Husband stole his mum-in-law’s body from funeral parlour – without telling his wife
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A HUSBAND broke into a funeral parlour that was going bust and stole the corpse of his mother-in-law - without telling his wife.
He could not contact the undertaker and feared not getting the body back in time for a planned service.
He took it to another parlour in Rochester, Kent — and has still not told his wife.
He said: “I had no option. I had to get the body out.”
The frantic husband asked traders to act as lookouts as he loaded his dead mother-in-law from a funeral parlour into a van.
The man stole the remains in broad daylight after failing for several days to get hold of the struggling parlour’s owner.
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With the funeral date looming, he broke into the building via a door in an alleyway and lifted the remains on to a trolley.
He then transported them in a hired van to another undertaker, who arranged the funeral.
He said: “I’d even spent two days at the police station trying to track the owner down, but I just couldn’t get hold of her.
“I’d taken on all of the organising and didn’t want to bother my wife at this time. She still to this day doesn’t know what happened — and I won’t be telling her.”
A young woman who acted as a lookout said the balding man in his 50s was accompanied by a younger man, believed to be his son, for the raid on Butterfly Funeral Services in Rochester, Kent.
She said: “He said he’d been trying for days to contact the owner, but she wasn’t answering the phone or the door.
“He parked the van right outside the store and, as he went round the alleyway to the back of the store, we distracted people on the street and got them to walk round the front of the van.
“I went to see if he was OK and they’d lifted the body into a barrow. It was covered in a sheet.
“They put it straight into the van. It sounds insensitive, but those who helped just had to laugh — it was so unbelievable.”
The drama, which took place a year ago, was revealed this week as bailiffs repossessing the parlour found 16 full urns on a shelf that had not been given to family members.
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Parlour boss Karen Calder, 44, is banned from using local crematorium services over unpaid bills. The company ceased trading several weeks ago.
Ms Calder said yesterday she closed “due to ill health”. She said: “I apologise if the families had difficulty contacting me.”
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