Grave Robbing in DeKalb County
Presented by Mr. Ronald Klein
Wednesday, February 24, 1999, 7:00pm
Country Inn Restaurant, Sycamore
The third Friends program for the 1998-99 academic year, Grave Robbing in DeKalb County, was delivered by lifelong resident and Friends board member, Ron Klein. In front of a full house at the Country Inn, Klein delivered a well-researched and interesting presentation that stayed on the light side of a potentially macabre subject. Klein's interest in the topic was generated while doing research for a piece on DeKalb County history entitled, "Law and the Prairie.
Klein bolstered his presentation with backgound information on the topic beginning in fifteenth century Europe. In that period, demand for bodies (cadavers) was for artists who studied human form through dissection. Later periods, beginning with the early nineteenth century, saw a shift in demand to medical schools. A regular supply of bodies became essential for anatomical study. England originally tried to meet the demand by allowing medical schools to take the cadavers of unclaimed bodies. This was later supplemented with a regulation allowing the schools to take the bodies of prisoners who died or were executed. There were other variations in Western society, for example, allowing the bodies killed as a result of war, and in some cases, the bodies of minorities, especially blacks, to be used.
Body supply has always been an uncomfortable topic for Western society to address. Mainstream religions have not opposed it, but few have discussed it openly. As in the case of Europe, demand soon outpaced supply, and an acceptable means of addressing demand was never found. Since a legal means could not be found, an illegal market grew for cadavers driven largely by high prices. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, a body could be sold for anywhere between $5.00 and $30.00, a sizable sum for the day. Additional money could be made, for example, by extracting teeth and selling these to dentists. Surprisingly, most grave robbers were medical students putting themselves through medical school, but there were also professional grave robbers.
The robbing of a grave itself needed to occur within a few days after a person's death. Digging up a grave would have to occur at night and when the gound was not frozen. Body extracting was a grueling business, and robbers had to be careful not to leave any telltale appearances behind. Klein focused on the one specific grave robbery in DeKalb County. Medical students from the Franklin Medical School in St. Charles stole the body of a sixteen year old girl from the Ohio Grove Cemetery on Barber Green Road. Following an investigation, the body of Marilla Kendall was recovered and returned to the grave. Indictments were handed down by a grand jury to the medical students involved and the school's founder and director, Dr. George Richards, but no convictions occurred. However, the Franklin Medical School was unable to survive the scandal, and closed down shortly afterward.
While there have been a number of instances of grave robbing in the country, this is the only one Klein is aware of that has occurred in DeKalb County. Likely many grave robberies have gone undetected, and there are probably a number of empty caskets buried in cemeteries throughout the country.
- Byron Anderson
For more information, please call (815) 753-9838 or e-mail libraryfriend@niu.edu.
Past Updated: August 22, 2007