Survivors Unearth Mortician’s ‘Mistakes’ : Vermont: Officials contend funeral director mishandled hundreds of burials, switched coffins, neglected corpses, skimped on final preparations. Probe began after family exhumed body.

After Joyce Metcalf died at age 60, her jewelry and the money she had been saving for new appliances couldn’t be found. Her four sisters, suspecting foul play, had the body exhumed.

When the coffin was opened, they found that the body had not been embalmed. The dress the family had provided for her burial lay crumpled inside the casket. Her body was still clad in a nightgown and had been wrapped in the sheets from the bed in which she died.

That was the first hint police had of the scandal that has since touched virtually everyone in St. Johnsbury and surrounding areas of northeastern Vermont.

During his six years in business in Vermont, state regulators say, funeral director Larry H. Titemore mishandled hundreds of burials--virtually every case he dealt with.

Regulators say Titemore, 44, failed to store or embalm bodies properly, put some corpses in cheap coffins instead of the expensive ones relatives had bought, and pocketed $75,000 that people had paid in advance for their funerals.

Now the community is grieving again for the relatives they believed had been properly laid to rest. Many are angry at Titemore.

“He was so personable,” said Ruth Covell of Milford, N.H., one of Metcalf’s sisters. “We thought he really cared.”

For those who paid Titemore in advance for their funerals there is another fear: that when their time comes there won’t be enough money to bury them.

“The thing that is so sad is that these are all things we all take for granted, that they are going to be conducted properly,” said Franne Whitney Nelson, a grief consultant who has been helping the relatives. “The public has lost that trust. In some ways it is not going to be gotten back.”

In April, the Vermont Board of Funeral Service revoked Titemore’s license. He has since filed for bankruptcy.

So far, he is charged only with moving a body without a license. He has pleaded not guilty.

His attorney, Deborah Bucknam, refused to comment.

In April, Titemore said: “I made some errors in judgment, yes. But I am not the beast that they painted me out to be.”

Titemore handled close to half of the 135 or so deaths a year in and around St. Johnsbury, population 7,600. The town has one other funeral home.

In Joyce Metcalf’s case, her sisters had been told she died after having a seizure. The spring, 1994, exhumation has not resulted in criminal charges. The autopsy found no evidence of foul play in her death and concluded she died of a heart attack.

Joyce Metcalf was found to be wearing her jewelry. Her sisters said the $1,500 they believe their sister had was never found. But there have never been allegations that Titemore took it.

Metcalf had been given a welfare funeral after her death nearly two years ago, but Titemore never asked the state for payment, so there was no fraud committed, police said.

It was the Metcalf case that put police on Titemore’s tail. In April, police, acting on a tip, found him transferring the body of a woman from a $150 fiberboard casket into the $1,250 hardwood casket she had paid for. She was about to be buried in the cheap coffin when Titemore realized he might be found out and tried to transfer the body before being discovered, police said.

Moving a body without a permit carries up to five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.

At the same time, police discovered the body of a prominent local man lying in a hearse parked in the driveway, where the corpse had been stored for four months during the winter.

Another woman who had died about three weeks before lay in an unrefrigerated room, while two other bodies were stored in a public part of the funeral home, which violates industry standards.

There were about a dozen bodies awaiting the spring thaw for burial. That in itself is not unusual in upper New England, but none of the corpses had been properly prepared for burial, officials said.

Nelson, the grief consultant, has been working with families whose relatives were buried by Titemore.

“Those who had people go through [Titemore’s funeral home] are having the hardest time,” Nelson said. “Short of exhuming, they are always going to wonder how their person was handled.”