The Plot Sickens: Burr Oak Cemetery Workers Testify to Desecrated Graves in Grisly Cemetery Scheme

A typical workday at Burr Oak Cemetery will bring tears to your eyes, what with the binge-drinking of Crown Royal whiskey, the routinely desecrated graves and the random, macabre discovery of a human skull and other bones just lying about on the cemetery lawn.

Indeed, as Fred Stanback testified Thursday to what he saw while working at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, the groundsman wept and wiped tears from his eyes.

“I’m sorry, you’ve got me reliving this all over again,” Stanback said. “But they tore up bodies, man.”

“They” would be two brothers, Terrence and Keith Nicks, now on trial in a Cook County courtroom, accused of digging up human remains and dumping them in a massive mound of garbage and mud, putting fresh graves over old ones, removing headstones and other desecrations of the burial ground entrusted to their care, all as part of a scheme to resell the plots and pocket the cash.

Keith, 51, was the foreman. Terrence, 44, drove the cemetery dump truck.

The bizarre and monstrous behavior at the historic Alsip cemetery — the hallowed resting place of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, of other noteworthy African-American citizens of Chicago, including jazz singer Dinah Washington, Harlem Globetrotter Inman Jackson, boxing champ Ezzard Charles and dozens of Negro League ballplayers, as well as thousands of other families — first came to light in June 2009 when a human bone found on the cemetery grounds was turned over to the Cook County medical examiner.

Six weeks later, the sheriff was making arrests.

The cemetery’s manager, Carolyn Towns, the Nicks brothers and a fourth man were accused of digging up as many as 300 bodies from 2005 to 2009, breaking into their cement casket liners and dumping their corpses into a mass burial mound. Towns pleaded guilty in 2011 and is serving a 12-year prison sentence. The fourth man, backhoe operator Maurice “Bear” Dailey, a 25-year employee of Burr Oak who reportedly drank Crown Royal whiskey on the job all day, every day, awaits trial.

Towns also administered an Emmett Till memorial fund, but she kept those donations for herself, too.

Towns was the orchestrator of the grisly enterprise, but the Nicks brothers were her joyful underlings, according to prosecutors, and Towns would pay them for their callous, criminal efforts.

One witness, groundsman Kenyatta Bridges, testified this week that he would see Terrence Nicks and Dailey laugh as they went about digging up bodies and dumping them. Bridges also said Dailey once put a human rib bone on his chair as a lunchtime prank.

On Thursday, Darnell Mayes, a witness for the prosecution, wept as he tried to tell the court about being unable to find his relatives’ headstones. Judge Joan O’Brien handed him a tissue to dry his tears.

“I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t do this.”

Mayes, and others like him, are the victims of these crimes. And many tears have fallen in the hours and hours of testimony offered this week against the Nicks brothers.

Towns’ scheme came apart quickly after the Cook County Sheriff’s Department launched its investigation. Initially a financial crimes probe, investigators soon discovered the cemetery was a field of ungodly horrors. The sheriff found many families who could not find their loved ones’ grave sites. FBI experts with experience probing mass graves of war-crimes victims in war-torn Serbia were called in to help unravel the mysteries in Burr Oak’s 150 acres.

The mass burial mound filled with broken bones was one such mystery.

In testimony this week, witnesses who live near the cemetery, such as Thomas Dabulskis, described cemetery employees working well past dark, using backhoes to build a huge mound of dirt filled with disinterred bodies. Dabulskis said the “hill kept getting bigger and bigger.”

On Thursday, Stanback testified that he saw a skull on the ground in 2007 and thought it was a Halloween prank. The skull was taken to the mass burial mound along with other bones.

Last week, another groundskeeper, Thomas Esper, told the court he once saw a rib cage lying on the ground. He said he also saw Terrence Nicks driving a dump truck with a human shin bone sticking out of the mud in the back of the truck. He told jurors he saw corpses floating in coffins filled with water after the Nicks brothers had taken sledgehammers to them.

On Thursday, forensic experts, including Anne Grauer, a Loyola University Chicago professor and an expert in forensic anthropology called in by the FBI, testified about the bones found at the cemetery.

“There were human remains all over the place,” Grauer said. “Never in the 30 to 35 years that I’ve been doing this have I seen that concentration and amount of human remains.”

Today, a trustee appointed by the governor has fully rehabilitated the property. Schoolkids now visit to learn about African-American history. And in August, five years after Sheriff Tom Dart made his arrests and took over the cemetery, a memorial was dedicated on the grounds of Burr Oak to the victims of these crimes.

The words dignity, honor and respect are etched into the monument. Those laid to rest in this hallowed ground are finally getting the dignity, honor and respect they deserve.

As for justice? That’s left for the judge and jury.

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