Guatemala City and Tijuana have seen an increasing amount of funerary violence, and also a bourgeoning and brazen set of homespun businesses that feed off the mayhem. Last month in Baltimore, a woman was gunned down at the funeral of her boyfriend, also a murder victim. (Photo by Simon Howden)

Virginia McGhee stepped out to make a phone call while at the funeral of her boyfriend in Baltimore and was shot in the chest. The high murder rate means good business for funeral homes. Joseph Brown, the owner of the funeral home where McGhee was shot, said he cares for at least two to three homicide victims a month. But after blood was spilled on his own sidewalk, Brown vented to a Baltimore Sun reporter last month that the murderers have gone too far.

Last year, two people were shot outside a West Baltimore church, where 300 mourners had gathered to view the body of a 26-year-old killed in a triple shooting and in 2001, a man was shot at while leaving the wake of his brother.

“[Respect has] gone out the window,” said Brown. “This has become a fact of life as much here in Baltimore as it is in Afghanistan, Iraq and anywhere else.”

The more appropriate comparison would be Guatemala City, Guatemala or Tijuana, Mexico. These well-known murder havens, like Baltimore, have seen an increasing amount of funerary violence, and also a bourgeoning and brazen set of homespun businesses that feed off the mayhem.

In Guatemala City, morticians called skullmongers speed to murder scenes looking to snag customers. When rival firms meet on the street, price wars ensue. Some skullmongers offer combos: a coffin, a wake and a funeral for as little as $150. The skullmonger industry is unregulated and growing, reported the Associated Press, last November. Some mongers even receive tips about murders from the police.

A Guatemala City man who goes by the nickname Don Carlos has transformed his mechanic shop into a funeral home, although the initial décor remains. Saw blades and drill bits hang on concrete walls and “in the back, among the old gaskets and engine blocks, the corpses are disemboweled, cleaned, embalmed and dressed for burial,” according to the Associated Press article.

In Mexico, with drug violence spiraling out of control, there is even more money to be made beautifying corpses, but more danger involved too. Funeral home operators from southern and central Mexico head for crime-ridden border towns like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, looking to expand their businesses. Some border city funeral homes send agents into the streets to hand out promotional fliers.

“Gun battles and gangland mutilations are also boosting demand for facial reconstructions,” reads a 2008 Reuters article. “And because of the rise in decapitations in the city, undertakers offer to hold the body and wait for the head to be found before proceeding with the funeral.”

The danger of death for Mexican morticians is real, though, and unlike Baltimore, it is often the funeral home owners themselves being targeted. An undertaker from Ciudad Juarez was shot dead in front of his home and numerous mortuaries in the border town, directly opposite El Paso, Texas, have been sprayed with bullets.

Not all morticians from murderous cities are bleeding the victims dry, though. A New York Times article reported the story of Tyrone Muhammad, a mortician, and Kenneth Reece, a coffin-builder. The duo, from Newark, New Jersey, a city that hit an all-time murder high in 2006 with 101 homicides, speeds to murder scenes with a different message: stop the violence.

They call themselves Morticians That Care and they rove the neighborhood in a green company van looking for residents to impress their message upon. The men display body bags, play music and talk about gunshot victims they have stitched up. On one occasion, they showed a video of a young gunshot victim being embalmed.

“I am just sick of patching up bullet wounds,” said Muhammad.

But in the world’s most murderous cities, bullets also mean business.

Neptune Memorial Reef, off the coast of Florida, is an underwater city that will eventually be able to accommodate the cremated remains of more than 100,000 people. The artificial reef attracts tropical fish and scuba divers and is designed to withstand a Category 4 hurricane. (Photo courtesy of Neptune Memorial Reef)

Off the coast of Key Biscayne, Florida, a city of the dead is rising. Neptune Memorial Reef is an array of concrete structures infused with cremated remains, designed to form an elaborate underwater cemetery that when complete will cover 16 acres and be able to accommodate more than 125,000 dead. Reef occupants can choose placement in columns, arches, lion statues or mounds shaped like creatures of the sea.

“The most popular are the marine placements,” said Stephen Ziadie, the reef’s Chief Operating Officer. “Everyone wants to be a shellfish or a starfish or a brain coral.”

The Neptune Memorial Reef is a project of the Neptune Society, a U.S. company focused on cremation. Neptune is one of a handful of companies crafting innovative underwater burial sites in warm Florida waters.

The Atlanta-based company, Eternal Reefs, combines an individual’s cremated remains with “eco-friendly cast concrete” to form what the company calls “reef balls.” There are reef ball sites off the coast of Fort Meyers and Miami, as well as Ocean City, New Jersey and Charleston, South Carolina. Loved ones of the deceased gather for a reef casting ceremony and can return to the reef site to dive, fish or examine the structure from a glass bottom boat.

Great Burial Reef memorials stand about three feet tall and are “molded from 100% natural concrete with a natural additive which accelerates undersea marine growth once it reaches the ocean floor.” Their reefs are in ten locations around Florida, including off the coasts of Venice, Port Canaveral and West Palm Beach.

The placement of cremated remains in artificial reefs is a recent trend that may be linked to the economic recession and a nationwide increase in cremations, which are often cheaper than traditional full body burials. Companies all focus on the green aspect of reef burial and the idea that life can beget life. It is a trend that is thoroughly modern, but there are colorful historical precedents, such as the underwater tomb of King Munmu, located in a rocky inlet in the East Sea, off Bonggil Beach, South Korea.

Munmu lived from 661 to 681 A.D. and was the 30th ruler of the Silla Kingdom. He requested to be buried in the East Sea so as to become a dragon and protect Silla from Japanese intruders. Munmu’s remains were buried under a massive granite rock at the bottom of a pool in a cross-shaped channel, although whether his ashes were scattered or placed in an urn is still debated by scholars. “Underwater Tomb of King Munmu is one of the few attractions of Gyeongju where no admission fee is charged and is open all year round 24 hours,” reads one South Korean travel website.

Neptune Memorial Reef has also become a tourist destination; scuba divers come to spot the tropical fish, eels and turtles that feed among the structures. The reef was originally designed by two friends, an avid fisherman and a man named Kim Brandell, a metal sculptor who fashions the large signature stainless steel globes that stand at the entrance to several of Donald Trump’s towers. The reef’s structures are anchored more than 15 feet into the seafloor and are intended to withstand a Category 4 hurricane. The first pieces were erected two years ago. Standard placement in the reef, such as in an archway or column costs $2699; placement in a more ornate structure, like a lion, costs $3999. More than 50% of the 1,100 placements already constructed have been filled.

“People generally think it’s a really cool concept but not everybody wants to be interned in the ocean,” said Ziadie. “But, I’ll tell you; we are seeing a lot of our customers from Florida, but also a lot in the Midwest, who don’t live anywhere near the ocean.”

The Call of Death: Caitlin Doughty left a career in theater to study mortuary science. Four decades ago 95 percent of mortuary students were male, with the majority from funeral home families. (Photo by Justin Nobel)

How Caitlin Doughty came to a career in death is unusual. At the University of Chicago she studied medieval history and crafted plays from Victorian poems and obscure Edgar Allan Poe stories. After graduation she moved to San Francisco and produced theater.

“That’s what I thought I wanted to do,” said Doughty. “Then I thought, ‘you know what I have also wanted to do,’ work in a funeral home.”

Mortuary science was once a stiff calling, a trade passed from grandfather to father to son. Non-white morticians were rare, as were women. In 1971, 95 percent of students entering mortuary schools were male, and the majority of them were sons of funeral home directors, according to statistics from the American Board of Funeral Service Education (ABFSE). Now, nearly 60 percent of enrollees are female. At Cypress College of Mortuary Science in Los Angeles, where Doughty is in her first semester, three-quarters of the students are women and not one is from a traditional funeral family. This year a new demographic has emerged: laid-off workers looking for a second career.

“Now that they have been let go from the financial industry or the mortgage industry they have the time to seek retraining and go into funeral service,” said Jolena Grande, a professor at Cypress, which will accept 50 percent more students this fall to accommodate for new interest.

But many newcomers arrive deluded about the profession that lies ahead and unprepared for the rigors of mortuary science itself. Some believe a job in the funeral industry will bring instant wealth. Goths with tongue rings and bodies decorated in tattoos are drawn to the profession’s dark subject but must be reminded that the bereaved want a friendly face, not a pierced one. The heavy science curriculum sends other students packing. “I figured it was just going to be some learnin’,” said Doughty. “It’s actually incredibly difficult.”

There are 56 accredited funeral service schools across the country and in 2007 they graduated 1340 students, according to ABFSE figures. The road ahead for graduates is difficult. Death comes at all hours, which means directors are always on call, and constantly caring for the bereaved can be emotionally draining. Only 5-10 percent of graduates will still be in the field ten years out, notes a popular funeral directing textbook.

Jolena Grande’s career has tracked another trend in the industry, corporate ownership. In the early 1990s, Grande left a family funeral home in California to work at one in Oklahoma, which was bought by Service Corporation International (SCI) while she was there. By the time she returned to her former funeral home in Los Angeles a few years later that too was under SCI. Now one in ten homes are owned by either SCI or Stewart Enterprises, Inc.. Across the Desert Southwest and Southeast that number can be much higher, Grande says.

But families usually keep the home’s family name; often all that changes is bodies are taken to a central facility for cremation or embalming, rather than prepped at each individual funeral home. “Most people don’t know that the family-run funeral home across the street is no longer family-run,” says Grande.

Geographic differences exist from home to home, said Dr. Michael Smith, Executive Director of ABFSE, but overall the industry remains relatively uniform. “As the baby boomers die off there may be slightly more demand,” said Smith, “but I think the future will be pretty stable.”

But as a new generation of mortuary students, with diverse backgrounds and no family funeral roots, enters the profession, the industry may begin to change. “What is interesting about America now is that we are sort of in a post death culture,” said Doughty. “It’s an exciting opportunity to create new rituals.”