A Wisconsin cemetery worker could spend 10 years in jail after pleading no contest to stealing an electric guitar from a casket.
The cream-colored Fender Telecaster was laid upon the body of Randall Jourdan, who wished to be buried with his “pride and joy,” the criminal complaint said. The guitar was recovered from the suspect’s home the next day.
“I have to have that guitar. It’s too expensive to be in a crypt,” Steven Conard allegedly told a groundskeeper at the Allouez Catholic Cemetery and Chapel Mausoleum near Green Bay where he was working, the complaint said.
Jourdan was a guitar player for more than 40 years, family members told investigators.
Not a serious market force. Petty theft, that is.
I can understand why this guy did this.
Putting a guitar in a sealed coffin with a putrefying corpse would render the instrument junk in short order. What purpose does a guitar have if not played? The gases and other products of decomposition would corrode the metal and delaminate the wood in short time. You are not being buried with your guitar, you are being buried with junk.
People, quit trying to hold on to your stuff after you’re dead. Let the few things of value and beauty you leave behind be enjoyed. Don’t put jewelry, cars, guns, instruments etc into the ground with your fetid, rotting corpse. If you hate your relatives, then leave it to charity.
To paraphrase the organ donor ads say, don’t take it with you, its more appreciated here.
A grave robber is unfit for cemetery work and no doubt injustice will reign, he won’t get 10 years at all…its likely charges will be dropped.
He should be made to reimburse the family five times the amount for exhuming the body and returning the guitar, instead of prison which only costs us.
But if he’s black, Holder will prosecute anyone who dare bring him up on charges.
“Might prosecute,” not “will prosecute”:
“Eric Holder has been carrying around a Harlem preacher’s quotation about ‘blackness’ in his wallet since 1971. In 1996 Holder explained what the quote means to him: “I am not the tall U.S. attorney, I am not the thin U.S. attorney, I am not the thin United States attorney. I am the black U.S. attorney. There’s a common cause that bonds the black U.S. attorney with the black criminal, or the black doctor with the black homeless person.”-The Limbaugh Letter, Nov 2011.
He didn’t exhume the body, he snatched the axe before it was interred.
…this story came out about a month ago with more details.
To return the guitar the body must be exhumed…that cost times 5 should be the punishment, not jail…unless he refuses to pay.
Jail is over used, too many non violent people jailed when they could be paying fines and compensation to their victims.
From unknown sources,
[quote]A very wealthy man wanted to be buried with his money. He knew that his family wouldn’t honor his wishes, so he asked his three best friends, a doctor, a priest, and a lawyer, to make sure that his wishes were carried out when he died. He gave them each a packet with $1,000,000, to be thrown into his coffin as they passed by. Sure enough the day came, and at the funeral, the 3 men each threw something into the coffin.
At the wake, the men found themselves huddled together. The doctor said, “I’ve just got to get something off my chest. I only threw $750,000 into the coffin — we needed some money for the new wing of the children’s hospital, and I couldn’t see the point in not making good use of the money…”
The priest said, “I’m so glad to hear you say that. I myself only put in $500,000. The rest went to the orphanage that so badly needed a new building…” The lawyer looked at the other two in disgust. “Why, I’m ashamed of both of you! I put in my personal check for one million dollars!”[/quote]
Grave robbing is a gray area .
Burial is an archaic and barbaric custom.
Call a grave a mini landfill with carbon sequestration besides leaving dead bodies out is unsanitary in the extreme.
Recycle. I’m thinking seriously about donating my body to a medical school. I won’t care then if they laugh at my tiny penis.
“I see dead people.”
I see racists. But, they’re white enough to deny it.
There are people without bias or bigotry. We refer to such people in the collective as the deceased.
20 out of 20 people calling someone racists that I observed in the last three years were either liars knowingly committing slander or so bigoted in their views that they failed to understand the difference between disagreeing with someone as a matter of principle and being raciest. In either case there words defined them.
Drop both the body and the guitar into a chipper-shredder straight into the coffin, and call it a day.
If the selfish bastard wanted his guitar that badly, that is how I’d give it to him.
Not-So-Greatful Dead.
A Tele is a terrible thing to waste
I bet this song was playing in Steven Conard’s head while he was accomplishing his mission
http://tinyurl.com/2gfaa7
Only marginally on topic:
Great album cover on a great album by an incredibly overlooked band.
That was a truly great band.
It’s just a friggen guitar. If the guy wanted to be buried with it, let him be. The coffin is probably worth more money.
Make the thief pay to have the guitar returned, plus 100 hours of community work. A fine will just be pissed away by some bureaucrat.