PHOTOS BY NICK CHRISTENSEN / METRO NEWS
Metro cemeteries program manager Rachel Fox looks at 19th century cemetery records, which were handwritten.
William Wallace Spalding died in 1904. More than a century later, he still owns property in Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery, one of 14 pioneer cemeteries owned by the Metro region.
Maybe Spalding wanted to be left alone in the afterlife – he owns two graves on either side of his final resting place. Maybe he thought he'd ultimately be joined by some family members.
Or maybe he just did what many did around the start of the 20th century – he bought a lot of graves without thinking much of it.
Whatever his motives, cases like Spalding's, and others who own unused plots in Metro's pioneer cemeteries, are about to get a more thorough look.
Recovering from a troubling two years in which the regional government sold graves that belonged to the living and disturbed graves occupied by the dead, Metro's Parks and Environmental Services department is in the midst of an overhaul of policies in the sensitive domain of cemetery management.
That's not necessarily an easy task.
A unique and insular industry
Running a cemetery is not like running a golf course. You don’t show up, mow the lawns, trim the trees and dig a hole every once in a while.
But when Metro inherited its 14 pioneer cemeteries from Multnomah County in 1994, leaders from the regional government took a definite hands-off approach to the new acquisitions.
To a degree, the inattention made sense at the time. Not only had Metro been handed the cemeteries, it also acquired the Glendoveer Golf Course, the Expo Center and Blue Lake and Oxbow parks.
Teri Dresler, who served as deputy director of Metro’s parks department from 2005 to 2009, said nobody ever bothered to ask whether the cemeteries had been following best practices under the county’s management. The old county policies were simply kept in place, she said.
Suhor Industries' Jason McCoy prepares to excavate a grave at Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery. A new code of conduct for contractors is in place at Metro's 14 cemeteries.
Even after the 2001 embezzlement conviction of former cemeteries manager Cherie Ireland, who pled guilty to stealing more than $88,000 from the program, the regional government failed to truly actively manage the program.
“We didn’t do the job we should have done, for many years,” Dresler said.
There’s no set career track into the realm of cemetery management. Prospective cemeteries managers can’t go get a college degree in graveyard operations.
Bob Fells is the executive director of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association, a trade group that represents more than 7,500 organizations in the death care industry. Occasionally, he said, someone asks him how to get into the field.
“My standard advice is to go see if you can get a job or volunteer at a cemetery,” Fells said. “That’s the best way to learn the challenges and ins and outs of operating a cemetery.”
Paul Slyman did not take that traditional path to get into cemeteries management. A former manager at the Portland Development Commission and deputy director at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, he knew more about environmental management than funerary objects when he became director of Metro’s Parks and Environmental Services Department in 2010. The cemeteries program is part of Slyman’s domain.
He and cemeteries manager Rachel Fox have been working on a new set of protocols for ensuring that past mistakes aren’t repeated.
Metro will be paying a consultant from Washington $17,000 to review Metro’s policies and find opportunities for improvement.
That’s a more hands-on approach than what other many other governments do to run their municipal cemeteries. Often, governments will contract out cemetery management to professionals, Fells said, instead of trying to manage the operations themselves.
Why not do the same at Metro, as the regional government does with the Glendoveer Golf Course, for example?
Slyman said the notion of contracting out cemetery operations was not suggested by the consultants who have reviewed the program.
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"We’re certainly interested in ideas that improve the operations of Metro’s pioneer cemeteries, and toward that end, we recently conducted a lengthy business planning process," Slyman said. "I don’t believe it’s a foregone conclusion that hiring contractors to run cemeteries necessarily improves their operations."
The disturbed bones
Metro doesn’t manage all of its cemetery operations. One of the most important jobs at the cemeteries is handled by Suhor Industries, a nationwide firm that builds the concrete liners that keep bones from shifting in graves. For Metro, Suhor Industries, often shortened to SI, is contracted to prepare graves for burials and remove excess dirt.
Ron Overlie worked for SI from 2001 to 2003. Last year, he told the Portland media that he was ordered to dig up occupied graves and dump the remains and excess dirt at Blue Lake Regional Park.
On a 2011 visit to former coworkers at Multnomah Park Cemetery in southeast Portland, Overlie said he saw them digging up another occupied grave. He then went to the media, and posted a YouTube video – dubbed over with Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” – showing bones in a dirt pile that he said was at Blue Lake Regional Park.
The Fairview Police Department and the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office investigated whether criminal charges could be filed for abuse of a corpse, but opted not to prosecute the case.
Metro has maintained that the bones at Blue Lake did not come from an occupied grave. Bones shift in the ground over time, Slyman said, and neither he nor Fox knew that remains were being shipped out of Metro’s cemeteries to be dumped at Blue Lake. If the bones came from a Metro cemetery, staff told investigators, they were undetected in backfill "and thereby unintentionally transported to the dump," according to the district attorney's report 2011.
“Rachel has told me she was never called. Never,” Slyman said earlier this month.
While many cemeteries are loathe to discuss the notion of bodies shifting in the soil, Fells, of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association, said it happens. Sometimes, bones even work their way to the surface.
While Suhor Industries' Brian Boersma watches, Jason McCoy excavates a grave at Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery.
“There are animals that will burrow into the graves and retrieve bones and bring them up,” Fells said. “There have been incidents where people visiting cemeteries find bones lying around. The assumption is that somebody has been graverobbing, or desecrating the graves.
“In the happier cases, it’s just animals doing their thing,” he said.
As for bones leaving graves by human means, Slyman said it’s likely that many cemeteries have remains in their excess dirt piles.
“If you visit a big cemetery around here, A, they’re usually a greenfield, not a historic pioneer thing,” said Metro’s parks director, "but B, all that soil that is excess goes to some portion of the cemetery that is out of the public view and it’s just stored there.”
A dirt pile in the backlot of a memorial park is still legally part of the cemetery. Blue Lake Regional Park is not.
“That’s the legal crux of this, that bones were taken out to 223rd (Blue Lake) and were placed in an area not permitted for the receipt of human remains,” Slyman said. “If we had a big storage pile at Lone Fir, we would have never violated that law.”
But in the stead of the embarrassing investigation into the Blue Lake bones, Metro won’t be taking any chances.
The new procedures at work
It’s a sopping wet morning at Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery, which recorded its first burial in 1846 and has more than 25,000 known interments. After the recent passing of Rex Evans, a grave is about to be prepared.
The job should be simple enough – the burial is a double-depth grave – Anna Mae Evans was buried in the plot in 2006, and Rex Evans will be laid to rest immediately above.
But the heavy rains have all but washed away paint used to mark the grave, and Fox, along with Metro cemeteries coordinator Noel Seats and two SI employees have to go on a search. Mud cakes many of the markers that are used to identify the lot, row and plots on the ground.
The Suhor Industries backhoe has no problem climbing the hill to the burial site, but the truck that would be used to haul off the excess dirt from the burial can’t get traction on the slick mud and grass.
Metro cemeteries director Rachel Fox, left, and cemeteries coordinator Noel Seats watch as contractors excavate a grave at Lone Fir.
The contractors, Brian Boersma and Jason McCoy, appear to follow the Metro cemeteries program’s new protocols. While McCoy uses the backhoe to pull up dirt, Boersma watches to check for any bones, bone fragments or funerary objects in the excess soil. Meanwhile, in the relative rain cover provided by a nearby cedar tree, Fox and Seats watch to ensure the contractors are doing their job properly.
As part of the new protocol, a Metro employee must be on hand to supervise the contractors at all times. The Metro employees – parks rangers, cemetery program workers, even Slyman sometimes – aren’t looking for bones themselves. They’re making sure the trained contractors are.
If fragments are spotted, the digging stops until the contractors get guidance from Metro staff. If actual bones are found, the digging stops and the grave is marked as unavailable.
As an added precaution, the dirt from the deeper parts of the dig will be kept on site, so any incidental fragments that were overlooked stay at the site, Slyman said. The top half of the grave will be hauled to the former St. Johns Landfill site, where Metro has been paying for fill dirt as the rubbish at the site settles.
If bones are found at St. Johns, the cemetery manager and the Oregon Medical Examiner will be notified, the policies say.
Graves illegally re-sold
Of course, Overlie's claims weren't about incidental remains shifting around underground. His message about graves being re-sold came months after Metro held a press conference to detail its re-sold grave problem.
Between 600 and 700 graves were re-sold without their original owner's permission, and in a manner not consistent with state law at the time. Dresler, Slyman and Fox all say former Metro cemeteries employees were responsible for the double-sold graves. Dresler, who headed the program at the time, said she could not comment on personnel matters relating to the employees' discipline for illegally selling the graves.
Metro cemeteries program manager Rachel Fox was the the first employee who became aware that graves were being illegally re-sold. Behind her are 19th century books with logs of grave sales.
In late 2007, Fox got a phone call from a very upset grave owner, who had discovered that someone else was buried in his grave at Lone Fir.
"Sure enough, there was a modern burial in his grave," Fox said. "That former employee was taken off the cemetery program, and then we started investigating what happened."
Dresler said her fear was that the double-sales were nefarious, that another employee might have been stealing from the program. An independent accounting firm, Moss Adams, was brought in to audit the cemeteries program.
They found no evidence of embezzlement. But they did find that the re-sales were in violation of state law.
"It is unclear why the grave sites were resold when Metro Cemeteries has a capacity of grave sites available for sale," the audit said.
Fox and Dresler said the former employee had some experience working at another cemetery, where in-house regulations said decades-old, unclaimed graves could simply be administratively sold to another customer. The employee had been following those procedures – which neither Metro nor Multnomah County have ever had in place. Instead, Metro was supposed to follow state law, which basically forces a cemetery operator to go through foreclosure on a grave abandoned believed to be abandoned, complete with a sheriff's auction.
The re-sales could have predated Metro's ownership of the cemeteries, which brings us back to William Wallace Spalding.
When Spalding first bought his graves, it was likely recorded in a hand-written log book. The 19th century cemetery manager probably wrote down the date the grave was sold, then "William Wallace Spalding, Lot 90, Block 12, 15," with the last number representing how much Spalding paid for his six graves.
During Multnomah County's ownership, those records were transferred to a type-written form called a lot sheet. This book added in Spalding's place and year of birth, year of death and the date he was buried.
Hand written in each of the four boxes surrounding the one marking Spalding's resting place are the words "Owned WW Spalding."
The lot sheet has pink paper, and on another page, the words "Old records show WHOLE of lot purchased by W.W. Spaulding."
Pink correction fluid was used to mark out legitimate grave owners, without going through proper procedures to re-claim abandoned graves.
Those words were, at one point, hidden. Someone used pink correction fluid to mark out that Spalding was the owner of the lot. In 2005, someone was buried in one of the six plots in Lot 90.
The pink correction fluid appears all over typewritten ownership records on lot sheets. Only in the last couple of years did Metro staff begin peeling away at the correction fluid to see who truly owned what graves.
A change in state laws, and more new policies from Metro's cemeteries department, should prevent the re-sold issue from rearing up again. If Metro does decide to declare the rest of Spalding's plots abandoned, cemeteries program employees will have to make an honest effort to find Spalding's relatives. They'll have to put an ad in the newspaper, and wait a few months to see if the kin of Spalding show up.
If they do, they'll have to show, through birth and death certificates, among other records, that they are, indeed, related to the William Wallace Spalding who rests in Grave 3S of Lot 90 in Lone Fir's Block 12.
Fox said it would take about 5 1/2 hours of staff time to process each unclaimed, unused grave and get it ready to be legally re-sold.
Permanent safeguards
Metro can put in place procedures. It can write new policies and hire consultants and auditing firms to review them.
But 11 years ago, its cemeteries manager pled guilty to embezzlement charges. Five years ago, the re-sold problems were discovered. The bones at Blue Lake almost resulted in criminal charges being files against an employee last year.
What's to say today's attention to the cemeteries program doesn't turn into more apathy, inattention or outright theft in five, 10 or 15 years?
Slyman said he believes the new procedures will keep that from happening.
"We have a dedicated manager position whose primary responsibility is the management of this important program for Metro," he said. "We have elevated the importance of this function within our department, and frankly, within Metro overall."
A pilot program could allow for cremated remains to be buried at some Metro cemeteries for the first time. Fundraising is ongoing for the Block 14 project at Lone Fir, which would create a monument to dead Chinese-Americans and patients from the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane who are buried under the gravel at the cemetery's southwestern gateway.
"We are bringing the necessary attention and management to this program so that it cannot only exist, but thrive," Slyman said.