2 accused of staging fake funerals

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It was quite a send-off for Jim Davis, or so the people paying his funeral bills were led to believe.

They were told Davis was laid to rest at Abbey Memorial Park in Compton after being placed in an ornate, top-of-the-line coffin lined with elaborate floral arrangements. Altogether, the bill to bury Davis at the palm-lined cemetery came to nearly $31,000.

But there was a problem: There was no Jim Davis. He was dreamed up by a group of scam artists, authorities say.

And prosecutors say the coffin that was lowered into the ground was made out of cheap plywood or cardboard, filled with either rocks or butchered meat and animal bones, apparently to convince those who handled it that there was a body inside.

Faye Shilling, 60, and Jean Crump, 67, were indicted last week on federal charges that they scammed insurance companies and funeral-related businesses out of as much as $1 million by taking out policies on fictitious people and then staging their funerals.

Two other women previously pleaded guilty in the case. The indictment lists just two fabricated deaths, but authorities said there may have been as many as seven.

The participants went so far as to file phony death certificates, and bought a $3,354 burial plot for “Jim Davis,” investigators said. Davis was the only one “buried.” The others were supposedly cremated.

“The allegations, if true, are quite shocking,” federal prosecutor Anthony Montero said Monday after Shilling and Crump pleaded innocent to fraud. “It does demonstrate an enormous level of deception and a commitment to hide their fraud.”

The women were freed on $10,000 bail.

The scheme began coming apart several weeks after the funeral, when an insurance investigator began snooping around, the prosecutor said.

Lydia Eileen Pearce, 37, owner of the Steward-Pearce Mortuary in Long Beach, and Barbara Lynn, 54, a notary, previously pleaded guilty to fraud and face as much as 20 years in prison when sentenced. Montero said more arrests are possible.