Forensic botany has long sat at the margins of criminal investigation, rarely given systematic treatment in scientific literature — which is exactly what makes the Burr Oak Cemetery case worth examining now.
In 2009, employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, were accused of exhuming old graves and reselling the plots, discarding older remains elsewhere on the grounds. The four charged were the cemetery’s then-director Carolyn Towns, grounds foreman Keith Nicks, his brother Terrence Nicks, and employee Maurice Dailey. They were convicted in 2015. The forensic role of moss in securing that conviction has now been detailed in a paper published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research.
Burr Oak was founded in 1927 as a burial ground for Chicago’s African American community. Emmett Till, heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles, and blues musicians Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington are among those interred there. The desecration was first discovered in June 2009, when Sgt. Jason Moran, who led the local investigation, arrived to find skeletal remains protruding from mounds of dirt.
The scale of what had happened became clear through records. The cemetery had capacity for 130,000 graves, yet official documentation listed between 140,000 and 147,500 people as buried there. The perpetrators had grown reckless — using a backhoe to excavate old graves, shattering skeletons in the process. Some 1,500 bones were recovered and attributed to at least 38 individuals, though official estimates placed the total number of desecrated graves between 200 and 400. Emmett Till’s deteriorating casket was found under a tarp in a garage behind the cemetery. It has since been restored and is now housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
What the moss revealed
Prosecutors needed to establish a timeline. The FBI had collected broken mulberry branches, buried grass fragments, and small pieces of moss found inexplicably buried eight inches below the topsoil alongside reburied remains. That’s when agents contacted Matt von Konrat, who heads the botany collections at Chicago’s Field Museum, asking him to identify the moss species and estimate how long it had been underground.
According to the announcement, von Konrat explained that moss has an unusual physiology. Even when dry and apparently dead, certain cells can retain metabolic activity. That activity diminishes over time at a measurable rate — giving investigators a window into when the remains had been moved and reburied. This placed the forensic evidence within a prosecutable timeframe.
The new paper is a follow-up to a 2025 study concluding that mosses and other bryophyte plants have been used as forensic evidence only about a dozen times over the past century. Von Konrat, a co-author on both papers, said the goal was to raise the profile of plants that investigators routinely overlook. “Mosses are ubiquitous, resilient, and capable of preserving timeline and habitat information in ways that complement other forensic tools,” he said, according to the report. He also pointed to the broader value of natural history collections in answering questions their curators had not yet imagined.
The next step
Von Konrat stated directly that the publications are intended to consolidate these cases into the scientific record and encourage investigators to recognize and preserve botanical evidence more routinely going forward.
Photo by Denis Agati on Unsplash
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