GRAVE INJUSTICE
Family prayed at empty burial site for 22 years
TEN COMMANDMENTS don’t even begin to cover this grave sin.
The macabre theft of an aspiring nun’s pricey stainless steel casket left her wasting away in the dirt of a stranger’s burial plot for more than two decades, according to her anguished family.
“What other explanation is there?” asked the dead woman’s last surviving sister, Nancy Roe. “(The coffin) isn’t there. My sister isn’t in it. It’s not with her. Where is it?”
Scarfia’s body, church staff said, had accidentally been exhumed in 1989 during the disinterment of an adjacent grave containing two corpses buried one on top of the other. Scarfia was then re-buried in the wrong grave.
Roe says the ghastly tale gets worse: When the alleged theft was uncovered in 2012, many of 20-year-old Juanita Scarfia’s body parts were missing and weeds had sprouted through her eye sockets.
“Whoever moved her — why didn’t they take all of her?” Roe asked about the gruesome grave robbery at St. Mary’s Cemetery on Staten Island.
Roe recounted to the Daily News how she watched as workers exhuming Juanita did the grisly work of confirming they found the right body.
“The DNA — we had to break off parts of my sister to make sure it was her,” said Roe, who runs a visiting nurse service in Palm Beach County, Fla.
“They wanted a tooth, a molar, so they had to pull that out. A piece of the femur, they sawed off.”
Despite the church’s contention that Scarfia’s body was simply misplaced, it doesn’t explain the disappearing steel casket with its velvet lining and brass handles.
Roe, with the help of her attorney John Godfrey and a private detective, concluded her sister’s casket was stolen and the body callously dumped.
The two sisters sued the Archdiocese of New York and the Staten Island church in 2013, seeking unspecified damages. The lawsuit is still pending four years later — and 47 years after Juanita’s death.
It was 2012 when Roe and sister Santina Picattaggio sought to disinter Scarfia from St. Mary’s Cemetery to rebury her alongside their brother in the New Dorp section of Staten Island.
The sisters were stunned to discovered their previous 22 years
of prayers came in front of an empty grave.
Gravediggers in full-body protective gear then went to work on the right plot, uncovering Scarfia’s skeleton, wig, and epaulettes from her military uniform inside a cracked concrete vault full of dirt. The casket was gone. Lawyer Godfrey suspects the horrible heist was premeditated, given the work involved in burial and exhumation.
“This was not two grave robbers in the night,” Godfrey said.
The burial process involves a minimum of three: A gravedigger, a vault-digger and an undertaker. A vault weighs around 1,000 pounds and requires a specialized truck with a crane to get it open.
“The process of disinterring — it involves a lot of players,” Godfrey said. “It seems impossible somebody just showed up, dug this hole and lifted the vault.”
Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling said he was limited in his comments because the Manhattan Supreme Court suit is still pending.
“Any suggestion that there was some sort of large conspiracy to steal a stainless steel casket is completely unsupported by any of the facts,” Zwilling said.
One thing is not debatable: Scarfia’s body was left in terrible condition.
“There’s no question there was trauma to remains in the process of digging up this casket,” Godfrey said. “It’s a really gruesome situation. It was handled really poorly.”
The ordeal provided a grim coda to Scarfia’s tragic death.
She left the convent in 1970 after falling in love with a priest. After enlisting in the Army, Scarfia landed at an Augusta, Ga., boot camp where she then received a card from the priest.
He declared his commitment to his vocation, and Scarfia fatally shot herself in the head. She received a military burial after her death on Nov. 5, 1970.
The decision to relocate her casket came after the death of her brother, Michael Scarfia. The retired NYPD officer died steering a free-falling helicopter into a New Jersey cornfield, away from nearby shopping centers.
Since filing the suit, Roe’s sister Santina died at 71.
“I wouldn’t say this caused her death but it contributed to her downfall,” Roe said. “Bad dreams, drugs for depression that caused her to fall . . . She never recovered from all the things that happened those last two years.”
The Church of St. Mary has closed. Cemetery staff said any employees involved with the burial were long gone.
Bobby Richard, the executive director of the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, said it was plausible that Scarfia’s vault was mistakenly relocated by workers during the disinterment.
The process, he said, can be extremely complex and labor-intensive because of the amount of dirt moved.
It wasn’t that uncommon for a vault to be damaged in some way, allowing dirt to flood the box, surrounding the casket and eventually causing it to collapse.
“Probably it was an honest mistake,” he surmised. “Was it done intentionally? Well, for what purpose?”
But he was flummoxed by the casket’s disappearance: “That I can’t fathom a guess on.”
A no-frills stainless steel casket — which currently starts at around $1,300 at Walmart — could only be resold if it was in pristine condition.
The velvet interior almost certainly bore an impression from the body, making it essentially worthless, Richard said.
Roe, the last of four siblings, has searched fruitlessly for similar cases of casket-theft. She’s wondered if the coffin or parts of her sister were used in an occult ritual.
Or perhaps there was a market in 1989 New York for secondhand caskets. She’s also considered maybe the gravediggers were just lazy when they botched the exhumation and reburied her sister in the wrong plot because it was easier.
But then why would the casket be gone?
Worst of all, she fears that no one will ever offer a definitive answer.
“It’s just a bad dream,” she said.