The Unclaimed Dead

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Since 1896 Los Angeles County has been interring the indigent and unclaimed dead. Workers would log each name in large handwritten books. Most of them remained unnamed for years afterward, and some forever.

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Who are L.A. County’s unclaimed dead? (Source-LATimes)

LOS ANGELES
Ownership of the indigent cemetery or what was known as Potter's Field passed from the City to the County of Los Angeles in 1917, and in 1924, with burial space there exhausted, the County began to cremate its indigent deceased.

In December, 2015 a single grave was dug at the Los Angeles County Cemetery to receive the cremated remains of 1,300 persons who had been sitting on a shelf in the medical examiner's office since 2012. County officials wait three years between death and burial to give family members a chance to come forward. But even the most optimistic know that more than likely once they're in the ground, they'll remain unclaimed and in many cases unnamed forever.

In 2015, the records were digitized, which would allow family members a chance to find a loved one even years after their death. There were 1,349 dead, made up of of 941 male, 404 female and 4 unknown. This included 131 babies and two teenagers; the majority of the people were over 60 years of age.

In 2016, the number of people was 1,430. ​

In December 2017, the cremated ashes of over 1,500 people that had been waiting since 2014 were buried at Evergreen Cemetery, which is less than a quarter-mile from the crematorium.

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Los Angeles County Crematorium in Boyle Heights

All of them died in nursing homes, hospitals or the streets across Los Angeles county. The remains were sent to a country crematory in Boyle Heights where they are reduced to ashes, and held for three years inside a plastic box.

Some of these people had no living relative to come for their remains, others had lost contact with their family of origin, and others had family that just couldn't afford to pay the county to handle and cremate the body.

Only if the death is deemed suspicious is the body autopsied by the coroner, and that office initiates an investigation to find next of kin. Ten percent remain unnamed and are given the universal surname of "Doe".

In 2016, a civil grand jury report blamed lengthy backlogs in autopsies and toxicology on underfunding. The M.E.'s office was found to be understaffed, and was in danger of losing their accreditation.

It's not only this cemetery which holds the unnamed, there are stretches of land that are forgotten even as burial grounds themselves. This is what was unearthed only a few years ago:​

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 In 2003, construction workers digging a drainage canal for the Playa Vista condo complex unearthed the bones of 396 Gabrieliño-Tongva Indians at the edge of the Ballona wetlands. The site is now a soccer field. Two years later on the other side of town, crews working on the Eastside extension of the Metro Gold Line found the remains of 174 people, most of them Chinese laborers, just south of Evergreen Cemetery. Some of the graves dated to the 1880s. ​

Greta Mayer (1883-1965)

One of those who's actually buried at Boyle Heights Cemetery is Greta Meyer. She was an actress and singer known for playing characters such as mothers, landladies and similar roles in both silent films and early talkies. She was born in Dessau, Germany and came to the United States as the star of an operetta company, and stayed to pursue an acting career. Her German family was comparable to the Barrymore family in America.

She appeared on Broadway in several stage productions. Her last film role was playing "Mama Hartzler" in the film drama, An American Romance (1944). She passed away in Gardena, California, on October 8, 1965, at the age of 82, and she was cremated and her ashes were buried in the Los Angeles County Crematorium Cemetery in Boyle Heights.

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Actress Reata Hoyt (1913-1942) in The Lily

Reata Hoyt is another actress who found her eternal resting place at the Los Angeles County Crematorium Cemetery. In 1925, it was reported she was the daughter of Sir Cashon Hoyt, an English diplomat who had died years before, and made his home in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her uncle was Colonel Edward George Hoyt of the English Royal Flying Corps. How much of this family history is accurate is unknown.

She made her film debut as "Betty Stetson" in the comedy The Non-Stop Bride (1926). Prior to this she had appeared in Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue, and was also part of the Ziegfield Follies. Her last film was The White Parade (1934). 

She married Harry Collins, screenwriter and cinematographer in 1927, when she was only 14 years old. Many dancers from the Ziegfield Follies were barely teenagers, who lied about their age. They divorced in 1935. Months after her first marriage ended, she married Joseph William Reilly in June, 1935.  

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The adventures of Joe Reilly c.1930

Joe Reilly was Fox Studios' director of safety, and when their marriage was announced in May, 1935 the newspaper listed his age as 36, when in reality he was 54 years old. He was a former detective lieutenant for the New York police department and was a technical advisor for Fox Studios. 

He had led an adventurous life. In 1912, he arrested Nicky Arnstein in Paris, conman and better known as Fanny Brice's husband. Reilly had worked on the gang squad, and was a body guard to Rheinlander Waldo when he was New York's police commissioner. When younger he had been a professional boxer under the name of "Spike" Reilly. He had been a member of Col. Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and was a rider in Buffalo Billy Cody's wild west show.

Despite being 32 years younger than her husband, Reata Hoyt died in 1942, at only 29 years of age from cirrhosis of the liver. Her cremated remains were dumped in a common grave. Her husband Joe Reilly followed her to the grave 5 years later, but by then he had moved to Florida. 

For the fanfare she had received when she starred in The Lily, Reata died in obscurity, and not even an obituary appeared in the newspaper. There is no marker for her.

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Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles, which contains the city's potter's field (Source-Alamy)

Fast forward to present day. In 2024, the hunt for family members is given over to investigators with the Los Angeles County Public Administrator's office.  The home of a 74-year-old Korean woman who died in October, 2023 in the hospital and remained unclaimed, was visited in an effort to find any clue to a family member's address.

If these persons had a home, many times they are cluttered with hoarded trash or broken belongings. This makes the search twice as hard as the investigators go through correspondence or anything that can offer a clue, protecting themselves with a mask, latex gloves and tyvek suits.

Since Los Angeles had the nation's largest homeless population they are always busy.

In December, 2023 the last burial of unclaimed and unnamed bodies from the M.E.'s office numbered 1,937. The number has been steadily increasing every year.

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Coffined bodies at New York City Morgue waiting for the coroner. The city's first morgue opened in 1866 on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital near the East River. c,.1868

NEW YORK
In 2014, the New York's Medical Examiner's office was described as a "mess". Bodies were lost, cremated by mistake or wrongly donated to science. 

Millions of dollars of taxpayer money was spent on equipment and plans that could only be implemented in the case of a mass disaster, instead of the daily workings of the ME's office. Between 2004 to 2014, $19.6 was given in federal Homeland Security grants.

The department did not release records of how those funds were spent, and it's suspected they were wasted. The department has a history of "criminality, waste and incompetence."

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The ME’s former chief of management information systems, Natarajan “Raju” Venkataram, and his co-worker girlfriend, Rosa Abreu, were busted in 2005 for embezzling more than $9 million from a $11.4 million FEMA grant meant to track and identify remains of 9/11 victims.

And bosses take lavish taxpayer-funded trips to conferences and symposiums. Frank DePaolo, assistant commissioner for emergency management, has traveled to Las Vegas, the Hague, Hong Kong and Israel. Chief of Staff Barbara Butcher has gone to Croatia and Thailand.

The two bosses have embarrassed the agency.

Days after 9/11, Butcher took home a Ground Zero souvenir — a jet exit-door handle she remarked would “make for good conversation on the coffee table,” a witness reported.

She said she gave it back, but “could not recall” to whom. She was promoted and got a pay hike to $166,879 a year.

DePaolo, who made $160,380 last year (2013), left a laptop that held 200 to 300 photos of body parts from 9/11 and other victims and city disaster plans in his agency-issued SUV. The computer was stolen from the vehicle.

Leah Lehrer in her youth

In 2014, the New York ME's office found an elderly woman's corpse in the morgue where it had been for nearly a year. Another body was sent for cremation in her place.

Leah Lehrer, died January, 2014, age 95 in her apartment. Her family had buried what they thought were her cremated remains in a Queens cemetery.

It's believed the remains that were interred belonged to Rebecca Alper, 71, who died by suicide in September 2013. 

When a relative inquired about Alper in May, 2014 the ME could not find her body. They hurriedly dug up 300 graves from the potter’s field on Hart Island, which turned up nothing since in reality she was cremated and buried in a grave in Queens under another woman's name.

A colleague of Lehrer said she had worked for New York Life up to her death, and traveled to Tunisia alone in her mid-80s. "She was a wonderful person, highly intelligent, very curious and very kind. She cared about other people." Lehrer had no siblings and was childless. She told relatives she wished her ashes to be buried in her parents’ grave site in Middle Village.

It's unknown why Lehrer's body was held for so long, since normally unclaimed bodies are sent for city burial within 2 to 3 months.

The mishandling of Lehrer's remains was blamed on "a boondoggle body-tracking software program that cost taxpayers more than $10 million."

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