The Tate-LaBianca Homicide Research Blog

Thomas Noguchi, Cielo Coroner

Strange Happenings:
Verdugo Hills Cemetery, meets Cielo Drive Coroner, Thomas Noguchi.
Lynn said: "Thomas Noguchi did the autopsies for Cielo Drive and was also involved in the bodies that washed away from the cemetery. There are actual photos from a local newspaper where people found human remains such as feet in their garden"

 "Also, students from a local high school, broke into the cemetery and were propping up dead bodies, putting cigarettes in the deceased mouth and having their pictures taken with them. The students were eventually caught".

Thomas Noguchi - Interviewed November 1986 by Douglas Stein

Noguchi Sates: "After a torrential rain the whole topsoil of the old cemetery in Verdugo Hills, California, started sliding. It happened to contain over ahundred bodies that floated first across the street, then into the yards and into the living rooms of houses and the doorway of the supermarket. It was a tragic scene. My staff tried to ascertain who had jurisdiction by calling a county lawyer. I said, "Forget it, I am going." I was the first on the scene to represent a governmental agency, and I ordered the public works' heavy bulldozers in. Those bodies posed a health hazard. So we moved.
The Verdugo Hills persons had drowned in a flood and had been buried soaking wet in caskets. These bodies changed to an almost soaplike consistency that resists decay. The corpses looked more like horror-movie ghouls than ordinary corpses. Adipocere, as it's called, happens when a combination of moisture and highly alkaline soil reacts with fat tissue and solidifies into a soaplike consistency".
Full Story: http://www.astralgia.com/webportfolio/omnimoment/archives/interviews/noguchi.html
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Related Story from Kimchi:
"Vandals Exhume Bodies From Crypts"... 11-14-96 - Yvonne Milosevic - LA Times.
In a gruesome act, vandals broke into eight crypts at the abandoned Verdugo Hills Cemetery and exhumed the bodies, propping one corpse up against the crypt and shoving a cigarette in its mouth, Los Angeles police said Wednesday.  A volunteer caretaker who last visited the cemetery in October discovered the macabre scene Tuesday afternoon.  The mortuary is trying to locate family members of the exhumed bodies.
In the 1970s the cemetery fell into disrepair. It lost its license in 1976 and since then has experienced a series of bizarre pranks and natural disasters.  Heavy rains in 1978 sent corpses and coffins sliding down the hillside into neighbors' yards, leaving 41 graves partially exposed. The city spent more than $200,000 to collect and store the corpses and build a retaining wall to prevent another landslide.  Even so, five bodies were exposed after heavy rains in February 1980.
Full Story Here:  http://articles.latimes.com/1996-11-14/local/me-64634_1_exhumed-bodies
Thanks Lynn and Kimchi!!