Cremation

It took more than four months to get the body of former Burbank mayor Dallas Williams cremated, and it took 2 1/2 years for his widow to settle a lawsuit against the people she accused of mishandling his remains. But settle Gaye Williams finally did, reaching an agreement in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday under which the Neptune Society, the firm that cremated her husband's body, will pay her nearly $1 million, said sources close to the case.

You say everyone wants a piece of you? No problem. There'll be plenty to go around after the final liftoff. Take Allen Ginsberg, the bard who met his makers last week. His remains were to be cremated, then divided in three parts, each being sent to a separate resting place--in Buddhist centers in Colorado and Michigan and one in a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey.

Ultranationalist Serbs were killing Muslims in Bosnia at the rate of up to 50 at a time, then secretly cremating their bodies at night and disposing of them in a rendering plant, according to eyewitness reports that the State Department now accepts as credible. Senior U.S.

Everyone who rides Disneyland's popular "Pirates of the Caribbean" attraction knows "dead men tell no tales," and its animatronic figures aren't talking either. But, oh, if they could. On Friday, workers at the Anaheim theme park spotted a guest on the ride sprinkling an unidentified substance into the water, prompting them to close the attraction and alert police. "A witness described the substance as a baby powder that quickly dissipated," Disneyland resort spokesman Rob Doughty said.

Orlando Castaneda arrives in San Dimas to find the San Gabriel Valley suburb alight with the glow of a stunning Indian summer afternoon. It's three days before Halloween in 1995, and Castaneda intends to spend this Saturday taking his champion Spanish Andalusian show mount, Incendio, on the animal's first trail ride. He sets out from the rented stable for a wooded dirt-and-gravel gully adjacent to a secluded residential stretch of Covina Hills Road, a route he's never ridden before.

Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth listened incredulously as a caller complained that the noxious black smoke pouring from a nondescript building in the desert carried the sickeningly sweet smell of burning human flesh. "I don't think so, it's a ceramics shop," Wentworth replied. "Don't tell me they're not burning bodies. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz," the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled.

Workers at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park improperly buried--and may have lost--the remains of a Covina man, according to lawsuits filed by the man's five grown children. The allegations are the latest in a series of accusations of mishandling of remains by the crematory at Forest Lawn's Glendale facility, which is under investigation by state officials.

When Jeon Gyeong-suk lost her husband to cancer three months ago, she agonized over how to keep his remains. Because land is at a premium, burial was out, and she found the idea of a heap of ashes stored in an urn sort of creepy. So the 51-year-old widow paid $900 to transform her husband's ashes into a few handfuls of tiny bluish beads that have the look of beluga caviar. Even though the beads look like pebble-sized gems, they aren't meant to be strung into a necklace.

The families of more than 300 people whose bodies were found strewn across the grounds of a Georgia crematory will receive nearly $40 million in a settlement announced Thursday with the business and 58 funeral homes across the South. The funeral homes agreed to pay $36 million and the insurer for Tri-State Crematory $3.5 million. The Marsh family, which operates the crematory, also agreed to preserve two acres as a tribute to the dead.