Mossy Messes & Movies at the Mortuary | 4M #232

Welcome to the two-hundred-and-thirty-second edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #232, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

The perfect place for a premiere

An enterprising funeral home in Connecticut is taking advantage of the success of video-game-turned-movie The Mortuary Assistant (which, by the way, earned $450,000 in its 208-theater limited release in February). Cody-White Funeral Home in Milford will welcome attendees to a special viewing of the movie on March 21, along with the opportunity to discuss the movie with the filmmakers, who will also be present at the “mini-premiere.” Milford is the home of Brian Clarke, who developed the horror video game and collaborated on the movie version.

Secure Online Identity Verification

When a family can’t come to your funeral home in person, online identification is sometimes the only option, — but emailing photos isn’t secure (and it’s repeat-viewable).

Secure View gives you a safer, documented way to confirm identity online:

• Upload the photo securely
• Send a password-protected link for a limited-time view
• The next of kin verifies themselves by uploading a government-issued ID
• You receive confirmation documentation for your records

If you want to see how it works (and how it helps safeguard your funeral home), watch the quick demo.

Closer to closure, perhaps

Today, Carie Hallford, who owned Return to Nature Funeral Home with her husband Jon, is set to receive her federal sentence, which could be up to 15 years in prison. She has already pleaded guilty to the charges, which are all financial. She’s also facing state charges of nearly 200 counts of abuse of a corpse, one for every body investigators said they found in the Penrose building in 2023.

Moss solves a mystery

You never know what sort of interesting evidence will be the key to proving a perpetrator guilty these days. It could be a Ring doorbell video, DNA, or … moss. Yes, moss, the green fuzzy plant that grows like carpet in damp, shady places. A study published this month in a scientific journal describes how a deep dive into the age of a certain clump of moss proved that a pair of Chicago cemetery workers were indeed present when graves were being dug up and resold for profit. You can read more about their mossy mess here.