A half of a century before his wife passed away, Reese Roberts had purchased burial plots in the Memory Gardens cemetery on Lone Mountain Road in northwest Las Vegas for himself and his wife, Aggie--that the two of them could rest side-by-side, in peace, for eternity, after their time on Earth was done.
He died first. In October of 1974. And because his plot and funeral services had already been paid for, Reese Roberts, a former corporal in the U.S. Army, needed only to be interred. Which he was, documents from the cemetery show, in space number two, with a standard headstone marking his burial site.
In total, Reese Roberts had purchased four spaces in lot 207 in the Good Shepherd section of the cemetery, and when a grandchild of Reese and Aggie passed away in December of 1998, he was laid to rest next to his grandfather, in space number three, with a headstone.
On May 19, 2006, three days after beloved Las Vegan Aggie Roberts—a horticulturist, PTA officer, matriarch—passed away, and less than 24 hours before she was scheduled to be interred next to her husband in a private burial service, authorities at Bunkers Memory Gardens discovered that somebody was in her grave. They delivered the inconceivable news to her family, who at the moment were deep in the ambivalence of grieving Aggie’s death and celebrating the life she had spread rich and fruitful over her 87 years. Gravediggers excavating her plot ran into a burial vault—a concrete enclosure indicating that someone’s remains had been buried there. But they didn’t know whom, for there exists no records of anyone being interred there.
Which, officials from the cemetery told Aggie’s family, presents the serious problem of not being able, by law or ethics, to disinter the body. State regulations say that a death certificate is required to exhume a body in Nevada; and, according to Bunkers, it goes against a cemetery’s code of conduct to remove a body without permission from the next of kin, who in this case are just as unidentifiable as the unknown remains.
Officials from Bunkers told the family they did not know how the mistake had happened. Their parent company, Carriage Services, Inc., took ownership of the cemetery in February of 1999, and the records they inherited from the previous owners, Services Corporation International, indicate spaces two and three of lot 207 were occupied by Reese Roberts and his grandson, respectively, and one and four were empty. Daniel Lang, a spokesperson for the cemetery, says that Bunkers keeps thorough records of all burials and all burial sites, and so they know the mysterious interring into plot one didn’t occur under their watch.
In any event, Bunkers presented Aggie’s survivors with five different remedies to the catastrophic mix-up, and they’ve left all five on the table since last May, Lang says. Three options would remove the grandson from space three into space four, and Aggie (who now lies without a headstone in space four) into space three next to her husband, while recompensing the family for the first plot. One would turn Reese’s grave into a double-depth plot and lay Aggie in there with him. And the last would have Aggie, Reese and their grandson removed to a whole new lot of the cemetery, next to a fourth, unoccupied plot.
“But we haven’t received any feedback whatsoever from the family,” says Lang. “In fact, we didn’t hear anything from them again until January of this year, when their representative contacted us.”
In life, Aggie Roberts had avoided drawing attention to her problems at any cost, says the younger of her two daughters, Pam Levins. She’d prefer to suffer in silence rather than to make a scene. And so, in memory of her mother’s way, Levins’ knee-jerk reaction had been to take up one of the cemetery’s offers, as a means to resolve the issue—to let her parents rest in peace together for time forevermore, in accordance with their wishes, and to allow the family to conclude its due course of bereavement. But her siblings declined. And not on account of principle alone (hadn’t their father paid for those plots?), but also because they still had several questions that Bunkers cemetery had left unanswered.
Such as the one they posed to cemetery officials, in writing, in February, about whether or not it’s possible their father is inside that burial vault in space one, since he was the first to occupy any of the four purchased grave sites.
In fact, the family felt this was such a plausible explanation that they signed papers for the disinterment of space two in March, to confirm Reese Roberts’ presence there. But it never came to that. The exhumation was never scheduled. Levins and her siblings requested in writing that Bunkers provide the family with the cemetery’s procedures for disinterment and body verification, but never received any. To this day, Levins says, her family has received no visual confirmation that her dad rests in space two.
Another question was the humanitarian one, as posed by Levins:
“What about the ethics of knowing who’s in plot one?”
She says, “What really makes me sick is that they wanted to bury this whole matter by giving us a free headstone for my mother. If we would have accepted one of their offers, they would never have done anything to find out who’s in plot one. Doesn’t that person’s family have a right to know their loved one is there?”
But the children of Aggie and Reese Roberts did not accept any, and so Aggie remains in an unmarked grave in space four, just as the unknown person buried in space one has no headstone or sign of commemoration of any sort.
Levins says it wasn’t until Channel 8 news intervened this past May, a year after her mother died, that she learned the family had other avenues of remedy available to them. One of which is the coroner’s office, which possesses the authority to have space one exhumed.
“The state laws are very vague,” says Lang. “But yes, we know that at this point, the only way we can identify the remains in space one is to have [Coroner] Mike Murphy order a disinterment.”
The coroner was scheduled to meet with Levins on Tuesday, May 29.