Claim of Missing Grave Prompts Suit

When Keith and Bertial Lindauer bought a burial plot 14 years ago, it gave them peace of mind.

Located in a quiet corner of Garden Grove’s Magnolia Memorial Park, it lay next to the grave of their son, Tim, who had died of cancer the year before at age 27. Twice the size of a regular plot, it was big enough that both parents could be buried there too.

“We just wanted to know that we would someday rest next to our son,” said Keith Lindauer, 70, a retired sales engineer.

But last year, when Bertial Lindauer died of heart failure, her widower was shocked to learn that their space had been used to bury somebody else.

In a lawsuit filed last week, Lindauer alleges that cemetery officials lied to him and surreptitiously relocated his son’s headstone to hide the fact that the adjacent plot had been resold. The lawsuit alleges negligence, fraud, breach of contract and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Bertial Lindauer was eventually buried in a single plot about 40 yards from the couple’s son, but that did not satisfy her husband of 50 years.

“It was a nightmare,” Lindauer said of his dealings with the 125-year-old memorial park, where some of Orange County’s pioneers are interred.

Janet de Michaelis, an officer of The Omega Society, which owns the cemetery, did not return calls seeking comment. Louis Marlin, an attorney representing her, said he had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment on it.

Bill Stelter, a manager for the Orange County Cemetery District, which owned Magnolia Memorial Park until 1994, said an investigation at the cemetery’s request appears to confirm Lindauer’s claim to the plot next to his son’s.

“Apparently the plot was sold by accident,” Stelter said. “It was a simple mistake that could happen at any cemetery. I’m still investigating.”

For Lindauer, who lives in Long Beach, the death of his 75-year-old wife in October during a vacation in Boston was the beginning of a long ordeal. Already distraught over his loss, he brought Bertial back to Southern California and began making funeral arrangements. When he contacted the cemetery, he said, “they told me we didn’t have a plot.”

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After a series of meetings, including one to which Lindauer brought the 1984 canceled check with which he had paid for the plot, cemetery officials told him they were convinced. But three days before the funeral was scheduled, Lindauer said, he was told the gravediggers preparing the burial site next to their son’s had struck a water line, rendering the plot unusable.

“At this point what was I going to do?” he recalled. “I had people coming in from all over the country for the funeral.” Reluctantly, he accepted the cemetery’s offer of a grave site nearby. “I was desperate,” he said.

Later, however, after talks with various people involved, he pieced together a bizarre scenario that he alleges in his lawsuit was an effort to mislead and defraud him. After erroneously selling his plot to another family, Lindauer alleges, cemetery keepers moved his son’s headstone one space to the right, making it appear that the plot in which Tim Lindauer was buried was instead the vacant one intended for his mother.

Gravediggers “actually opened Tim Lindauer’s grave,” the lawsuit contends, with the intention “to bury [Bertial Lindauer] in the upper, unoccupied portion of that grave.” Then they changed their minds, the lawsuit states, and concocted the water-line story.

Stelter could not confirm that Tim Lindauer’s headstone was moved but said the matter has been reported to the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which regulates private cemeteries.

Nancy Hardaker, a spokeswoman for that department, would not confirm that an investigation is underway.

Lindauer’s lawsuit, filed March 1 in Orange County Superior Court, does not specify an amount sought in compensation.

“First we’re going to find out what happened,” said Mark B. Plummer, the widower’s attorney.

Lindauer says the primary issue is not money.

“If they had told me the truth at the beginning,” he said, “it could have been straightened out in three minutes. Our society needs better; this has been a horror story.”