Hawthorne Woman Gets Prison For Fake Funerals
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — A Hawthorne woman who helped staged fake funerals to defraud insurance companies out of nearly $1 million was sentenced on Wednesday to a two-year federal prison term and ordered to pay about $330,500 in restitution.
Faye Shilling, 61, of Hawthorne, pleaded guilty to a pair of wire fraud counts on the eve of trial last July before U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson.
Prosecutors said Shilling and co-defendant Jean Crump, 68, of Los Angeles, collected almost $1 million from insurance and lending companies by purchasing policies for non-existent people, killing them off on paper and then staging their funerals.
Shilling, a nurse phlebotomist, and Crump, who worked at a now-defunct Long Beach mortuary, filled caskets with various materials to make it appear they contained actual corpses, according to court papers.
After the funerals, the women and their associates filed bogus documents with the county saying the remains had been cremated and scattered at sea, prosecutors said.
The insurance policies were worth $50,000 to $450,000, and the women collected on some as large as $250,000, according to the grand jury indictment.
Shilling and Crump also defrauded several lending companies that advance cash to cover funeral expenses in exchange for a portion of the decedent's life insurance policy, prosecutors said.
Crump was convicted by a Los Angeles federal jury of mail and wire fraud and is set to be sentenced by Pregerson on Feb. 7.
Both women have been free on $10,000 bonds.
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