Man’s mother’s body left languishing in crematory for months

By Dave Savini

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    CHICAGO (WBBM) — An Indiana man’s mother’s remains spent months languishing in a south suburban crematory that has been shut down by Illinois officials amid reports of body mishandling.

Daniel Spanley had a hard time watching his mother Lisa’s decline and then dealing with the pain of her death on Oct. 27, 2024. But what happened next made it all worse.

Lisa’s body went missing for more than six months. Her son only recently learned his mother’s remains had been languishing at Heights Crematory for that time.

“I was hoping my mom wasn’t part of it and everything else,” Spanley said.

Spanley did not want his mother to be part of what the CBS News investigation uncovered in February. People’s loved ones were being handled in a way that violated Illinois state law.

Regulators from the Illinois State Comptroller’s Office launched their own investigation and shut the crematory down. One of the bodies they found in the course of that investigation was Lisa Spanley.

But the state was initially unable to identify her because she wasn’t tagged properly; her name was spelled wrong. She hadn’t even been cremated.

“I was really surprised when I heard that,” her son said.

Lisa Spanley should have been cremated immediately, but instead she was among the 100 bodies the state found.

CBS News Chicago Investigators tried asking operator Clark Morgan about the mishandling of bodies, but he had no comment.

Daniel Spanley is upset to have seen the images of the way bodies were stacked in trailers there, and said, “Oh, it’s [expletive], you know. It’s bad.”

Spanley paid Indiana company Crown Cremation Services $800 in cash to handle his mother’s cremation, but Crown sent his mother’s body to Heights to carry out the cremation. Neither Crown nor Heights would comment on the Spanley case.

“It’s disrespectful,” he said. “You’re supposed to be running a business and people entrust you to do it a certain way, on a certain standard.”

Attorneys Gabriel Hawkins and Karen Enright are part of a team of lawyers now representing dozens of families filing lawsuits against Crown Cremation Services and Heights Crematory.

“You have certain duties and responsibilities [to operate] in a way that won’t expose people to the trauma, in a way that their loved one’s corpse was abused,” Hawkins said.

And they also blame state regulators for not acting sooner.

“The State of Illinois did turn a blind eye, because they knew all these bodies were there and they needed to get disposed of,” said Enright.

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office was finally able to determine Lisa Spanley’s identity and contacted Dan to collect her remains. He said he wants to see a criminal investigation into the crematory and the actions of its operator.

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