A man is in the Tulsa County Jail after police were called to a grocery store in response to a man shoplifting food. What they found in his pockets during a pat-down is unnerving.
Tulsa police responded to Market Warehouse, a discount food store chain in eastern Oklahoma. There they found Richard Adam Wilson, 45, accused of stealing food. When police searched him, they allegedly found a resealable plastic bag containing several gold fillings.
Police say those fillings came from the teeth of the dead.
Wilson allegedly told police that he is an embalmer at Ray Francisco Embalming Service in Tulsa.
Wilson was arrested and booked into the Tulsa County Jail on complaints of petty larceny and removal from a burial site. He is held on $10,500 bond.
Stealing gold fillings from the dead, as disturbing as it may be, is not a new practice. In fact, as long as people have been buried with their valuables, there have been grave robbers willing to desecrate the grave site to get to the gold. During World War II, Nazis pried gold fillings from the bodies of Jews slaughtered in concentration camps. Today, unscrupulous embalmers and morticians count on the old adage, "Dead men tell no tales," in order to pry easily-melted gold fillings from the mouths of the bodies that pass through their hands.
In March 2012, a Colorado embalmer was arrested for making a false statement to a pawn broker after he was accused of stealing dental gold from bodies and pawning it. When he was arrested, he was found with a baggie containing 25 pieces of dental gold and pawn receipts showing thousands of dollars in transactions.
In June 2013, a German crematorium fired a worker who had amassed more than two pounds of dental gold worth approximately $40,000.
In October 2013, a California mortuary worker was accused of stealing approximately 125 gold dental crowns in one year and selling them for approximately $50 a piece.
Perhaps these people don't see the damage in stealing from the dead. It's likely that they feel that it would be a shame to bury the gold in the ground or sit with the ashes in an urn. However practical the argument may be, the fact is that the dental gold does not belong to them. Grieving family members would feel victimized by the desecration of a corpse or the knowledge that someone was sifting through the remains to make a few quick bucks.
