Morgue Finds Missing Body That Wasn't Missing

By Amanda Dickman in News on Jun 20, 2007 10:30PM

When the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office first admitted that they couldn't find the body of the recently deceased Rosalie Schultz, they thought they had sent it off to the wrong funeral home by mistake. After calls to the funeral homes, a second look-see, and causing the family to panic (to the point of nearly calling off the funeral), they discovered that the body was, in fact, in the morgue after all.

Apparently Schultz was in the refrigeration room all along, right where she was supposed to be. One small (actually, large) thing, she was stored behind another body that was much bigger, blocking her from view during the search. Hey, who needs Sherlock Holmes when you have the staff at the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office?

We kid. Listen, we know things happen, especially when one is working in an environment that is overloaded and/or understaffed; we're human, we make mistakes. But the thing that's really getting to us about this story is the fact that the Medical Examiner's Office is still managing the flow of bodies in and out of the morgue manually. In this day and age, how can they not have a more efficient system in place? We're talking about the morgue of one of the largest cities in this country, not some backwoods rural town. Thankfully, some good may come from this incident, as the office says that from now on they "will no longer allow two bodies on one tray and the county is promising to install computers to better organize the office."

Hopefully these changes will come to fruition or else it seems that, with the combination of the manual tracking system and an apparent corpse overload, matters will only get worse. During the initial search, as many as ten workers at the morgue searched for four hours and couldn't come up with the body — a fact scarier than the thought of being locked in that place overnight.

Image via The Sherlock Holmes Museum.