Wichita — Police say thieves broke into an aboveground crypt at a Wichita cemetery and stole a necklace from a woman’s corpse. The theft was reported Tuesday morning, five months after an attempted grave robbery at another Wichita cemetery.

An Alabama family claims in a federal lawsuit that in a three-way mixup, a Maryville cremation company sent them the ashes of the wrong person instead of those of their deceased relative. The mixup also resulted in an elderly woman being incorrectly buried in the Tennessee Veterans Cemetery, the lawsuit alleges.

FOR MORE than 18 months, three "unscrupulous" funeral-home operators stole diseased body parts from the corpses of 244 Philadelphians and sold the tissue for nearly $250,000 to two "predatory" operators of a New Jersey company, a Philadelphia grand jury found yesterday. That company, Biomedical Tissue Services, or BTS, in turn resold the tissue for $1 million to four companies, which processed it for hospitals.

New scanning techniques make worn gravestones legible, with plenty of other scientific possibilities. You’ve probably wandered through a graveyard and noticed that some older inscriptions are so worn that they’re illegible. Perhaps you’ve even wondered about the stories behind them, whose bones are lying there. Thanks to a new project you might be able to find out one day. Scientists at the Ambient Intelligence Lab at Carnegie Mellon Cylab have developed a way to take hi-res scans of the tombstones that can reveal the carving. After that, the scans are matched against a database of carvings to show the words.

"Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science"
by Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson

In 1974, the bones of three men were excavated from the rubble of an ancient palace in Iran. Bill Bass, professor emeritus of forensic anthropology at UT, was called in to investigate the 12,000-year-old crime scene. This case, along with other “cold cases” Bass has investigated throughout his career, is explored in his latest book, “Beyond the Body Farm.”

Construction on a new development in Stamping Ground was put on hold after workers uncovered an old casket. Archeologists are carefully excavating a coffin with human remains that dates back to the 1800's. It was found right next to First Baptist Church in Stamping Ground on Wood Lake Road.

By Sue Parrish

There is nothing that can evoke a more lonesome feeling than driving down a highway and noticing from a distance, a group of grave stones and one loan pine tree surrounded by an isolated fence in the middle of a field being worked by a farmer. This is a sight that brings speculation of a number of possibilities: Is this a burial site for family members of a homestead long gone; the hallowed ground of a church site, whose structure has become part of the past, or is it the cemetery of an abandoned town, whose buildings have also returned to dust? The farmer knows the answer to the question in our minds, as we speed on.