Officials: Exhumation of killers from vet cemeteries is rare

HARTFORD, Conn. — Officials say the recent exhumation of an Army Vietnam veteran’s body from the Connecticut State Veterans Cemetery was a rare invocation of federal laws aimed at keeping murderers and rapists out of veterans’ burial grounds. Guillermo Aillon’s remains were disinterred from the Middletown cemetery last month, after officials learned he had received a life sentence for killing his estranged wife and her parents in North Haven in 1972.

The federal Department of Veterans Affairs says only one other person appears to have been exhumed from a U.S. veterans cemetery under a 2013 federal law that gave the VA the authority to dig up the remains of murderers and rapists.

The body of Army veteran Michael LeShawn Anderson was removed from the Fort Custer National Cemetery in Michigan in 2014.