Wyoming Coroner Finds Unclaimed Remains In Shared Coffins Or Shipped Out Of State

EVANSVILLE — The smell of death is everywhere around Natrona County Coroner James Whipps.

Go back a few years to 2003 when Whipps was with the U.S. Army and he was part of America’s first invasion of Iraq. He killed enemy soldiers on the battlefield, his buddies were killed and he saw horrible mutilations.

“It was not a fun affair,” Whipps recalled.

Now, he goes up to his second-floor office off Wildcat Road in town here where he lays his head down on his desk and sobs. It’s the baby deaths and juvenile deaths that rip at his heart here in Natrona County.

"The babies are the hardest to deal with,” Whipps told Cowboy State Daily.

He picked up an infant earlier this week to investigate what happened. Did someone shake it to death? Sudden Infant Death Syndrome?

“Babies are healthy. Babies are not supposed to die,” Whipps said.

Nothing surprises him anymore.

Take for example, nearly two years ago just when he thought he’d seen it all. That’s when the old funeral manager of Bustard & Jacoby’s — before it got bought out by Park Lawn Corp. out of Toronto, Canada — dropped in to pick up a deceased person from Whipps’ cold storage morgue.

In casual conversation, the funeral manager asked Whipps what he wanted to do with all of the cremated remains that were being held in storage at his funeral home.

Whipps looked at him quizzically.

With a little bit of probing, Whipps learned he was opening up a Pandora’s Box holding the cremated remains of “indigent” people being held at Bustard & Jacoby’s and a second local funeral business, Newcomer, which had been sending off its cremated remains to Topeka, Kansas, for storage rather than keeping them in Wyoming.

Whipps ended up taking 22 unidentified remains off the hands of Bustard’s. Newcomer had none, as any it had were mysteriously sent to Kansas.

Kansas Is Home

So, where are the cremains of Wyomingites who’ve been sent to Kansas?

“Before they started giving them to me (in 2022), everyone who was indigent or unclaimed with Newcomer was being shipped to Kansas,” Whipps said.

“I’d say seven or eight a year were going to Kansas before we started taking the cremated remains,” he said. “We averaged about 15 indigents and unclaimed (bodies) a year in 2022, and the years before then, with half going to each funeral home, Bustard’s and Newcomer.

“That number has since exploded,” he said.

No one can say for certain how many bodies were shipped to Kansas, who they are or whether they’ve been cremated or buried.

Jeremy Lamb, a spokesman for Newcomer Funeral Service Group at the company’s Topeka headquarters, did not return multiple phone calls for comment.

The local Newcomer funeral home’s Melinda Langston could not be reached for comment.

Since the old funeral director of Bustard & Jacoby left a few months ago, no one can confirm much about the history of indigent bodies who were cremated, or whose bodies may have been buried in coffins at two local cemeteries, and possibly more.

Interviews with Whipps and Bustard & Jacoby’s David Purrington, a funeral service practitioner in Casper, indicate that cremated remains and bodies may be buried in either the city of Casper’s Highland Cemetery or the privately owned Memorial Gardens to the east of town along Yellowstone Highway.

Some remains could even have ended up in Cheyenne.

No matter where the bodies went previously, or whether they were cremated or not, Whipps said that things are being done differently going forward.

Proper Burial

Previously, when next-of-kin didn’t claim an indigent person, the funeral homes would basically invoice the county for a fee of $1,500 to take care of the body through cremation or burial.

However, the rub here was that the funeral homes were keeping the remains in their facilities and not handing them over to the county for proper burial, such as making attempts to contact next-of-kin for pick-up where they might end up on someone’s fireplace mantel or in a garden.

Whipps explained that these were “handshake agreements” that had never been formalized — probably because they were family-run businesses before being bought by larger corporations from out-of-state in recent years.

By The Book

Handling dead bodies in the Cowboy State is done by the books. Everything is done above board.

Wyoming statutes govern who takes claim over dead people — especially when they are destitute. The technical classification is “indigent."

There are endless possibilities over how a coroner takes control of a dead indigent person.

For instance, coroners like Whipps can take legal control of an unclaimed indigent person by way of picking them up in a motel room where they might have killed themselves or died from a drug overdose.

Those bodies are brought back to his cold storage freezer on Wildcat Road. Investigators kick into gear to figure out who they are. Some can’t be identified.

A funeral home could end up with a dead body after someone dies at a nursing home or hospital, and where the person’s next of kin can’t be found, or if they are found but don’t want the person because they can’t afford to cremate or bury the body.

Unwanted People

Whipps also said that some cremated remains aren’t wanted by family members because of a parent’s sexual abuse or abandonment from the family when children were young.

“They cut ties with them long ago and want nothing to do with them,” said Whipps of what some say to him when these family members are contacted. “The kids are like, ‘Nope.’”

When a funeral home takes control of a body that no one wants, it’ll reach out to the next of kin to pick up the body, but if there isn’t any money to pay for the cremation or funeral services, the dead body is forwarded to the county for handling — in this case, the coroner. But this wasn’t being done in the past.

Given how indigent bodies were handled before August 2022, Whipps and the Natrona County Board of Commissioners are now formalizing the process. They are drafting a memorandum of understanding to have procedures put in place in a few months.

The old ways are being tossed out. No more handshake deals, no more shipping bodies off to some mysterious final destination in Kansas.

“Bustard’s used to sometimes bury them, sometimes cremate and sometimes put a bunch of cremated remains in one casket and put them in the ground,” said Whipps of previous practices.

“It’s the basic potter’s field going on, but we don’t have a potter’s field. They’d buy a plot and take all of the indigent remains and put them in there,” he said.

A potter's field has biblical origins, and is defined as a place for the burial of unknown, unclaimed or indigent people.

Whipps said that Bustard’s would put the cremated remains or bodies in an unused casket and place them in the ground altogether either at Highland Cemetery, Memorial Gardens or elsewhere.

As for Newcomer, Whipps said it would ship its indigent bodies back to a “corporate plot in Kansas.”

“With Bustard’s, when they changed ownership, someone raised a concern and asked, ‘Why do we have these indigent remains?’” Whipps said, adding that these messy problems are finally coming to a resolution in Natrona County.

New Home

The city of Casper has donated a few plots near the intersection of Hanna Lane and Dixon Drive inside the Highland Cemetery where Natrona County commissioners have approved spending about $15,000 to build two columbaria where urns of ashes can be stored — a final resting place.

Meanwhile, Whipps is cautiously optimistic that 24 cremated remains stored in a backroom of the county coroner’s office on Wildcat Road will eventually find a home at Highland or in the hands of family.

Still, at the moment, 17 cremated remains are going to a columbarium yet-to-be-built at Highland, he said.

“I’m confident that everyone who goes into the columbarium will truly be there forever because we exhausted efforts to find them someone to take them,” Whippes said.

On Friday, the cremains of mostly unwanted people who are indigents are stored in square, book-shaped containers filled with the dust and particles of people from Bustard’s and Newcomer, the latter no longer sending dead people back to Kansas.

The remains are stored in a fireproof filing cabinet in two drawers dedicated to holding them. They are neatly packed in the drawers, with each “urn” labeled with identifying information to help Whipps’ team of eight or so investigators figure out who they are.

Whipps has had luck finding out the identities of who a good chunk of the unnamed people were when they were dumped into his lap back in 2022, and figuring out a “morally and ethical” way of getting the cremated remains to family.

The number of cremated remains in the drawers fluctuates because of the endless stream of people who die, and those who are too poor to get a proper burial.

The Investigators have tracked down a few dozen, with several getting shipped off around the country to places like Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia.

Many of these family members in far off places can’t afford to pay for their loved ones’ cremated remains to be shipped to them, Whipps said.

This is why the county recently decided to pick up the tab for these destitute family members.

The remains are sent by way of the U.S. Postal Service. The agency is the only one permitted by law to ship cremated remains.

Federal Express and UPS can't touch them.

Natrona County is paying anywhere from $80 to $120 to send boxes, sealed and tagged, through the mail. As a precaution, Whipps has added a large, zip-close bag to ensure extra protection that nothing leaks out.

“The funeral homes as a business shouldn’t have to deal with this,” Whipps said.

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.