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Undertaker Supplied Wrong Ashes to Family, Court Hears PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Friday, 11 March 2005
By Katherine Haddon, PA


An undertaker conned a grieving mother out of nearly £1,700 by supplying her with the wrong ashes after the death of her son, a court heard today. Roger Barker, 57, of Grove, near Wantage, in Oxfordshire, scattered ashes apparently belonging to Lee Kent, who died after a road accident in October 2003 aged 27, as his parents Paul and Sheila watched.

But Oxford Crown Court heard that the ashes were not Lee’s and that Mr and Mrs Kent, also from Grove, have never received those belonging to him.

Following Lee’s death, Mr and Mrs Kent engaged Mr Barker’s firm, R and H Barker, which has branches in Didcot and Wantage, to carry out the necessary arrangements.

Lee’s body was to be cremated and his ashes scattered in a specific place, prosecutor David Bright told the court.

In a statement read out in court, Mr Kent, 55, said that he and his wife met Barker at the agreed spot two days after the funeral in November and he had gone over to his vehicle to see Lee’s urn.

“I went over to his four wheel drive where he showed me an urn that was resting on the front passenger seat,” he said.

“At this point, he said words to the effect: “There’s Lee.”

There was also a plaque on the urn with his son’s name on it, Mr Kent added.

Barker then scattered the ashes for the family, the court heard.

But Mr Bright claimed that Barker had only actually collected Lee’s ashes from Oxford Crematorium the day after they were supposed to have been scattered.

Later that month, Mrs Kent received a phone call from her sister-in-law which prompted her to contact the crematorium manager and police, the court heard.

The day she did so, Mr Bright said that Barker was at the crematorium and when he heard what Mrs Kent had said, responded: “I’ve really f***** up big time.”

In evidence, Mrs Kent, 52, spoke of how Barker had reassured she and her husband about arrangements following Lee’s death.

“He just said we had nothing to worry about, nothing at all he would do all the worrying for us,” she told the court.

Mr Bright described the alleged actions as “thoroughly dishonest and likely to evoke deep distress” and “a fraudulent and cruel deception”.

Barker denies one charge of obtaining a money transfer of £1,697.82 by deception from Sheila Kent in November 2003 and two of making a false representation to procure a cremation.

The last two charges relate to allegations that he forged the signatures of two grieving relatives on cremation forms.

In May 2003, it is claimed that he signed the name Brian Harrow on forms connected to the cremation of his wife Elizabeth.

And in July 2003, the court heard that he falsified the signature of Thomas Lacy in relation to the remains of his 86-year-old father, Reginald.

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4191182
 
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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Henry David Thoreau, 1854

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