Dart: Virtually Impossible to Identify More than 12K Unclaimed Bodies

Chicago - The Cook County Board ordered changes last year, in the way unclaimed bodies are "buried" at a South Suburban cemetery. They acted after complaints made by Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.

Dart said in an interview Thursday that the chaos at the cemetery is still causing trouble for law enforcement.

Since 1980, more than 12,000 indigent and unclaimed bodies have been buried in mass graves at Homewood Memorial Gardens.

The sheriff said it's virtually impossible to figure out where any one individual is located - meaning some crimes may never be solved, and many families may never have the solace of finding their loved one.

The real scandal was not the mass burial of unclaimed bodies and the indigent at a south suburban cemetery near 171st and Halsted.

The scandal was that no one kept track of where the 12,700 bodies were placed.

“You have a better chance of hitting the Powerball than of finding somebody that you believe is buried out there,” Dart said. “No one watched. No one cared.”

That's what Dart, Det. Jason Moran and others discovered when they tried to identify eight previously unidentified victims of mass murderer John Wayne Gacy.

It took shrewd police work and a stroke of luck to locate thier remains, because the Cook County Medical Examiner had violated a specific order and buried them at Homewood. The sheriff solicited DNA swabs from the relatives of dozens of young men who had disappeared about the time of Gacy's rampage.

But as scientists found most did not match any of Gacy's victims, Dart gradually came to a sickening realization. Some of those long-ago missing persons may never ever be found, because they may be buried in the chaotic mass graves at Homewood Memorial Gardens.

“There's about 50 years worth of missing people that you're never going to make that connection,” Dart said. “So, for individuals whose loved ones went missing and showed up at the Medical Examiner's office as an ‘unidentified,’ there's no way you're going to find your loved one. It's just not going to happen.”

Dart said he feels this situation is “rotten.”

“This is not something where you have to have a degree in calculus to figure this out,” Dart said. “It's about, frankly, caring.”

Since the County Board ordered reforms last summer, Dart said things have improved. For example, DNA is taken from each body before burial and each grave is now marked on an easy-to-read map.

Dart offered a partial defense of Dr. Nancy Jones, noting that the scandalous mismanagement at Homewood Memorial Gardens began long before she became Medical Examiner. She inherited a dysfunctional system, but unfortunately she did not do enough to fix it.

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