Owners of Paradise Cemetery Plead No Contest to Charges

The family owner-managers of Paradise Memorial Park cemetery in Santa Fe Springs pleaded no contest Monday to charges alleging the family embezzled funds set up for cemetery maintenance and dug up graves to resell the plots.

Groundskeeper Victor Fortner, 48, was indicted by a grand jury in January on 69 counts of criminally disinterring human remains and illegal use of cemetery funds. His mother, owner Alma Fraction, 69, and sister, general manager Felicia Fraction, 31, each were indicted on three counts of embezzling maintenance funds.

Sentencing for the three is scheduled for Dec. 6. Despite objections from Deputy Dist. Atty. Ralph Plummer, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Cowell said during Monday’s proceedings that he was not inclined to sentence any of the three to further jail time.

After the January indictment, each of the Fractions posted bail within two weeks of their arrests. Fortner was released on his own recognizance early this summer after serving several months, Plummer said.

“I believe that these are state prison cases,” Plummer said after Monday’s hearing. “This is pretty horrendous, and it has taken a toll on the victims.”

Fortner faces a maximum of nine years in prison. The Fractions each could receive up to four years in prison. They also could be ordered to pay substantial restitution to victims of the scam.

The most gruesome of a series of cemetery scandals last year, the Paradise Memorial case seemed a nightmarish scenario about final places that were anything but restful. Investigators had alleged that in addition to misusing money mandated by law to be earmarked for grave upkeep, Fortner systematically ordered workers to dig up old graves--some dating back to the 1930s and 1940s--at the sold-out cemetery.

In some cases, remains were deposited in a 7-foot-high, 50-foot-long dirt pile behind a tool shed, investigators said. In others, authorities discovered six to seven bodies piled on top of one another in a single grave; the plots, authorities said, had been sold over and over without removing any of the previous remains.

“We simply don’t know if there were headstones for all the graves involved,” Plummer said. “And if there were, we don’t know what happened to them.”

The Sheriff’s Department last year said Fortner acknowledged to investigators that he dug up coffins and resold the plots, but said he didn’t realize the practice was illegal. Records on about 3,000 illegal disinterments were carefully kept at the cemetery, sheriff’s deputies said.

Investigations into the practices at several area cemeteries began in June 1995, when the now-defunct state Cemetery Board began looking into complaints that conditions at Paradise were so decrepit as to be a health hazard.

The inquiry eventually included allegations of wrongdoing at other cemeteries.