Veteran's Widow Learns Remains She Buried Were Not Her Husband's
BOSTON (CBS) - When she laid her husband to rest in 2012 after his long battle with pancreatic cancer, Etta Hinckley finally felt at peace.
"He had been through enough," the Plymouth widow says, "so that when it was over for him we just wanted him in our spot for us to go and be close to him."
That feeling was short-lived. Marine - and Vietnam veteran - Edward Hinckley, was cremated. But like dozens of other deceased, once he was in the hands of Dorchester funeral director Joseph O' Donnell, everything went wrong.
Police called Mrs. Hinckley to give her the awful news: "They told me the ashes were not my husband. They didn't know who they were, but they were not him," she said.
Joseph O'Donnell has been in custody since last summer; he is facing almost 300 charges.
Police say he took grieving families' money for cremations - but instead, stacked dead bodies in a Weymouth storage locker.
Hinckley was bewildered to learn what had happened. "How can someone do that to people," she asked. "You trust someone. That's the last step, the last thing you can do for the people you love."
Earlier this year, the family of a Dorchester woman discovered the ID tag from Ed Hinckley's cremation -- in the ashes that they thought belonged to their loved one.
That prompted authorities to order officials at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne to disinter the strangers' ashes that had been in Hinckley's spot on May 15th. Those have since been handed over to authorities.
Hinckley's daughter currently has her father's remains; the family hopes to re-inter him by this July.
"We are luckier than most; we got his ashes back," Etta Hinckley said. "So now we concentrate on having a service as soon as we can, and then our prayers for all those people who don't know where the people they love are."
