J.J. Green, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – The sun was bright in early January of 2006 at Arlington National Cemetery, but a dark veil hung over retired Air Force Col. William Koch’s heart.
“It was the worst day of my life,” said Koch, recalling when he laid his 61-year-old wife, Jean, to rest in a plot in Section 66.
“We did not see the burial itself because the weather had been so bad that the ground was squishy and we couldn’t walk out where she was actually going to be buried, which may have been part of the problem.”
An unsettled feeling came over Koch in early June of this year. It was brought on by explosive allegations of mismanagement at the cemetery in a report from the Army inspector general.
The report exposed widespread burial operation irregularities, mistakes in the mapping of gravesites, disinterment of remains without approval from next of kin, discarding of remains and ultimately burial of remains in the wrong gravesites.
According to the report, evidence began to emerge as far back as May of 2003 regarding remains in gravesites that should have been empty.
Media reports that cemetery officials had become concerned about possible misplacement of remains in Section 66, where his wife of 35 years was buried, confirmed Koch’s growing suspicions.
“When I first read about the problem, they had said it was limited to one particular section and it wasn’t the section where my wife was buried, so it really didn’t bother me,” Koch said. “But later on they started saying other sections may be involved.”
Koch called the cemetery, and asked if it could confirm that his wife was buried in the right place.
Koch says the return phone call came about three weeks later.
“They called me back and said everything is fine.”
But everything was not fine.
“About a week later I got a call from another member of the Arlington Cemetery staff saying there is a problem. The wife of the Army sergeant which was buried next to my wife was concerned, as I was, to dig up her husband and confirm he was indeed buried there.”
Jean Koch, who was a reverend, was thought to be buried in plot 1180 in Section 66, but sometime in August, Koch says “they dug up her grave or where they claim she was and it was empty.”
Koch recalled a rush of emotion.
“To be perfectly honest, I was kind of in shock at first. It’s the old thing like ‘why me’ or ‘how could this happen?’
Anger replaced shock.
“I’m mad as hell about this,” Koch said.
The mystery over where his wife was buried was solved after the grave belonging to the Army staff sergeant next to his wife’s was dug up and the remains were not his.
“They then decided that that was her in the staff sergeant’s grave, and they had to find him and they went to the next grave down and it was the wife of a Navy officer. ”
There they found the staff sergeant’s remains and the urn containing the cremated remains of the Navy officer’s wife.
Koch said the solution to the mess was to take “the Army staff sergeant with the approval of the wife and bury him somewhere else, put the urn back in the grave, put a new headstone on my wife’s and where she was supposed to be is now available for another burial.”
While relieved his wife has been laid to rest, Koch still is not done.
“I’m waiting also for the president or the Secretary of Defense or one of the military secretaries to come up with some kind of statement about this, which I have not seen. They may have, but I have not seen it yet, and I’m really disturbed also about that, that they don’t think enough of our troops to at least think of a statement to tell people in the country that we’re working on this, we’ve had a problem, we recognize the problem and we’re working on it.”
Jean Koch’s case is just one of more than 6,600 graves that may be mixed up. There are more than 320,000 graves in the cemetery. Officials tell WTOP they are not sure how high the number will go, and one official was not at all optimistic that every situation could be resolved.
In Part II – Dramatic, never-before-revealed details about discarded remains in the cemetery.
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