What started as gruesome discoveries in two Southern California cemeteries now tops the state's list of consumer scandals.
State investigators have taken over five California cemeteries and are seeking control of at least four more in an expanding probe that has taken several bizarre turns and pitted two state agencies against each other.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday October 28, 1995 Home Edition Part A Page 4 National Desk 2 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
Cemetery conservatorship--Because of incorrect information supplied by the state Cemetery Board, a story in Thursday's editions stated that the state was seeking conservatorship of Inglewood Memorial Park. The state has not sought conservatorship of any Inglewood cemetery.
The whole macabre mess will fall before the public's eye at an Assembly subcommittee hearing today in Sacramento, where legislators are expected to demand an investigation of how the state's burial grounds were allowed to get so out of hand.
The state's probe of cemeteries--some of which stand accused of embezzling customers' money and at times reselling burial plots or committing other morbid misdoings--is the Department of Consumer Affairs' "No. 1 priority," agency spokeswoman Maria Chacon Kniestedt said. The hearing, called by Assemblyman Willard H. Murray Jr. (D-Paramount), will be full of unhappy people--regulators who blame each other for confused investigations, and industry leaders who say regulators have been blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
But the saddest statements are likely to come from bereaved relatives of those buried in the troubled graveyards--some of whom have been told they will probably never know what happened to their loved ones' bodies. Others only recently found out that hundreds of thousands of dollars that were supposed to go into maintaining the cemeteries they chose for their relatives might have gone into the pockets of cemetery owners.
"These things have been going on for years, and nobody caught it," said Murray, who heads the budget subcommittee on state administration, which funds the state Cemetery Board. "The question is why? Was it too much influence by the industry? Was it a lack of resources? That's what we're looking for."
His search for answers will be made more difficult by warring among state officials, unpaid bills, allegations that a state auditor accepted a loan from a cemetery, and by a reform-minded investigator who is threatening to quit.
The Cemetery Board, which under crusading new Director Ray Giunta had launched the investigations in June, was swallowed almost whole by the bigger state Department of Consumer Affairs this month.
Immediately after taking over, the consumer department raided Giunta's offices while he was out of town and seized many of his agency's records, including checkbooks. The Cemetery Board had used the checkbooks to pay for operations at the cemeteries it took under control.
