Private Eyes & Stolen Stretchers | 4M #256
Welcome to the two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #256, 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!
TBR: The Skelfs Series
Not sure why it took so long for this book series to come across my radar, but I knew I had to share it with our readers — you know, just in case you like to read about fictional people who do what you do (in addition to some odd side gigs). Written by Scottish author Doug Johnstone, The Skelfs series is about three generations of women from the Skelf family who run two businesses out of their large Victorian Edinburgh home—a long-established funeral-home business and a private investigator agency. When the family patriarch dies, the three must take charge of both demanding operations while uncovering hidden family secrets and lethal local cases. Ghost Notes, which was released recently, is the seventh book in the series.
A Pre-Need Program You Don’t Have to Manage Alone
Building a successful pre-need program takes more than intention.
It takes people, systems, and consistent execution.
Treasured Memories provides a complete, managed approach:
- Counselor recruitment, hiring, and training
- Educational programs like PreNeed University
- Community outreach and Lunch & Learns
- Aftercare support and ongoing family engagement
- Direct mail marketing and contact management tools
All designed to help you:
- Expand your reach in the community
- Increase market share
- Build a reliable pipeline of future business
This isn’t just a service offering.
It’s a structured, supported path to long-term growth.
An awful statistic
According to a new study published in the Australian Journal of Psychology, children who lose a parent to death “develop mental health problems at twice the rate of kids with an intact family.” When compared to children of divorce, separation, or imprisonment of a parent, children whose biological parent dies are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, ADHD, or other issues.
Good news from Indiana
Indiana Governor Mike Braun announced last week that his office has managed to cut the wait time for professional licenses in half since January 2025 — including the wait time to obtain a funeral director’s license. While the average processing time of all licenses fell from nearly 12 days to almost 6 days during that time, funeral director licensing dropped from a whopping 51 days to just 2.5 days. While he didn’t specify what measures were taken to improve wait times, he stated that his office is “cutting red tape and breaking down barriers to great jobs without sacrificing safety, training, or skill requirements.”
A sad day for deathcare
Both locations of Maurer Funeral Home, which began operating in New York nearly 100 years ago, were closed last week because the owner, whose grandfather founded the business in 1927, “is retiring and there is no one else to take over the business.” Families with preneed contracts are being referred to other funeral homes with oversight by the state, while four of the funeral home’s eight employees will “stay on to fulfill the remaining obligations to families.”
Should have saved this one for October …
Archaeologists from a Polish university have uncovered the grave of a real-life vampire — sort of. The 400-plus-year-old grave that was excavated in Poland in 2022 contains the body of a 17- to 19-year-old woman who died in the 1600s. The grave, though, is what really caught the attention of researchers — it was the booby traps and mechanisms that were arranged to keep her in her resting place and not return to take her revenge. Her body seems to have been dug up briefly and reinterred so that an iron sickle could be placed “across her neck with the blade angled to her throat” and an iron padlock secured to her big toe. An account of the discovery in Popular Science reminds readers of the silver lining of the young woman’s demise, “While grim, this scene illustrates the complex intersections between faith, superstition, community, and wealth within rural European life during the 17th century. But if it’s any consolation, the falsely accused vampire at least got to keep her head.”
They saw him rollin’ … they arrestin’ …
If you were a thief looking to make some quick bucks, what would you steal? Probably not mortuary gurneys, right? Well, apparently you’d be missing out, as a Florida man has proven that stealing medical stretchers from funeral homes in multiple Southern states and reselling them to other funeral homes was quite the lucrative business. Although the details of his crimes are paywalled, AL.com reports that an investigation has uncovered a “sophisticated ring” of the “bizarre” crime by the 58-year-old man, including his most recent acquisition of a $7,100 gurney from an Alabama funeral home.
