A few yards from Caton Farm Road, a grave site tells a story of a man who served his country, raised his family and died six months past his 71st birthday. His grave marker is flanked by two small American flags, plastic flowers arranged to look like another American flag, and a second arrangement in which red plastic flowers ring the word “Dad” in white plastic flowers.
The display of affection and patriotism is not unusual at St. Mary’s Nativity Cemetery near Crest Hill. Bright flowers (real and plastic), wreaths, candles and red-white-and-blue flags adorn dozens of neatly trimmed grave sites. The shiny monuments all seem recently cleaned, as do the photographs of those buried here that are embedded into the granite next to their names.
From here it would be easy to miss the cemetery across the street. There, no flowers or flags draw any attention. There is no asphalt entrance or granite markers in the shape of crosses. There are neat rows of grave markers, but they are all made of formed concrete blocks the size of toaster ovens.
Nor is there any hint on the concrete blocks of what those buried here did with their lives. Some markers include a first and last name, but others just have initials where the first name should be or, like the marker for someone named Wilson, simply a last name. Years of birth and death are listed, but no months or days.
It isn’t until you read what is inscribed on the 6 1/2-foot red concrete monument standing alone about 40 paces from the nearest gravestone that the story of the dead on this side of the road comes into focus. Under the initials “I.S.P.” is an inscription:
“They Paid Their Debt to Society,” it reads. “May God Remit Their Debt to Him.”
They are the men–and one woman–of the Illinois State Penitentiary (I.S.P.) system who were housed at Stateville Correctional Center, which looms less than a mile away, or at the nearby Joliet Correctional Center. In this cemetery and one closer to the 33-foot-high walls of the prison–walls the inmates themselves built–are the remains of 437 inmates buried between 1925 and 1974, when the last inmate was buried on the prison property.
If prison is a place to lock up and forget those who forfeited their freedom, these 437 are the forgotten of the forgotten. There is, for example, one man buried in 1927 identified simply as “Negro” named Joe. They were without family, had families who could not afford to bury them or had families who wanted nothing to do with them, even in death.
“I would guess that nobody wanted anything to do with them. Period,” said George Stampar, an assistant warden at Stateville from 1965 until 1975, and at Joliet for the next 10 years.
While there are no available figures of just how many inmates died in Stateville since it opened in 1925, one statistic illustrates how unusual it was for families to completely turn their backs on inmates. Of the 13 inmates executed at Stateville between 1928 and 1949, only three are buried here. The rest were taken away, presumably by their families.
As that statistic suggests, the reasons particular inmates are buried here cannot be found on prison records. Economics might have played a large role; there were more people buried here–140–in the 10 years beginning in 1929, the year the stock market crash triggered the Great Depression, than during any other 10-year period.
To be sure, there are executed murderers buried here, but most of the others were in prison for all sorts of crimes and “just happened to die while they were here,” said Lt. Gary Tazelaar, who has worked at Stateville since 1975.
Take John Mack, the first inmate to be buried here. Convicted of robbery in Cook County, Mack had served 1 1/2 years of a 3- to 20-year sentence when he died July 18, 1925.
All that Bureau of Prisons spokesman Nic Howell could find out about Mack was that he was 27 years old in 1924, had an alias of “Little Johnny Danders” and was illiterate. Mack’s records are so old that many words are impossible to read, Howell said. If the cause of death is recorded, Howell couldn’t make it out.
We do know Mack was white; it says so right on the side of his grave marker. Most of the grave markers record the race of the inmate: W for white, C for colored, I for Indian.
“Prisons are notorious for identifying people by any means possible,” Howell said, looking for a possible reason the information was important enough to be stamped on every headstone. “That is strictly a guess.”
The one woman is one of two Indians listed on the roster of the dead. Her name was Arvira Williams. Like Mack, Williams was a convicted robber. Sentenced to one year to life, she was 24 years old when she arrived at the Joliet Correctional Center on Feb. 5, 1930. She died three months later of pulmonary tuberculosis. But Howell said his microfiche records list Williams as a “Negress” and not an American Indian.
Interspersed with the once-intact remains of inmates are parts of others. In all there are four legs, one arm and a hand buried here. “The state was responsible for these people,” Tazelaar explained. “When a limb was amputated, the prison had to show what they did with it.”
There are some notorious inmates buried here. John Brown was one of three men executed in December of 1928 for the murder of a Lake County farmer. The farmer, the Chicago Tribune reported, had given work to one of Brown’s accomplices and made the fatal mistake of showing Dominic Bressetti some money, in the process revealing “the tin can wherein his money and Liberty bonds were hidden.”
Bressetti returned to the farmhouse with Brown and a third man, Claude Clark. When the farmer refused to let them inside, he was shot through the door and beaten to death.
More than a year later, the three were executed on the same day. Their deaths marked the first time in Illinois, the paper reported, in which the electric chair “rather than the hangman’s noose” was used for execution.
John Jelliga, a 33-year-old unemployed steelworker from Whiting, Ind., is also buried here. Jelliga was one of two men arrested for the robbery and murder of a Crete farmer after being identified by the farmer’s wife, who was also shot. “That’s the man who shot me like a dog,” the paper reported her saying.
The paper went on to report, almost gleefully, Jelliga’s last hours. One article reported that the prison band rehearsed “in the hope it would drown out the hum” of the electric chair as it was being tested. “But the noise from the death house reached Jelliga’s ears,” the paper reported. “He wept hysterically.”
On Oct. 21, 1938, Jelliga was executed, killed by “three minutes and 2,300 volts.”
Prison officials, past and present, can’t recall ever seeing anyone visit the graves. While some say they’ve seen an occasional flower arrangement at one of the cemeteries, nobody can remember any one grave receiving particular attention. “I can’t ever recall ever seeing any flowers,” Tazelaar said.
There was one mention of flowers in an article about Jelliga’s execution. While the paper reported that none of Jelliga’s relatives attended the service, there was “one bouquet placed on the grave. It was sent by his widow.”
Graveside services were quick for any of the inmates. A chaplain in attendance wouldn’t have said much, and Stampar doesn’t recall any family showing up. “If they did have anybody,” Stampar said of the inmates, “they just gave up on them.”
The last inmate buried here was Robert Johnson. His grave, like those of the other final six men buried here, is marked with a piece of metal a little bigger than a computer disk attached to a stone block. The plaque, which has turned green, cannot be seen unless one is standing directly above it. Johnson, who had served nine months of a four-year sentence for taking indecent liberties with a child, died Aug. 8, 1974, of cardiorespiratory arrest.
It was most likely a change in the law that ended burials here. According to Stateville Supt. Ron Fleming, at about the time of the last burial, a law went into effect requiring the county coroner’s office to conduct autopsies on anyone who dies in prison. Because that office was coming to retrieve the bodies anyway, “we let them take over” the duties of disposing of the remains, he said.
For years, the coroner’s office simply ordered the cremation of the remains of unclaimed bodies, according to Will County Coroner Patrick O’Neil. That changed when O’Neil took office in 1992. Explaining that cremation might leave the county vulnerable to a lawsuit if a relative suddenly turns up, O’Neil said all bodies are now buried at various cemeteries.
The duty of burying an unclaimed inmate falls to various funeral homes on a rotating basis. The Department of Corrections pays $975 to cover the cost of the grave site and funeral expenses, O’Neil said.
“I have to take them outside the county,” said Ferdinand Range, who owns a funeral home in Joliet, explaining that grave prices are too high in Will County. He said there is a small graveside service attended by a prison chaplain.
Back at Stateville, even though it has been more than two decades since the last inmate was buried here, the staff continues to mow the lawn around the graves. None of the markers has toppled over, a common sight in some old cemeteries. Some of the markers show signs of crumbling, but only one has broken apart. Many are difficult to read, as moss has invaded cracks and the indentations of the letters. But none has been spray-painted or otherwise vandalized. That is important, Tazelaar said.
“No matter what they did,” he said, “there is some humanity.”
Nevertheless, as the years go by, the markers will continue to become more difficult to read, leaving the stories of those buried here to fade further into memory.
But there is one grave where the story of the deceased may not disappear so quickly. It is apart from the others, all the way on the other side of the prison.
“Duke,” it reads, above the years 1943-1956. “A Real Pal.”
Duke was, as many of those who work at Stateville know, the warden’s dog.
