The Undertaker

SKEPPINGTON, RICHARD C., age 52, of Columbus, died Tuesday at the Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. Mr. Skeppington, formerly of Atlanta, was a warehouse supervisor with a local trucking company. By authority of Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. (See also SKEPPINGTON, JUDITH M., wife, accompanying). Funeral services for both at 10:30 AM today, Greene Funeral Home, 255 E. Larkin, Peterborough. Internment, Oak Hill Cemetery, following.

That sounded eerily familiar, and his wife's death notice was just below:

SKEPPINGTON, JUDITH M, age 48, of Columbus, died Sunday at Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. Loving wife of Richard (See also SKEPPINGTON, RICHARD C., above.) Retired after thirty years as a schoolteacher in the Atlanta area. By authority of Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. Funeral services for both at 10:30 AM today, Greene Funeral Home, 255 E. Larkin, Peterborough. Internment, Oak Hill Cemetery, following.

Interesting, I thought. And not very original. The language was almost a boilerplate to Terri's and mine. Another automobile accident. Husband and wife, both dead. Again, the ever-popular Varner Clinic and the Greene Funeral Home. Burial at Oak Hill Cemetery by the authority of that eminent local barrister Mr. Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. Suddenly, the hard plastic chair wasn't nearly as uncomfortable. I leaned back, positively clucking to myself now. I had found something. Amazing. And with that happy realization, the frustration seemed to melt away. I eagerly pulled down the next stack of newspapers and waded into them at a more leisurely pace, knowing that I had found the link and convinced that I would find a whole lot more if I kept at it.

I worked my way back through a full ten months of newspapers, between the stacks of newsprint and the microfilm reader. In all those issues, I found three more bell ringers. Two of them were pairs of husbands and wives who had died together in various accidents. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Thomas K. Pryor formerly of Phoenix, Arizona. He was a retired autoworker who managed the Hampton Inn on U. S. 40 in Hilliard, near Columbus, until his death. The other couple was Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Brownstein formerly of Portland, Oregon. He was a retired carpenter. Mr. Pryor was fifty-seven years old and his wife twenty-six. Mr. Brownstein was forty-four and his wife was forty-two. One couple had died in a car wreck and one in a boating accident out on Buckeye Lake. I guess they threw in the boat to prove they had a touch of originality. The last obituary was for a single man: Edward J. Kasmarek, thirty-two years old, formerly from Chicago. He was an automobile mechanic with Jeffries Honda in Grandview, Ohio. Every one of them had the red flags of the Varner Clinic, the Greene Funeral Home, Oak Hill Cemetery, and the honorable Ralph Tinkerton, esquire as executor.

I got up and stretched. It was a nice little package they had put together, I had to admit. A perfect little scam. Who would ever notice? Other than the typesetter at the newspaper, who reads the thousands and thousands of obituaries you see in a big city newspaper during a typical year anyway? And once read, who would ever remember the details? Especially in the plain vanilla ones? It was clever. Very clever. And it was definitely a scam. But why?