Former Owner of Cemetery Is Arrested

In the first criminal charges resulting from Southern California’s cemetery scandals, state authorities Friday arrested the former owner of a Long Beach graveyard for allegedly embezzling $500,000 from the cemetery’s endowment fund.

Dean A. Dempsey, 43, of Long Beach was taken into custody at the Newport Beach souvenir shop where he now works and was charged with one count of grand theft and three felony violations of the state Health and Safety Code, said Maria Chacon Kniestedt, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Consumer Affairs. Dempsey was held in Orange County Central Jail in lieu of $680,000 bail.

Dempsey allegedly raided the endowment fund at Sunnyside Cemetery, which he sold after the state began its investigation in 1994. The interest from such state-mandated accounts goes toward covering maintenance costs after graveyards fill up.

He allegedly used the money, paid by those buying graves, to settle personal debts, Kniestedt said, including bar tabs and payments on a leased Mercedes.

After a summer of sometimes gory revelations from several Southern California cemeteries, relatives of those buried at the troubled parks repeatedly have called for arrests. On Friday, Consumer Affairs officials promised to deliver more.

The defunct State Cemetery Board began investigating Dempsey in 1994 after complaints that the grounds at Sunnyside had fallen into disrepair, and it quickly moved to seize the park’s bank accounts. That probe spurred inquiries into other burial grounds, including Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs and Lincoln Memorial Park in Carson.

At Paradise, investigators found a pile of bones behind a toolshed and evidence that graves had been dug up and resold. Headstones were found in trash bins at Lincoln, where some caskets, officials said, had been buried just two inches below the surface.

Officials from Consumer Affairs, which took over most duties of the Cemetery Board in October, allege that Dempsey began raiding the fund in 1988, just a year after he purchased Sunnyside for $100. He moved money first into the cemetery’s operating account, officials said, and then into his own pocket.

In a 1994 interview, Dempsey denied wrongdoing, saying the park’s endowment fund was not generating enough interest to pay for upkeep. He used the money, he said, only to pay for maintenance of the grounds.