As a cold wind blew across Forest Hill Cemetery on Whitten Road on Tuesday morning, Dr. Lisa Funte peered into a newly unearthed brown steel casket that just 30 minutes earlier had been 6 feet beneath a headstone marked “John G. Hughes.”
Funte, an assistant medical examiner, then turned toward a small group of onlookers and solemnly announced: “It’s a female.”
Hughes was mistakenly cremated instead of buried, and the body of Billie Sue Smith then was stripped of all identification and buried in Hughes’ plot instead of being cremated, said Oliver Ewing, a former embalmer at High Point.