This kind of incident is not unknown, maybe not even uncommon. In the early 80s in the small coastal town of Lincoln City, Oregon (Art Thieme will remember it as being close to Depoe Bay. Lincoln City was incorporated from 5 tiny towns: Devils Lake, Oceanside, Nelscott, Taft and Cutler City some years back.) a mortician did the same thing. I forget how many wrapped bodies were stacked in his garage and other nooks, 21 comes to mind. In the cemetery, they also discovered multiple one body-on-top-of-another-and-another graves.

Had I had a suspicious enough mind, I could have been the one to turn him in, strangely enough. One sunny day I had walked on the beach from Cutler City to Oceanside and on the way back on the highway I stopped and admired some molded fiberglass and concrete lawn and gallery creations an outdoors shop had on display. There was one in particular that I liked- but I told the man I had to leave, that the odor coming off the hill was nauseating me. I don't remember that he even responded to my comment, though it seems like he must have been aware of the odor. Eventually it was a neighbor of the mortuary who called in the police.

It was the same story the man in the current newspaper story gave: he got behind, he said, and then didn't have the money to catch up. The closest crematorian was some miles away, and he said he couldn't afford their prices, anyway, and he was planning to bury all the bodies instead of cremating them. Even though he had continued to accept people's orders and payments for cremation.

As you can imagine, in a small town like Lincoln City (fewer than 10,000 people) it rocked everybody. The grief was palpable. His wife, bless her heart, was a registered nurse who was very popular in the community- I have no idea if she knew how ill her husband was. I never talked with her again before, as it happened,I moved back to the Valley.

Ebbie