A Story Worth Retelling

   This is one of those tales that, on the surface, would be common during Halloween, when macabre things are commonplace, when skulls and bones lose their repulsion and children dress up as ghosts and goblins and play with the specter of death. But there was no trick-or-treat and no childish “Boo” to this story, although it did occur a few days before Halloween. It begins with a Pike County, KY farmer, who went out one morning to check on his cows and found a body, a casket, and a vault strewn across his pasture. In spite of the gruesome nature of this incident, this is still not a Halloween story, although it was a crime, and it prompted the retelling of a love story three-quarters of a century old.
   At the top of the hill behind the farmer’s land is a narrow road that is seldom used and enough evidence remained on the road to indicate that someone rolled the vault, which had been forcibly opened and welded back, off the back of a truck. The casket burst through the vault when it tumbled down the mountain and the contents disgorged. Naturally, with Halloween in the air, the story broke immediately and the state police, who were in charge of the investigation, asked residents to check their family cemeteries to see if any of their graves had been tampered with.
   That’s when I stepped in. The Pike County Coroner and his assistant are good friends of mine, and with the experience I had in analyzing the exhumation of two of my family cemeteries, I offered to help out. Grave robbery is a vicious crime, and it exhibits a dimension of disregard for human values that transcends even the usual religious implications. Cultures across history have always honored their dead in some way and have expected their graves to be inviolable for eternity. The universal need for closure has existed as long as people have been on this earth.
   Although I knew nothing of her family when I heard the story, I knew what it was like to have a loved one torn from the ground where she was placed. It was bad enough to have to lose nearly two hundred years of my family graves, but there was at least a greater good that could be realized from my loss. The new road that cuts through the place where they rested will help bring prosperity to an area desperately in need of it, so I could at least fathom some justification for what happened to my cemeteries.
   But this was different: it was mindless and cruel, and although we did not know who was the resident of that shattered casket, the collective slap across all our faces was palpable. I immediately went to work.
   The facts of the case were unusual: it was not a frat-boy prank, since the culprits would not have dumped the body in such an isolated spot if they were going for the horror of the season. The victim, who was a female from twenty to thirty-five years old, had apparently died of natural causes and the clothing and other information led us to believe she died sometime in the 1930s. The casket, a very expensive model, had not been manufactured since World War II, and the vault type was last manufactured twenty years ago. The casket was four-sided (coffins, by contrast, are six-sided), made of 20-gauge bronze-anodized steel, and had an unusual panel that dropped down to allow family to pray with their elbows on the casket. It was a “full-couch” casket, as the industry term is used, to indicate a solid lid, instead of the more common half-lidded caskets of today.
   It was expensive. When it was built, it had cast-aluminum decorative devices at each corner, plated to resemble gold. We determined that this could have been a reason for the robbery; someone had knowledge of the casket and wanted to steal the gold. Three of the plates had been broken completely off, but the fourth was only half-removed. Apparently, the grave robbers had discovered too late that there was no gold and their vandalism was pointless.
   But the vault held the greatest mystery. Instead of the usual plate-and-cover of most vaults today, this vault was basically a large tube with a door on one end. Most unusual was the fact that, although there was dirt on the vault, there was no damage from the acidic water that appears in most aquifers in the coalfields. The presumption was that the body had been buried on a very high spot, above the aquifer, which would have eaten away at the metal over seven decades. In fact, the inside of the vault, at least its walls, looked almost pristine.
   The first report I gave the Coroner’s office was that the body had probably been buried somewhere in the Tug Valley region of Pike County instead of the Levisa Valley. The Tug Valley is the dividing line between Kentucky and West Virginia. Both valleys are branches of the Big Sandy River, but the larger numbers of the labor force who worked the mines of the early Twentieth Century in the Tug Valley were European immigrants. In the Levisa Valley, the labor force was predominately local or from the American South. The Tug Valley became the most likely place where the body was originally interred.
   In addition, the only jewelry worn by the body was a wedding band with nine tiny diamonds and no engagement ring, indicating a common practice of Italian brides during this period. Consequently, it would appear that the body was of a young woman of an apparently well-to-do family of the 1930’s, probably Catholic, possibly Italian, and had been buried somewhere above the water table, possibly in a family cemetery that may have been abandoned after the old culture of the coal camps disappeared during the 1950’s.
   There was little more I could tell them, although with that information in mind, I began narrowing my search. Although logic doesn’t always prevail when it comes to the death of a loved one, there were a few other clues I used: her clothes were spring-like, hand-stitched, with cloth flowers attached to the sleeve and neckline. This was a common style in the mid-1930’s and indicated a spring burial. I found that (with the assistance of eBay) her shoes were manufactured from 1935 through 1940, and this helped narrow the search. The fact that no indentations or depressions were found on her neck or chest further indicated that she was buried simply with her wedding ring, and that no diamonds or lockets or even earrings graced her body. One might have expected more, given the money someone had spent on a state-of-the-art casket and vault for the time, but it could also have indicated merely that when she died, whoever loved her considered her natural beauty more important than any trinkets she could have worn.
   The state of West Virginia has excellent online vital statistics, and with the assumption that whoever this person was, she would have died in a West Virginia hospital, I began tracing records of deaths during this period. Until the 1960’s there was no hospital on the Kentucky side of the river, and the Pike County residents there went to Williamson for medical care, so a death certificate, even for Kentucky residents, would have been issued by West Virginia. After initially viewing all records from 1930 to 1941, I limited the search to the period of 1935-1940 and came up with seven likely candidates and downloaded their death certificates.
   The next morning, police officers found her empty grave.
Indeed, Beatrice Winnie Price was one of my candidates, and after contacting her family, the identification was made positive. The story of a violated grave was sad enough, but the complete story was even more tragic.
   Winnie Whitt and Paul Price were high school seniors at Williamson High School in Williamson, West Virginia and graduated together in 1932. They were deeply admired by their classmates and they were the perfect couple. She was the beautiful, vivacious and kind daughter of a successful Kentucky attorney, and he was the handsome, gregarious son of a successful Williamson businessman. In spite of their wealth, there was no envy on the part of their classmates; the story was that Winnie and Paul fell in love from the time they first met and everyone knew they would marry. Both families knew the couple was in love and had no objection to their marriage, but both wanted them to go on to school first. The Depression was deepening and it was important to have a good education and marketable skills, they argued.
   Winnie and Paul agreed completely with their parents. Then they eloped to Virginia on graduation night.
   After the families recovered from the shock, the couple moved into a new home and planned the rest of their lives together. Sadly, that life lasted only another five years. Winnie was diagnosed with kidney disease, which in those pre-antibiotic and pre-dialysis days was usually fatal. In fact, during this time, only tuberculosis had a great fatality rate than kidney disease (or Bright’s disease as it was sometimes known). The couple was advised not to have children, since it would merely hasten Winnie’s death, if she even survived such a pregnancy, so they had none, but her health steadily deteriorated. In the winter of 1936-7, with Winnie obviously failing, her mother-in-law took her to Florida to see if the warm weather would help her. In spring they returned and she died in April 1937.
   Winnie’s father made one request of Paul Price; that he be allowed to take her to the family cemetery across the river in Kentucky for burial. Paul was a young man, her father reasoned, he would marry again and have the family he and Winnie could never have. He would build her a mausoleum and Paul would have the key forever and would always be part of her family. Paul accepted his father-in-law’s offer, and indeed married again, had children, and married a third time after his second wife passed away. He remained close to the Whitts as long as he lived.
   About eight years ago, Winnie’s family determined that the family crypt had deteriorated to the point that it was no longer secure and the decision was made to re-inter Winnie and her parents in the grounds of the family cemetery. That explained why there was so little damage to the vault: it had not been there long enough for the water to corrode it. On the last Wednesday before Thanksgiving, in the same casket her husband bought for her all those years ago, and in a secure new vault, she was buried for a third time.
   We still do not know the culprits of this despicable act, but the police have leads and are following them. We do, however, believe that we know why her grave was disturbed. The love story of Winnie and Paul grew after her death and funeral, which was one of the largest ever recorded in the Tug Valley. The casket she was interred in went from bronze to pure copper and maybe even pure gold in the collective memory of those who were there or were told about it. In other tales, because the Whitts and the Prices were wealthy, the simple band with nine tiny diamonds became a treasure trove of jewelry. When the grave robbers opened her casket, they must have been surprised: there was no treasure trove and there was no gold. At least they had the decency to let her ring remain on her finger.
   Will we ever find who did this? I suspect we will, someday. As heavy as the vault and casket were, it would have taken at least two people to shove it off the truck on that lonely mountain road, and probably more than that to load it, so for at least two people, it is no longer a secret. Secrets rarely remain secret for long. Somewhere, someone, if he has any humanity left inside him, is regretting what he did and eventually, the truth will come out. There is a price to be paid and he knows it. The laws are on the books; grave robbery and abuse of a corpse are felonies, punishable by prison time. But for whoever did this, adding a final, sad and unnecessary chapter to one of the purer love stories of the coalfields, that price may be preferable to keeping it inside him until his own death.
   But at least Winnie is safe again, and the fabulous riches that were buried with her have been revealed to be only myths. Instead, she rests beside her mother and father, who outlived her by many years and saw their other children marry and present them with the grandchildren Winnie never could. Paul Price is gone as well, and I spoke to one of his grandchildren recently, who did not know that his grandfather had been married before, but he was not surprised. Perhaps there was something in his grandfather’s eyes that told him; people are empathic enough to sense these things in the people they love.
   And some stories, in spite of their circumstances, deserve retelling. This was one of them.