Mislaid Body Casts Pall Over Neptune Society Image : Lawsuit: Decaying corpse of former Burbank mayor was found months after it was supposed to be cremated. The distraught widow charges negligence.

Gaye Williams’ memory of her husband, Dallas, a former Burbank mayor and well-known Los Angeles advertising man, was once a bittersweet collage of images drawn from his final days of life.

There was the classical concert she arranged in their home, the night they stayed awake all night in each other’s arms and the way he made a joke out of the portable oxygen tank he needed near the end to help him breathe. “Just follow the cord, you’ll find me at the end of it,” he would say.

Finally, as if God were taking a personal interest, Dallas Williams sank toward stuporous death from cancer at 72 on his favorite day: June 3.

The man known for the mild humor of such ad creations as the Culligan Man loved to write friends on that day and introduce the letters with his favorite song lyric: “Well, it’s the third of June, another sleepy, dusty, Delta day.”

These were the memories the 52-year-old widow fed on for strength as she began learning to live without him.

Then one night last year, four months after her husband’s death, a man in a dark suit showed up at her door and asked her to identify a picture of a decaying corpse that had been mislaid in a refrigeration compartment in Gardena, she said.

The eyes were missing, the nose had begun to deteriorate and the skin was peeling away. This nightmare image was Dallas Williams’ body, which, contrary to her belief, had not been cremated. The sight burned itself into the widow’s mind, searing away her carefully arranged catalogue of memories.

“I just lost it,” she said in an interview. She became hysterical, shrieking and crying--behavior out of character for a former journalist who sat coolly through the grisly Manson Family trial.

This month, she sued the Neptune Society for negligence, infliction of emotional distress and interference with human remains.

“What should they pay for this kind of emotional upheaval?” she asked. “The way I feel about it, they should pay a lot.”

Jeffrey Zinder, an attorney for the Neptune Society of Los Angeles, denied any wrongdoing. He blamed the problem on one of the society’s outside contractors, North American Crematory in Santa Ana, which at that time worked for Neptune picking up bodies and transporting them for cremation. He said North American mixed up the paperwork.

Richard Crouley, the owner of North American, denied the accusation and said a Neptune Society official offered to supply him with new cremation permits if he would help cover up the mistake. He refused.

“I was going to get a bogus permit,” he said. “This is a whole fabrication to get rid of the body because it sat there too long.”

Crouley said he would be a witness for Williams when her suit comes to trial.

Larry Miller, vice president for operations of the Neptune Society, categorically denied that any offer was made to produce fake cremation permits.

James Allen, executive officer of the state Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers, said his office is going to investigate the incident but declined to talk about it.

Charges and countercharges aside, Zinder said the Neptune Society handled the Williams case as ethically as they knew how. Once they discovered what they suspected was Dallas Williams’ body during an audit of the refrigeration facility where bodies are stored before cremation, they acted as quickly as possible to correct the problem. That’s why Gaye Williams received a call and a visit at night.

He said the body had to be identified.

“This is an unfortunate situation that we tried to deal with expeditiously and fairly,” he said. “It’s also a unique and odd situation.”

Albro Lundy, Williams’ attorney, charged that it is not unique. He said he has evidence that a second corpse was mislaid in the refrigeration facility.

The Neptune Society’s Miller said the corporation has been in business 20 years, and is independent from other Neptune Societies around the nation. Miller said the organization is the largest cremation society in North America, having handled 50,000 cases and claiming 300,000 members. Members pay a flat fee of about $1,000 to join, according to several sources. After a member dies, the society arranges for the cremation and either scatters the ashes or returns them to the survivors.

Gaye Williams said her husband chose the Neptune Society because he didn’t want a lot of money spent on a funeral. She said she still does not know whose ashes she received in a box shortly after her husband’s death. In the weeks afterward, she would hold one-sided conversations with those ashes. She realized it was foolish, but they were all that remained of her husband, she believed.

Now that she knows they weren’t her husband’s ashes, she feels even worse.

“You feel like a damn fool,” she said. “You don’t even know who you were talking to. It was bad enough if it was Dallas. It’s plain stupid if it’s somebody else.”

Along with Stan Freberg, Dallas Williams was among the first to see the comic potential in commercial advertisements. He created memorable radio characters, such as the Culligan Man, who urged a prospective customer, played by Williams’ first wife, to call out, “Hey Culligan Ma-yan!”

He also created Whitney, the literal-minded Arrowhead water truck driver, whose misadventures on his daily water delivery route were chronicled in many spots. In one of the most famous, Whitney calls his boss to report signing up customers on “Sepulveda, Ocean Drive and Hilo Avenue.” When his boss asks what he’s doing in Hawaii, Whitney replies, “Well, you said take everything west of La Brea.”

Williams served on the Burbank City Council from 1956 to 1967, including two terms as mayor, and in 1963 became the founding president of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, in which supervisors and city council members from around the region come together to study common problems.

It was while serving as mayor that Williams met Gaye Scott. They married in 1970.

Dallas Williams was found to have lymphatic cancer in 1985. He lived five years comfortably, almost free of pain, and then the disease spread to his lungs. As he declined, Gaye Williams resolved to hold a concert in his honor in their home in the hills above Hollywood. Friends arrived from all parts of the country to participate.

“He sat up in a chair and we filled the house with music for five hours,” she said. On piano was Williams’ physician, Larry Heifetz.

When everyone had gone, the couple sat up in bed all night. He refused to have the lights off. “I held him all night long,” she said. “He said, ‘That was the best day of my life.’ ”

Though Dallas Williams actually died an hour after midnight on June 4, Gaye Williams prefers to think he died on June 3.

“He loved to write letters on June 3 because of the Bobbie Gentry song,” she said. He didn’t know the date, but “he would have stopped breathing an hour earlier, if he could have.”

As soon as he was dead, Gaye Williams left the room. “I didn’t want to see his lifeless body.”

Dallas Williams had asked that his ashes be scattered over Puget Sound in Washington state, but the widow could not bring herself to do that after the funeral, even when his older brother died a short time later and the rest of the family suggested spreading the ashes of the two brothers together.

She didn’t leave the house for several months. But just as she was preparing for a trip to Ireland in early October, she said, she received a call from a man identifying himself as an official of the Neptune Society. He needed to see her that night.

“What did you do, give me the wrong ashes?” she said she joked.

“I’ll be right over,” he replied noncommittally, according to her account.

Once there, the man said there had been a mistake. He brought out a picture to show her, hoping that she could identify it.

“He whips this picture out,” she recalled. “It was a picture of a 4-month-old corpse. I was hysterical. I can’t understand what possessed this man to come into my house and wave this picture in my face,” she said. “For a long time afterward I had a hard time remembering him any other way than that picture.”

She said the Neptune Society official told her the mix-up occurred because there were several other Williamses who died at the same time, something her attorney Lundy said turned out to be untrue.

Zinder said the body was discovered later, during a routine audit of the refrigeration facility.

“I’m not the best housekeeper,” said Gaye Williams, “but even I clean out my refrigerator more often than every four months.”

Zinder said bodies are covered with sheets, so it is possible that one could be overlooked for some time. Lundy said the mislaid body was finally identified as Williams through dental records, and it was cremated.

On June 3 of this year, Gaye Williams, Dallas’ sons, Dallas Jr. and Bayard, and several close friends took a boat out onto Puget Sound. It was hardly a “sleepy, dusty, Delta day.” Dolphins were churning the water and the sun shone like a gold coin as Gaye Williams scattered the ashes into the deep water.