The gruesome discovery of unrefrigerated, decomposing bodies at a South Deering funeral home two weeks ago exposed the dearth of oversight of Illinois’ funeral home industry.
Illinois is one of a mere handful of states that, absent complaints, does not conduct regular inspections of funeral homes, according to a 2025 survey from the International Conference of Funeral Service Examining Boards.
Illinois also is the only state that does not have a board or agency monitoring licensed funeral homes at their physical locations, the group said.
A recently signed law grants the state comptroller’s office more regulatory powers over cemeteries and crematories, but that purview doesn’t extend to funeral homes. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation regulates funeral director and embalmer licenses.
“That kind of fragmentation cannot help this situation,” said Wake Forest University Law professor Tanya Marsh, who teaches estate law and studies laws about the treatment and disposition of human remains.
What was found at the South Chicago Chapel funeral home earlier this month has prompted calls from elected officials for more reforms. State Rep. Marcus Evans, D-Chicago Heights, whose district includes the facility, called the situation “horrific” and said the Legislature should have been “more proactive” in regulating the funeral home industry.
Gov. JB Pritzker has questioned who should investigate funeral homes given that his administration now only licenses the facilities, but he has said little else about what kind of legislative response should follow the horrors discovered at South Chicago Chapel.
Marsh said the solution typically thrown around in the wake of grisly incidents such as the one in the South Chicago Chapel is to pass stronger licensing laws, limiting who comes into the profession in the first place.
But bad actors, she said, are often already licensed. While the state had revoked South Chicago Chapel owner Clark Morgan’s license in 2024, his wife Johanna had retained her license.
“If we can’t figure out how to head off people from engaging in this kind of behavior, then we have to have some sort of enforcement mechanism on the back end to try and figure it out before it’s too late,” Marsh said.
Michael D. Sharkey, an attorney who represents the Illinois Funeral Directors Association, said the group welcomes “fair and thoughtful regulation of funeral service.”
“Illinois has a lot of rules and regulations on the books concerning funeral homes and crematories,” Sharkey said. “[At South Chicago Chapel], I believe that this is a failure of state agencies to properly enforce those and to properly track the alleged nefarious characters.”
Pritzker hints at oversight changes
The state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation said it received a tip about “potential operation concerns” at South Chicago Chapel, prompting Chicago police to investigate and uncover more than 50 unrefrigerated bodies at various stages of decomposition.
Before that tip, what had been going on at the funeral home had gone unnoticed by the state.
But some elected officials, including Pritzker, are questioning whether the state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation is the right avenue to handle complaints of potential abuses. The governor said he’s meeting with Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s office about possibly streamlining how complaints are reported to the state.
“IDFPR is a licensing organization, but the investigatory endeavor — we should all discuss whether that’s something that should belong to IDFPR or to some other body,” Pritzker said.
On Monday, WBEZ sought clarity from Pritzker’s office on that comment and asked whether the governor favored regular funeral home inspections by the state, tougher criminal penalties for desecrating human remains inside funeral homes or creation of a blue-ribbon panel to propose tougher oversight measures for funeral homes.
A Pritzker spokesperson declined comment.
Thirty-six other states have created separate funeral boards to manage director licenses, funeral homes, crematories and cemeteries. The other 14 states, excluding Illinois, have appointed state agencies, such as public health departments, to the task.
Creating a unified board is something state Rep. Diane Blair-Sherlock, D-Villa Park, is considering. She chairs the House State Government Administration Committee, which typically handles funeral home legislation, and worked on the bill granting the comptroller more regulatory powers over cemeteries.
But Blair-Sherlock said she’s not sure if the comptroller or the IDFPR have the resources to become the state’s one-stop shop for funeral industry oversight.
“Sometimes we want to give it to a department, and the department says we’re not equipped for that,” Blair-Sherlock said. “I believe that we will be able to do something early next year.”
And while a vast majority of other states carry out annual or biannual inspections of funeral homes, sometimes even unannounced searches, Illinois is one of four states — along with Alaska, Hawaii and Iowa — that does not conduct any inspections of licensed funeral homes, crematories or cemeteries.
Starting next year, the comptroller’s office will have authority to inspect cemeteries only after a complaint has been filed.
“The tragic situation that happened in Chicago — this is not a number of bodies that piled up in the last week — right?” Marsh asked. “The more frequent inspections are by the state, the more likely they are to catch this kind of problem before it gets completely out of hand.”
A spokesperson for Mendoza said she is also looking at implementing harsher criminal penalties for funeral directors who mishandle human remains after what happened at South Chicago Chapel.
“Comptroller Mendoza believes these people belong in jail,” Mendoza spokesperson Kim Howard said.
In 2024, Pritzker signed legislation that imposed new criminal penalties against funeral home operators who knowingly made false statements on death certificates, kept false records or maintained ill-equipped preparation rooms where bodies are prepared for burial.
There was no language in that law that explicitly imposed criminal penalties for the desecration of bodies inside funeral homes.
In June 2025, Mendoza’s office revoked the chapel’s crematory license and handed over evidence of the owners improperly storing remains to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Illinois State Police. Neither Clark nor Johanna Morgan were arrested.
Howard said the goal is to introduce legislation with tougher criminal penalties for funeral home operators during the fall veto session, which begins in mid-November.
State ‘not on top of this,’ lawmaker says
Illinois has seen high-profile cases of funeral home and cemetery directors mishandling human remains over the last 15 years.
In 2024, a downstate funeral home was found by authorities to have misidentified up to 800 cremated ashes. That triggered passage of a law requiring crematories to affix remains with a unique ID and maintain chain-of-custody documentation.
And in 2009, the Cook County sheriff’s office found former Burr Oak Cemetery manager Carolyn Towns and three other workers had dug up graves, dumped the bodies and resold plots. The workers were later convicted, and Towns got a 12-year prison sentence.
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In response, then-Gov. Pat Quinn assembled a bipartisan task force of state lawmakers to come up with legislation clamping down on cemeteries.
Former Republican state Rep. Dan Brady, R-Bloomington, was one of those lawmakers. Brady is now mayor of Bloomington and a longtime funeral director.
“The situation I experienced as a legislator on that task force was consumers that testified before us that had suspicions of things, whether that be at a funeral home, at a cemetery … didn’t know where to turn,” Brady said.
He and the task force recommended the Legislature consolidate all funeral and burial oversight under the state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation and enact a law mandating cemetery managers be licensed.
Quinn signed the bill mandating cemetery management licensure into law in 2010. But the other bill consolidating funeral home and cemetery oversight stalled.
“There were opposing folks in the industry that felt that leaving things to the status quo was better,” Brady said. “[For] those of us who sat on the task force to listen to testimony, that was just the opposite. We wouldn’t have Burr Oak … if we had some of those recommendations maybe back then.”
Now six years later, Evans is joining Blair-Sherlock and other Democratic members in calling for new legislation that would consolidate oversight of funeral homes and cemeteries under one state body. Evans said passing funeral home oversight reforms in recent years “just hasn’t been a priority, for whatever reason.”
And for that, Evans is apologetic.
“I’m sorry for the loved ones that we were not on top of this,” he said. “But there’s a game plan now. We don’t want bad actors to feel any comfort with regards to abusing the remains of our loved ones.”