Re: Gram Parsons’ final repose.
Cecil says, “The men were tracked down a few days later, but there was no law against stealing a body …”
Pardon? Surely that deserves just a little expansion, or at least the assurance that the state in question has in the interim enacted laws against body snatching.
Or is it just me?
I’d guess that the Californian position is a holdover from English common law, in which traditionally there was indeed no law against stealing a dead body.
The argument was that a dead body was not property and hence could not be stolen. The body, after all, had had a clear owner, but they were now, well, dead.
Where this became crucial in practice was, obviously, in prosecuting body snatchers. Supposedly, the standard ploy was to charge the robbers with theft of the grave clothes rather than the body itself. That led to the standard practice amongst the robbers of stripping the corpses as they were removed from the grave. The prosecutable offense then tended to be regarded as desecration rather than theft.
Even the 1832 Anatomy Act, which was the key legislative attack on the trade, didn’t introduce an offence of stealing a body.
In more recent times, however, the artist Anthony-Noel Kelly was successfully convicted of stealing body parts from the Royal College of Surgeons.
The traditional English legal position is discussed by the historian Ruth Richardson in her classic study of the origins of the 1832 Act: Death, Dissection and the Destitute (RKP, 1988).
Why would someone snatch a body, but leave the clothes and belongings? I always thought grave robbing was about taking STUFF, not actual bodies.
Some grave robbing was done to provide cadavers for anatomy/medical students.
As a rule, in 18th and early 19th century Britain all graverobbing was done to supply medical schools. And there was never much of an English tradition of burying people with grave goods. Or indeed in anything other than a coffin and a shroud.
I can’t be sure of the title I think the book is Waking The Dead. It has a chapter or two on graverobbing. Bonzer is correct. The body was stripped to avoid theft charges. Many medical schools had a requirement that students provide cadavers. That meant that they robbed graves or paid somebody else to.
Why put it in the past tense? Quite a few people have been prosecuted in recent years for doing this. Generally they’re people in the funeral business, who sell body parts before cremation, but then there was the director of UCLA’s body donor program.
The bodies in your links were never in a grave, so I don’t see the connection.
There was a case in WI. involving attempted necrophilia. There was no law on the books at that time against necrophilia.
Also:
The charges that were brought related to crimes against the living.
I’m surprised that those friends of Mr. Parson’s weren’t charged with performing a cremation without a license.