On a bitter cold Thursday evening, a driver of a local funeral home van stopped at a QuikTrip leaving the engine running as he went inside for a purchase. Like so many, this driver could not bear the thought of returning to anything less that a toasty vehicle when he made the cold walk from the store to vehicle. Yet, history tells that we descended from pioneers who trekked across the cold Great Plains in covered wagons.
A running, unattended vehicle invites the criminally feeble as an attractive nuisance, a free ride in a vehicle—pre-heated no less. So a man and woman trolled the QT lot, snagged the funeral home van, and took off on a 24 hour odyssey. Unbeknownst to them, a dead man lay inside awaiting transport to his final earthly stop.
From ice to heat one might say, as the unlikely trio—the dead and the brain dead—soon became hot news. Car theft runs rampant here, routine stories that oft go unreported until a police chase ends in a violent collision. But a story of corpse taken for a ride in a stolen van reports no ordinary crime: Even in death, we are abused.
Beginning in North St. Louis County, our local Bonnie and Clyde traveled across the river to Alton, Illinois enlarging their felony to a federal crime of illegally transporting a cadaver across state lines. They later returned to the Show Me State, where no one showed them the news covered by local radio, television and the Post-Dispatch, which captured the populace’s attention.
One wonders why the heisters failed to notice the dead body in the back of the van. Any self-respecting carjacker would have combed the vehicle for valuables—a gun, a wallet, an old Village People CD; a dead body is hard to miss.
Incurious by nature, the indifferent duo suffered the misfortune of the sub-freezing temperatures that kept a decomposing body on ice. Ironically, the cold provided the opportunity for the theft, but it prevented the odor of a telltale clue.
Of course, another indication remained obvious to all but the oblivious—the funeral home’s logo, a large, wreathed letter that marked the white van for all to see. To provide the widest range of observation, the culprits parked the van on the lam in a Walmart parking lot in Festus, Missouri. Espying the van as he walked to his parked car, a witness called local authorities.
The police arrived, and cornered the culprits without incident in the store’s sporting goods department. No one reported what the couple was shopping for—perhaps hunters’ camouflage apparel.
The news reported that the arrested duo were homeless Caucasians once again demonstrating that criminal activity oft finds its roots in systemic poverty. Indeed, in these racially-charged times, it bears noting that when it comes to head-scratching crimes, Afro Americans have nothing over Euro Americans.
In the end, the corpse was sent on to its final appointed round with a crematorium, leaving the lawyers wondering how much value this case might net.