|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
|
|
Tills well-preserved body exhumed |
|
|
|
|
Written by DeadGirl
|
|
Friday, 03 June 2005 |
June 2, 2005
BY DEBRA PICKETT Staff Reporter
Perhaps Mamie Till Mobley is still protecting her son.
Her decision, in 1955, to display her murdered son Emmett's body under glass might have kept his remains intact until the day federal investigators were finally ready to investigate his death.
Officials and family members stood by Till's grave at Burr Oak Cemetery Wednesday morning as Till's body was exhumed.
"It was a moment," said Simeon Wright, who, 50 years ago was awakened by the sound of angry men wresting Till, his cousin, from the bed they were sharing. "After you pass through the sadness, it was a moment of triumph today."
Minister tells story of Lazarus
In a brief service before the exhumation, the Rev. Keith Hayes told the biblical story in which Jesus commanded the stone be rolled away from Lazarus' days-old tomb and the man emerged alive, still wearing his death shroud.
After the prayer service, the cement vault holding Till's casket was lifted from the ground.
For Wright, the connection was plain. Just as Lazarus had been preserved, his young cousin's grave seemed to have been protected.
"We were afraid that the original vault would crumble after 50 years," Wright said, "but it was perfectly intact."
Shortly after 10:30 a.m., after investigators spent about two hours photographing the vault, checking its seals and draining water from inside, the vault was topped with a protective cover, wrapped in a blue tarp and then placed on the back of a white flatbed truck, which made its way from the Alsip cemetery to Stroger Hospital, where a CT scan was performed.
No autopsy at the time
The body, still beneath the clear cover under which it was displayed at Till's 1955 funeral, was described by sources as being remarkably well-preserved. The grotesque swelling that disfigured Till's head had apparently receded, sources said, leading one official to remark that Till's body looked better Wednesday than it did 50 years ago.
The body is to be transferred to the Cook County medical examiner's office, where the medical examiner, Edmund R. Donoghue, is to perform an autopsy.
An autopsy is standard procedure in any apparent homicide, but none was performed when Till's body was found 50 years ago. That lapse allowed lawyers for the two men charged in Till's death, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, to successfully argue that, without a formal identification of the body and cause of death, the accused could not be convicted of murder. At the time, only Till's family identified the body.
The autopsy will definitively prove Till's identity; family members have already submitted DNA samples for comparison. The examination of Till's body might provide other information to investigators.
When NAACP leader Medgar Evers was exhumed 28 years after his death, an autopsy provided evidence that convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder. Dr. Michael Baden, the forensic pathologist who performed Evers' autopsy, said no matter the condition of Till's body, bone injuries will be apparent, as will bullet holes and evidence of drowning.
Acquitted men admitted murder
When Till's body was shipped back to Chicago, by train, in 1955, funeral director A. A. Rayner was instructed to keep it permanently sealed. Till's Mississippi relatives had been required to sign papers agreeing to this condition before officials there would release the body.
But Till's mother refused to keep the agreement, demanding that the crate be opened and the body put on public display.
Rayner said at the time that he believed the body had been packed with lime to make it deteriorate faster. He did some work to prepare the body for viewing -- removing the boy's swollen tongue, sewing closed a gaping head wound, pushing an eyeball back into its socket and injecting some patches of skin with a preservation fluid -- but did not embalm the corpse, which was displayed under an airtight case. This could be good news for investigators because embalming can make accurate lab tests impossible.
The renewed investigation into the Till case was launched in May 2004, in hopes it might lead to additional prosecutions. Though Bryant and Milam, acquitted of murder and kidnapping charges by all-white juries, are dead, recent documentaries offered evidence that others, who are still alive, were involved in the death of Till, who was said to have "sassed" storekeeper Roy Bryant's young wife in rural Money, Miss.
According to Bryant and Milam's own account, given to Look Magazine after their trials, Till's murder was neither premeditated nor a conspiracy. The two men claimed that, after taking Till from his bed, they drove him around for a while, intending to scare him. They eventually brought him to a shed beside Milam's home in Glendora, where they beat and pistol-whipped him.
To their surprise, the men said, Till was defiant.
Enraged, the two men then drove Till -- battered, according to their account, but still conscious -- to a cotton gin, where they forced him to lift a large metal fan into the back of the truck. They took him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, told him to carry the fan to the edge of the river and then to strip naked.
Then, the two men said, Milam shot Till once in the head and the two men tied the fan around his neck to weigh down the body in the river, where it was recovered days later.
This account does not fully square with the damage visible on the recovered body. Till's head appeared to have been smashed with an ax and an ear had been cut off, as if extensive torture had occurred.
Contributing: Stefano Esposito, Natasha Korecki, Steve Patterson and Monifa Thomas
http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi |
|
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
Quote Repository
“The clouds that gather round the setting sun, Do take a sober colouring from an eye, That hath kept watch over man's mortality.” William Wordsworth
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
|
