Latest news with #cremation
RNZ News
6 hours ago
- Business
- RNZ News
Advocacy group calls for removal of funeral directors as cremation middleman
Photo: 123rf An advocacy group wants to see funeral directors removed as the middleman in cremations, saying it's costing people money. Death Without Debt spokesperson Fergus Wheeler explained two doctors were required to sign off on a death for cremation - the first would have seen the body and made notes about the cause of death, and a second doctor was required sign-off on that paperwork. Currently, the system was set up so that people needed a funeral director to facilitate this second sign-off, with funeral directors billing the family for doing so - but legally, it did not have to be done this way. Wheeler said a small tweak to the Ministry of Health's existing online death documents system could fix this, ideally allowing the first doctor's paperwork to be uploaded to the cloud to be checked by the second doctor, without the need for the funeral director to forward it on. He said the cloud already existed, it just required a change of process. "You can if you understand the medical referee system, sometimes, if you're lucky, get through the system," Wheeler said. "But 99.9 percent of the public have no idea how the system works." As well as giving funeral directors permission to charge a service fee for this administration task, it also gave them the opportunity to "hook people into a package deal", charging grieving families for things they did not need. The Funeral Directors Association strongly denied this allegation to the select committee. With cremations now making up 80 percent of deaths - in part because the cost was still a lot less than a burial - Wheeler said this affected a lot of people. "We don't blame the funeral industry particularly for this," Wheeler said. "It's actually the Ministry of Health [who have] known that the system has been dysfunctional for decades." The Health Select Committee's final report into funeral debt was released last week. In it, it agreed that "the current process and regulations impose high costs on the public and create a barrier for people who want to organise their own funerals, particularly when their loved ones are about to be cremated". It encouraged the ministry to prioritise further work on updating the cremation regulations, and requested a report on the planned changes to regulations before the end of this parliamentary term. "We also encourage the ministry to consider making all documents relating to cremation available on the Death Documents website. We note that the Ministry's planned work could address the current barriers to DIY funerals." But Wheeler said those directives to the ministry were weak and lacked urgency. "You've got a pretty major social problem with funeral debt happening, and the Health Select Committee have said, well, let's fix it sometime in the next few years. It's not quick enough, it's not urgent enough," he said. The Funeral Directors Association, which represents about 75 percent of funeral homes, was approached for comment by the select committee, and its comments were included in the final report. According to the report, it "strongly refuted what it described as Death Without Debt's 'allegations of predatory behaviour' on the part of funeral homes, and said that, on the contrary, the industry has a 'caring, respectful, and professional approach'." "It maintained that, without public funding of funeral services, private funeral companies must fill the void. In so doing, these companies incur property, insurance, compliance, staffing, and other costs, which must be covered by the prices they charge." It suggested the government introduce a legislative mandate for funeral prices to be transparent - it required price transparency from its members and said it encouraged them to offer free consultations for those pre-planning and pre-paying for funerals. Comments from the Ministry of Health were also included in the report. It acknowledged the current burial and cremation processes were "outdated and disproportionate, and needed modernisation". It said previous work in this area had been delayed by Covid-19, but it was in discussions with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Department of Internal Affairs about modernising the regulation of the funeral sector. "The ministry told us it is committed to reviewing the cremation regulations in 2025," the report said. The Funeral Directors Association, the Ministry of Health and the select committee have been approached for further comment. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Incredibly disturbing': docuseries goes inside jaw-dropping LA mortuary scandal
'I don't want to be cremated,' director Joshua Rofé said in a recent interview. 'I know that for sure.' After Rofé made the shocking HBO docuseries The Mortician, you can understand why. The three-parter focuses on a mortuary scandal that one of his interviewees called 'the ultimate incendiary point for which we now have massive regulations … regarding cremation'. Many who watch the piece may feel the same about their final arrangements as Rofé does concerning his. The Mortician is an exploration of a sprawling, twisted 1980s criminal case that vaulted the Lamb funeral home in Pasadena, California, and its co-proprietor David Sconce to national infamy amid charges of carrying out mass cremations at a ceramics kiln; stealing and selling corpses' gold jewelry and dental fillings; stealing and selling corpses' organs; delivering fake ashes to people mourning dead loved ones; and plotting violence against adversaries in the mortuary business. The series – debuting on Sunday – in part casts Sconce as an exceptionally malicious actor in a profession with mostly honorable practitioners. And his downfall led to industry reforms at protecting consumers of mortuary services in the US, including laws that allowed for crematorium inspections and made it a felony to furtively take dental gold or silver from corpses. But, as both The Mortician and a scan of news headlines establish, mortuary scandals that echo the one centering on Sconce and the families with whom he did business persist. Rofé alluded to a guilty plea in April from a Colorado funeral home owner accused of keeping a dead woman's body in a hearse for more than a year as well as improperly storing others' cremated remains. His series nods to other relatively similar cases over the years in Georgia, Vermont, Tennessee and Texas. None of that is to say the mortuary industry is particularly vulnerable to attracting the proverbial bad apples, Rofé said. He remarked: 'People do fucked up things in every business in the name of money.' Yet, he added, 'as it relates to the business of death, it becomes a bit more grotesque' when that happens. And there's so much grotesqueness in The Mortician that Rofé couldn't find a place for one of the most disturbing anecdotes he said he has personally ever elicited in his career. It's one that's included directing Lorena – examining the infamous case of the woman who cut off her husband's penis with a kitchen knife in Virginia in 1993 – and Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, which partially delved into a fight over the renowned landscape artist's estate. The anecdote in question came from Louis Quinones, who used to drive a van that retrieved bodies for Sconce's mortuary to cremate. Quinones recalled how one day he was in a cold storage room where the mortuary kept bodies on shelves, and he instinctively kicked a blanket on the floor aside that he believed had been left there haphazardly. But he felt there was something under the blanket, which he removed and discovered was the corpse of a baby. Quinones told Rofé that he looked at the name written on the baby's ankle tag – and realized that he had delivered what was supposed to be the infant's ashes weeks earlier to the child's mother after she had paid for a cremation. 'That is another level of depravity,' said Rofé, who also made Sasquatch, which zeroed in on a mythical monster and a murder. But there was no space for that recollection from Quinones in a series that spends a total of about 180 minutes recounting how Sconce first cornered the cremation market in his community by charging just $55 a body, undercutting the competition. The funeral home he owned and ran alongside his parents then went from conducting fewer than 195 cremations in 1981 to more than 25,280 just five years later – inviting a law enforcement investigation that uncovered the brutal, illegal shortcuts he took to register that increase in volume of about 12,860%. It was impossible at that rate for the mortuary to determine whose ashes belonged to whom. So it handed ashes back to client families at random – which they had no idea about for years. Furthermore, investigators determined that, to maximize his profits, Sconce abided by his mortuary's taking – and selling – everything from rings and clothes to eyeballs, hearts and livers. Those efforts required the mutilation of bodies and had not received permission from people who had entrusted Sconce to care for their dead. The details of Sconce's legal fate – including in connection with criminal charges that he killed the owner of a rival mortuary – are out there for those who are so inclined to find out ahead of The Mortician's airing. But suffice to say he went on to a series of incarcerations from which he was paroled. That parole happened as Rofé researched Sconce's story in archived newspaper articles and weighed retelling it in a docuseries styled after the Los Angeles noir films the director said he devoured after moving to the city at the beginning of his career. He picked out Sunset Boulevard, DOA, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. The Mission Revival-style mortuary inextricably tied to Sconce would have been at home appearing in any of them. Rofé and his team, mostly based in LA and New York, had two days' notice that Sconce was being released from a prison in Sacramento, California. But they got there in time to greet him at the prison gates and subsequently capture what HBO billed as the first – and evidently only – interview Sconce had given since his parole, making it an easy decision for him to finish what became The Mortician. Some of the comments Sconce offered have already made the news. 'To me commingling of ash is not a big deal,' Sconce says in one rant on The Mortician, an excerpt of which was in a trailer clip that drew media coverage. 'I don't put any value in anybody after they're gone and dead – as they shouldn't when I'm gone and dead. That's not a person any more.' He continued: 'That's not your loved one any more. And it never has been. Love them when they're here. Period.' Rofé couldn't discuss much of his interview with Sconce without spoiling the series for prospective viewers. But what he could say is he was gripped with how Sconce shifted from demonstrating himself to be 'the king of deflection' – even with respect to things that court documents presented as proven facts – to 'being so upfront about other incredibly disturbing things that you couldn't believe somebody was not only coping to but trying to rationalize as something that there's nothing wrong with'. 'And I still can't believe some of the things he said on camera,' Rofé said. 'If you [are] shocked watching, do understand that I was shocked having it said to me in person.' The Mortician begins on HBO on 1 June with a UK date to be announced
CBS News
4 days ago
- General
- CBS News
A Mackinac Bridge official died in 2010. It took 15 years to lay him to rest
A Michigan man who had a key role in building one of the longest bridges in the United States was buried 15 years after his death, after a funeral home near the iconic structure surprised the public by saying it still had his ashes. Larry Rubin was laid to rest Wednesday in Petoskey, 40 miles from the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan's two peninsulas. For decades, Rubin was the senior staff member at the Mackinac Bridge Authority, which manages the bridge, a 5-mile span over the Straits of Mackinac that is considered the third-longest suspension bridge in the U.S. It opened in 1957. When the bridge was built, "he had an important role because the Authority needed someone to carry out their decisions. He served with excellence," Barbara Brown, a former board member, said Friday. Brown said she was "just shocked" when she saw Rubin's name listed in the St. Ignace newspaper. A funeral home was informing the public that it had many unclaimed cremains. His family apparently didn't pick them up after he died at age 97 in 2010. Val Meyerson of Temple B'nai Israel in Petoskey was familiar with the Jewish section of Greenwood Cemetery and aware that Rubin's first wife, Olga, was buried there in 1990. His name was already on the headstone in anticipation of eventual death. Meyerson said friends from the Bridge Authority helped pay for Rubin's interment. About two dozen people attended a graveside service led by a rabbi. "We all took turns filling in the grave, which was quite an honor," Brown said. "To have been neglected and forgotten for so long — it was moving."
Fox News
5 days ago
- Science
- Fox News
Archaeologists solve grim mystery of 1,500-year-old bucket found at historic tourist site
Print Close By Andrea Margolis Published May 29, 2025 Archaeologists recently discovered the purpose of a mysterious 1,500-year-old bucket at one of England's most historic sites – and it wasn't pleasant. The National Trust released a statement about the Byzantine Bromeswell bucket, found at Sutton Hoo, in May. The site of two ancient Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, Sutton Hoo has offered a wealth of knowledge about pre-Norman British history since its first excavation in 1938. STRANGE VIKING GRAVE WITH 'CHRISTIAN OVERTONES' DISCOVERED BY PERPLEXED ARCHAEOLOGISTS: 'VERY UNUSUAL' During an excavation last summer, archaeologists unearthed the base of the Bromeswell bucket, which dates back to the 6th century. Different fragments of the bucket were uncovered in past excavations, but this latest discovery gave researchers more to study. With the base in hand, researchers quickly went to work to analyze the artifact with a variety of techniques, including computerized tomography, CT scans and X-rays – and they found an answer. In a morbid turn of events, experts learned the bucket was used to hold the cremated remains of an important person, and their grave goods. "The cremated human and animal bones uncovered confirm the find was used as a cremation vessel," the National Trust noted. The organization added, "Cremated human bones included parts of a talus (ankle bone) and fragments of a skull vault (the upper part of the skull that protects the brain)." "It's a remarkable mixture – a vessel from the southern, classical world containing the remains of a very northern, very Germanic cremation." The bucket dates back to the 500s. It's decorated with a hunting scene depicting men armed with swords and shields, as well as dogs and lions – painting a vivid picture of life in the past. "The latest fragments include feet, paws, the base of shields and even the missing face of one of the men," the statement described. It is believed the bucket came from Antioch in the Byzantine Empire, now located in modern Turkey. The National Trust noted, "Letterforms used within the bucket's design suggest it was made in the 6th century, meaning it was already 100 years old when it arrived here at Sutton Hoo." Researchers also found "a mystery object" that turned out to be a double-sided comb made from an antler. Interestingly, the object had not been burned. LATE BRONZE AGE SETTLEMENT DATING BACK 3,000 YEARS UNCOVERED AMID ROAD WORK: 'IMPORTANT DISCOVERY' The National Trust said the presence of the comb suggests the Anglo-Saxons took grooming seriously, as combs have been found in male and female burials before. "Slightly less romantically, combs also would have been useful in the control of lice," the statement said. "Although the human bone in the cremation couldn't be sexed, it's hoped that ancient DNA from the owner might survive on the comb, and analysis could reveal more about them." National Trust archaeologist Angus Wainwright said that he was "hopeful" future research will uncover new insight into "this very special burial." For more Lifestyle articles, visit "We knew that this bucket would have been a rare and prized possession back in Anglo-Saxon times, but it's always been a mystery why it was buried," Wainwright said. "Now we know it was used to contain the remains of an important person in the Sutton Hoo community." CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER Anglo-Saxon expert Helen Geake told the National Trust the puzzle of the Bromeswell bucket has "finally" been solved. "It's always been a mystery why it was buried." "Now we know that it is the first of these rare objects ever to have been used in a cremation burial," she said. "It's a remarkable mixture – a vessel from the southern, classical world containing the remains of a very northern, very Germanic cremation." She also said the find "epitomizes the strangeness" of Sutton Hoo, which has captivated British history enthusiasts for decades. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP "It has ship burials, horse burials, mound burials and now bath-bucket burials," Geake observed. "Who knows what else?" Print Close URL
CBS News
27-05-2025
- Science
- CBS News
1,500-year-old bucket with human bones found inside was cremation burial vessel, archaeologists say
A 1,500-year-old bucket discovered in England has been identified as an ancient cremation burial vessel, experts said. The 6th-century bucket was found at Sutton Hoo, an archaeological site near Suffolk, England, that is home to two ancient cemeteries. Fragments of the bucket, named the Bromeswell bucket, were first found in 1986. Researchers found more pieces of the relic last year during an excavation by Time Team, a British TV show where archaeologists conduct excavations on-camera. An analysis of the newly-discovered pieces determined that Time Team had found the entire base of the bucket, and that it contained human bone fragments, the National Trust, a U.K.-based conservation organization, said in a news release. The bones included part of an ankle bone and fragments of a skull, which the National Trust said was proof of an "early Anglo-Saxon cremation burial." Some of the pieces of the Bromeswell Bucket on display. David Brunetti, National Trust Images Angus Wainwright, a National Trust archaeologist, said in the news release that the burial appeared to be "very special," and that researchers will conduct further analysis. There were also animal bones inside the bucket, which is made of copper alloy and is decorated with a hunting scene. The National Trust said the bones were larger than those of a pig, and noted that horses were often included on funeral pyres as a symbol of status during this time. The bones will undergo radiocarbon dating, the National Trust said. "We knew that this bucket would have been a rare and prized possession back in Anglo-Saxon times, but it's always been a mystery why it was buried," Wainwright said. "Now we know it was used to contain the remains of an important person in the Sutton Hoo community." The bucket base, with bone fragments and the double-sided comb to the left. FAS Heritage The bucket was made in the Byzantine Empire and may have been a diplomatic gift or acquired by a mercenary Saxon soldier, the National Trust said. The vessel is decorated with a scene of men armed with swords and shields. The scene also includes lions and dogs. The newest fragments help complete the picture, showing feet, paws, the base of shields and the face of one hunting man. Also inside the bucket was a double-sided comb that the National Trust said was likely made from antler. The agency said its researchers hope ancient DNA can be recovered from the object. The item was not burned in the cremation process, the National Trust noted. The inclusion of such combs in other burial sites suggest that "personal appearance and grooming was important to the Anglo-Saxons." The comb could also have been used to control lice, the trust said. Plant remains were found during the excavation of the bucket pieces. Analysis of those pieces could "reveal more about the climate and seasonality around the time the bucket was buried," the National Trust said. Time Team aired a documentary about the discovery and year-long analysis project earlier in May. The group will conduct more research at Sutton Hoo through mid-June.
