted from the cemetery with locally collected specimens in the Field’s herbarium and, after consulting with several international experts, identified the species as Fissidens taxifolius, also known as common pocket moss.

A survey of the cemetery grounds showed a huge colony of common pocket moss growing in the area where graves had been disturbed, but none was present at the site where the remains had been dumped and recovered with the botanical specimen.

“So that gave us pretty strong evidence that the remains had come from this other section of the cemetery,” von Konrat said.

While the Field’s analysis may have answered investigators’ “what” question, there was still the matter of “when.”

Prosecutors needed to know the age of the moss to counter defendants’ claims that the crimes had happened before they started working at the cemetery.

Turns out, the unique properties of moss allowed scientists to pinpoint a timeframe for its burial with the bones.

“Moss is a little bit freaky,” said von Konrat. “Even if they’re dry and dead and preserved, they can still have an active metabolism, a few cells that are still active. The amount of metabolic activity deteriorates over time, and that can tell us how long ago a moss sample was collected.”

After a complex process of testing chlorophyll amounts in the evidence specimen, fresh moss and older moss in the Field’s collection, researchers concluded the cemetery moss was only a year or two old, which dovetailed with the accused’s employment tenure.

The Burr Oak case was the first time such botanical evidence was submitted in an Illinois courtroom to establish a timeline in a criminal proceeding. Von Konrat hopes it’s not the last.

“Mosses are often overlooked,” he said. “We want to highlight this microscopic group of plants as a tool for law enforcement. If we can elevate mosses as potential evidence, maybe it could help some families somewhere in the future.”

As a reminder, von Konrat keeps a poster in his lab featuring a photo of FBI agents on the scene at Burr Oak. The caption reads: “People lie, but moss does not.”

Contact Patty Wetli: [email protected]

---