Lawyers Say Exhumation Proves Woman Was Properly Buried

Lawyers for a mortuary facing a $1-million lawsuit said Friday that dental evidence confirms that a Thousand Oaks woman was buried alongside her husband at Pierce Bros. Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village.

Steven H. Gurnee, whose Sacramento law firm represents Pierce Bros., said a forensic examination conducted Thursday after the woman’s body was exhumed showed “unique bridgework and dental evidence that matched up exactly” with Judith Lutton’s dental records.

Lutton’s daughter, Lyndy Lutton-Ward of Thousand Oaks, had sued Pierce Bros. after worrying for months that the remains in plot 555-A belonged to a woman other than her mother.

She had not dropped her lawsuit against the mortuary as of Friday afternoon, and her attorney did not return requests for comment.

But Gurnee maintained Friday that the tests were conclusive.

“This is obviously and without any doubt the correct woman,” Gurnee said.

“We understand that families that are in grief have ideas about things that may not bear any resemblance to reality,” he said. “While we sympathize with such emotions, the facts demonstrate that our client did exactly what it was supposed to do.”

If Lutton-Ward’s forensic expert does dispute the defense’s findings or wants to conduct DNA testing, the two sides would again go before Ventura County Judge Glen Reiser, who ordered the exhumation, in mid-August.

Lutton-Ward sued Pierce Bros. in 1998, concerned that the woman buried next to her father was not her 82-year-old mother. Her suspicions began early on, when the funeral home gave her a contract for cremation rather than burial.

Despite assurances that her mother would in fact be buried, Lutton-Ward remained troubled, because she believed the body she saw before burial was not her mother’s. Also, samples of hair she had tested did not appear to match her mother’s.

Complaints like Lutton-Ward’s are rare, according to experts in the field.

The National Funeral Directors Assn. does not track such statistics for the 2 million burials conducted across the country each year. David Walkinshaw, an Arlington, Mass., funeral director of 20 years and a spokesman for the organization, says burying the wrong body would be “any funeral director’s biggest nightmare--we tend to be overly careful.”

The state’s Department of Consumer Affairs, which investigates complaints against cemeteries and funeral homes, has suspended or revoked 22 licenses since 1996, when the department took over regulation of the industry.

Only one of those cases involved improper burial, according to records. About 225,000 burials occur in California each year.

Agency spokeswoman Nancy Hardaker said her office gets about 25 complaints a year from Southern Californians who suspect improper burial of a loved one. On average, about five of those complaints lead to exhumation for further inspection.

Perhaps two bodies a year are indeed wrongly buried in Southern California, Hardaker said. Those improper burials are almost always a mistake and can be corrected, she said, adding that typically no disciplinary action is taken.