Embattled mortician has county contract

A Dunedin funeral home that has the county's indigent burial contract is owned by a man who is under investigation over shoddy practices elsewhere.

By EDIE GROSS

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 6, 2000

The owner of a funeral company under investigation in Florida and Illinois for mistreating bodies, burying them in the wrong locations and allowing cemeteries to fall apart operates a facility in Dunedin that has the county's contract to bury or cremate poor people and unclaimed bodies.

Pinellas County has paid Abbey Parklawn Funeral Home, owned by Willard I. Timmer, nearly $420,000 since 1996 to handle the county's indigent burial program.

Because of headline-grabbing allegations against Timmer's company and employees -- which include selling gold teeth from corpses, allowing cemeteries to flood to the point that body parts surfaced and botching burials -- Pinellas County has begun reviewing how Abbey Parklawn handles its services.

After Social Services director Evelyn Bethell heard about events in Volusia County, she said her office sent a social worker to investigate conditions at Abbey Parklawn, which is managed by Timmer's daughter, Jeannie Walsh, and her husband, Michael.

Though a final report has not been written, Bethell said initial observations indicate that the local funeral home and cemetery are just fine.

"If I didn't feel okay, we have a 30-day clause," Bethell said. "If we have any problem whatsoever, I would just go to the county attorney and county administrator and say, "We're going to cancel this contract.' "

Since 1993, at least 40 families have complained about Timmer's Volusia County facilities to the state Department of Banking and Finance in Orlando, which regulates the burial industry and is now investigating Timmer and his operations.

Timmer's son and several other employees of Bellevue-Cedar Hill Memory Gardens in Volusia County were arrested in June and July and charged with crimes ranging from botching burials to yanking gold teeth out of cadavers and selling them.

Timmer, 71, also has faced scrutiny in Illinois, where the state comptroller's office investigated poor conditions at two of his cemeteries south of Chicago in fall 1999. Since then, Timmer has fixed the cemeteries' flooding problems, once so bad that body parts floated to the surface in heavy rains, state officials say.

Timmer still must address maintenance at the cemeteries, and his company is undergoing a financial audit, said Gail Lobin, spokeswoman for the Illinois Comptroller's Office.

"They have not been perfect, but they have been cooperative," Lobin said. "This is an owner we monitor aggressively, meaning we have someone out monitoring his properties weekly."

Timmer, who has homes in Dunedin and Daytona Beach, could not be reached for comment. Elizabeth Mabry, one of his daughters who is serving as acting general manager at the Bellevue cemetery in Daytona Beach, said Timmer was out of town.

In the latest development in Daytona Beach, the cemetery's parent corporation was charged Friday with a third-degree felony after investigators said the cemetery buried two infants in the grave of a 749-pound indigent man.

Port Orange resident Michele Macklefresh said she was alarmed when she learned in June of the allegations against Timmer and his company. Timmer had donated a grave at Bellevue-Cedar Hill Memory Gardens in Daytona Beach for her infant son, Joey, who was born three months premature and died three hours after birth.

At least once a week for the last 13 years, Michele and her husband, Jim, have visited Joey's grave in the "Babyland" section of the cemetery.

But weeks of painful inquiry revealed a shocking piece of information: Joey's body was not where the Macklefresh family thought they had buried him. In fact, it seems that nothing is in Joey's grave, and the funeral home does not know what it did with the body.

The Macklefreshes have sued Timmer and his Bellevue cemetery. They still visit Babyland each week, hoping that Joey's body is somewhere nearby.

"At the time, it (the Babyland section) was comforting. Now it's sickening. Are those the smallest victims in his game?" said Mrs. Macklefresh, 30, who paid $210 for her son's concrete vault, which also seems to be missing. "They took our money and our son, and we don't know what they did with him."

While Banking and Finance officials in Orlando are swimming in complaints about Timmer's Volusia operation, the Tampa office has heard only a few minor concerns about Abbey Parklawn in Dunedin, said Tom Spock, a financial examiner and supervisor in Tampa.

"The last few times we've been out there, we haven't run into the situations found in Orlando," said Spock, whose office last visited Abbey Parklawn in October.

Jeannie Walsh, general manager at Abbey Parklawn, said she is not close with her brother, Edwin Timmer, who was managing Bellevue-Cedar Hill Memory Gardens in Volusia County before his June arrest on charges of fraud, negligence and other violations. Though her father owns both Bellevue and Abbey Parklawn, the two entities operate separately, she said.

"We just detest what has happened over there," Walsh said. "I can tell you that will not happen here. A body needs to be treated in an appropriate, respectful manner."

Walsh said her funeral home handles about 1,200 burials and cremations a year. Roughly one-third of those come her way through the indigent burial contract with Pinellas County.

Since Abbey Parklawn bid on the contract in 1996, the company has buried or cremated 1,585 people at an average cost to the county of $265 per case, hardly a windfall for the funeral home.

"We're not making a lot of money off the contract," Walsh said. "We don't have condos in Cancun."

Her father's companies, which handle indigent burials in Chicago as well as Volusia and Leon counties, do that work as a service to the community rather than as a moneymaker, Walsh said.

"We are committed to serving our families with dignity and respect," she said. "We don't give any preference to regular pay versus indigent burial."

A plaque at the front door of Abbey Parklawn says, "Willard I. Timmer, In Charge," but Walsh said her father, in the business since 1957, does not handle day-to-day operations at any of his cemeteries anymore.

But state investigators say they suspect Timmer was aware of the problems at his Volusia facility and are focusing on him because he is the president of 14 cemetery, funeral and cremation companies in Florida.

State law says "officers and directors are responsible for what happens at the cemetery," said Sam Whited, a financial specialist in the Orlando office of Banking and Finance. "As far as I know, he is on the premises."

Bethell of Pinellas County Social Services said her employees visit Abbey Parklawn at least four or five times a year and occasionally attend funerals held for indigent burial clients to be sure the services are dignified.

She has met Timmer several times during contract discussions, and describes him as a man who insists that things are done right. The latest contract renewal lasts through May 2001, unless the county chooses to cancel it with 30 days' notice.

So far, Volusia County has chosen to keep its indigent burial contract with the Bellevue cemetery, said Gloria Fordham, manager of Human Services. Clients served under the contract have not complained, and bodies have been buried where they were supposed to be, she said.

"We haven't experienced a problem where an indigent has been in the wrong place," she said.

Other Bellevue customers are not as lucky. Daytona Beach resident Gloria Paulk, 57, said cemetery officials told her they are not sure if her parents are buried under their marker or even if they are buried together. Her brother is supposed to be buried in Bellevue too, but the cemetery has no records on him, she said.

"I don't even go out there now," she said. "I know they're doing some bad stuff out there. I think they're more or less robbing the graves out there." Emma Polito said she and her husband, Anthony, paid $7,000 for two crypts in a Bellevue mausoleum in 1992 so that their family would not have to worry about where to bury them. Now she worries her spots may not have been reserved after all, and she has not been able to get any answers from the funeral home.

"Somebody said, "You better go in there and see if somebody else is in that spot,"' said Polito, 82.

Shortly after east coast newspapers began reporting problems at the Bellevue cemetery, Macklefresh had her son's grave probed with a metal rod. The examination, which she hesitated to do at all, indicated the grave was empty.

She said she wonders if Timmer and other cemetery employees knew all along that Joey was missing.

"It makes me wonder if they've looked out that window and laughed at me, saying, "Why are you visiting that grave?' I think our loss was his profit," said Macklefresh. "We all grieved separately at our time of loss. Now the whole community is grieving together."

- Times staff writer Edie Gross covers Pinellas County government and can be reached at gross@sptimes.com or at (727) 445-4166. Times researchers Kitty Bennett and John Martin contributed to this report and information from the News-Journal of Daytona Beach was used.

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