Naturally, we’re all looking for ways to acquire happy endings. To most people this means not dying. Or maybe dying very, very old and only in our sleep. However, in California, the home of happy endings, three entrepreneurial spirits (among them a notary and the owner of the Steward-Pearce Mortuary in Long Beach) managed to make a bundle out of staging fake funerals and fake cremations.
How did they do it? Well for starters, Faye Shillling, a 60-year–old with lots of spunk and imagination, bought life insurance policies on non-existent people. When these individuals “died,” she and her co-conspirators collected.
And to make sure they were generally perceived as dead, according to a local newspaper, they bought a casket, filled it with heavy materials to approximate the weight of a dead body, and also purchased a genuine burial plot (good for the local economy, I suppose). Their take on the scam? About $1 million.
However, on re-thinking the plan, the conspirators decided it had flaws. What if authorities exhumed the casket only to find it stuffed with with junk? So they had the casket exhumed and then staged a fake cremation.
Alas for the co-conspirators, there was no happy ending. Two weeks ago, Shilling and her accomplice were apprehended and pled guilty to insurance fraud.
What a great story! Thanks for sharing! I was almost cheering the fraudsters - I mean the way insurance companies screw us, it’s great to have someone screw them! But then I realized every scam raises their rates for everyone else. But a smile is still worth something…
The universe is just. Those who toy with death for their profit will be punished. No bad deed goes unheeded, no good deed unrewarded. This wholeness of our universe may not be visible to most, but it definitely, totally is to me. These California criminals will regret their actions.