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When you think of a cemetery, a quiet, solemn, well taken care of place comes to mind. It is a sacred spot where people are laid to rest and the idea that the deceased should be left in peace is deeply ingrained in societies across the world.
What doesn’t come to mind is crime, hate, or vandalism, yet just like any other place open to the public, these things do occasionally happen at cemeteries. One such place was at the Grove Street Cemetery in New London, Ohio. Visitors to the cemetery noticed that a number of items they had placed at gravestones had started to go missing. Most of what mysteriously vanished were special keepsakes and little trinkets that represented memories of people’s loved ones, which naturally left people upset that they’d been taken.
One of the victims, whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were buried at Grove Street Cemetery, said that various mementos she had left there were gone when she went back to visit them. One such item was a flowerpot that she had given her father back in 1977. While not worth all that much monetarily wise, to her it was priceless and held deep personal meaning.
Thankfully, the cemetery had already installed surveillance cameras on the premises for security reasons. They caught the thefts on tape and handed the evidence over to police to investigate the matter when they couldn’t find the people responsible on their own. What was on the tapes was disturbing, two older women would drive their car through the cemetery and stop at various gravestones. If they saw something they liked, the women would casually walk over and pick it off the grave, then bring it back to their car. It was as it they were shopping and even items that had been weighed down or secured with heavy bricks were not off limits.
The police soon identified and arrested the two women from the tapes and when people finally found out who they were they were shocked. One of the women, Donna Riley, had been elected as the fiscal officer of the nearby Sullivan Township. Her position meant that people entrusted her to oversee and manage the town’s monetary funds. Both she and her accomplice, Evelyne Cantu, were charged with misdemeanor theft which they both initially pled guilty to. However, after they got a lawyer, they both subsequently withdrew those pleas and instead pled not guilty to the charges.
After the women were caught, no more items went missing from the cemetery and things settled back down to normal. While most people are taught to honor the dead and care for gravesites, those two clearly were clearly lacking in respect.
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