Wendel on the Web is WKYC reporter/producer Kim Wendel's "take" and commentary on the news
Have you ever stopped to think about this?
According to a USATODAY article, Omar Mateen, the man who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, has been buried in an unmarked grave in northwest Miami. And those who have loved ones buried in the Muslim Cemetery of South Florida are not happy about it.
The story details how a man, whose wife is buried there in that cemetery, “really [doesn’t] want him here.” Others have voiced similar feelings.
If you think about it, the grave of a mass murderer has a macabre notoriety, somewhat attractive (in a twisted sort of way) to a "celebrity" grave as a place for protesters or even "worshippers" to gather.
Towns typically don't want to become a resting place for a person with such a dark past, as stated in the USATODAY article, so burials are kept low-key or even secret in order to reduce tensions.
Would one solution be to cremate their bodies and return them to the families? And this also got me thinking about other notorious mass murderers and where they were/are buried.
After a little research in NBC stories on NBC New York, I found some interesting items.
Ted Bundy, who was convicted of 3 killings in Florida and confessed to 30 more in seven states from 1974-1978,, was executed in the electric chair in 1989 at the age of 42. He assaulted and murdered young women and girls in the 1970s.
Bundy's remains were cremated in Gainesville, Florida and, at his request, his ashes were scattered in an "undisclosed location" in the Cascade Range in Washington state.
A bit closer to home, Jeffrey Dahmer, who grew up in Bath, Ohio , in Summit County. Dahmer raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Caught in 1991, he was convicted and sentenced to 15 life terms in prison. A fellow inmate beat him to death on Nov. 28, 1994.
His brain was kept in formaldehyde while his parents -- who had divorced -- fought over what to do with it. Eventually, his brain and body were cremated and split between them.
Remember the Columbine High School tragedy? In 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves.
Klebold's family had him cremated, according to the Rev. Don Marxhausen, and Marxhausen said Klebold couldn't be placed in a public cemetery because people would desecrate his grave.Harris' family has never publicly revealed his final resting place.
Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001 for killing 168 people in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh's body was taken to a local funeral home, where he was cremated and his ashes were given to one of his attorneys.
One of the most notorious killers of my generation was Lee Harvey Oswald. John F. Kennedy's assassin was shot to death at a Dallas police station two days after the president was killed on Nov. 22, 1963.
Oswald was never put on trial. His body was exhumed in 1981 from a cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas, to put to rest theories that Oswald's body wasn't actually there. Authorities used dental records to conclude the remains did, indeed, belong to the man who shot the president.
His body was then reburied at Rose Hill Memorial Cemetery in Fort Worth.
Sounds a bit gruesome but I wouldn't want a serial killer buried near my parents.
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