Stealing urns for scrap metal money

Charles Rayburn discovered a way to turn ash to gold. For half a year the central Tennessee cemetery worker had been stealing brass urns from the top of gravestones and selling them to local metal scrapyards.

Rayburn swiped more than 100 pounds of urns, each one valued at about $160. But last week family members went to visit the grave of a recently deceased relative at the Johnson Cemetery in Burns Tennessee only to find their loved one’s urn was missing. Police tracked the object to a local scrapyard, which led them to Rayburn; he was charged with desecration and felony theft. “Hopefully someday he’ll understand what he’s done,” said a man who has lived across the street from the cemetery his whole life.

Rayburn’s crimes may have been inspired by the weak economy and a need for cash but there are multiple reasons to steal a gravestone. One of the most well-known tales of tomb theft involves a young outlaw named William Bonney, otherwise known as Billy the Kid.

The Kid was born in the slums of New York City in 1859. His father died young and at the age of 14 the Kid traveled west with his mother to Silver City, in New Mexico Territory, a wild lawless land that was in virtual anarchy. The Apache Indians had recently been defeated and local cattlemen were in a bitter feud for power known as the “Lincoln County War”. The Kid worked as a ranch hand for John Tunstall, a local posse leader and father figure. In 1878 the sheriff and his men murdered Tunstall and the Kid began a bloody war of revenge. He ambushed and killed the sheriff and his deputies then went on the lam for two years. Eventually he was captured, convicted for murder and transported back to Lincoln where he was to be hung but one evening he snatched a guard’s six-shooter and killed him and a second guard then mounted a horse and fled.

A newly elected sheriff named Pat Garrett promised to restore justice to the region and embarked on a relentless pursuit to capture the Kid. Garrett and two deputies set off for abandoned Fort Sumner, where the Kid was supposedly hiding out. Residents gave him little info but one evening while calling on an old friend Garrett’s luck changed.
“Soon a man arose from the ground, in full view, but too far away to recognize,” his account of the incident states. “He wore a broad-brimmed hat, a dark vest and pants, and was in his shirtsleeves…He raised quickly his pistol, a self-cocker, within a foot of my breast. Retreating rapidly across the room he cried: ‘Quien es? Quien es?’ ‘Who’s that? Who’s that?’ All this occurred in a moment. Quickly as possible I drew my revolver and fired, threw my body aside, and fired again. The second shot was useless; the Kid fell dead. He never spoke. A struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped for breath, and the Kid was with his many victims.”

He was buried in a small cemetery at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881; somebody stenciled letters on a plain board and jammed it into the soft earth, forming a crude gravestone. Within months this marker was shot to pieces but a friend of the Kid’s made a cross out of stolen pieces from a picket fence and marked it with the words “Billy the Kid (Bonney) – July 14, 1881”. Several years later the fort was sold to the New England Livestock Company, a worker from Boston named Chauncey yanked out the marker and boarded the company’s Concord coach with it strapped to the outside of his suitcase. It was never to be seen again.

In 1940, a Colorado man installed a small granite footstone to mark the spot of the Kid’s remains but in 1950 the marker was stolen. In 1976 it was found in a field on a ranch near Fort Worth, Texas and ceremoniously reinstalled. Four years later, it was stolen again. This time it turned up days later, in Los Angeles. A burly local sheriff flew out to pick it up. The marker was again reinstalled, this time surrounded by a steel cage. It is presently open to the public.