Elisha Anderson, John Wisely, and Gina Kaufman

Detroit Free Press

State inspectors had been to the Cantrell Funeral Home several times before, but this time was different.

On Aug. 29, they slipped on respirators and carried flashlights as they searched the shuttered business on Detroit’s east side, chasing a phone tip that corpses were hidden throughout the building.

The power was off and the building dark as they combed the basement containing knee-deep trash with the smell of embalming chemicals hanging in the air.

Upstairs, they found a stillborn body and the cremated remains of another on a desk. But they missed an even more shocking discovery: 11 fetuses stashed above the first-floor ceiling in an infant-sized casket and cardboard box hidden by insulation.

Inspectors wouldn't find those for another six weeks, when they returned Oct. 12 with a detailed, though anonymous, letter guiding their search. The typed letter, addressed to a specific inspector at the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, was unsigned and in places ungrammatical, but its directions were clear. Go through sliding doors into the hallway, turn right, and you’ll find a storage area, the letter said.

“If you look above the door theres a crawl space and … several infant corpse placed there dating back from over 10 years ago,” it said.

The discovery made international headlines, prompted an ongoing criminal investigation and raised new concerns about what secrets might still be hidden inside the building at 10400 Mack Avenue.

If investigators have determined how and why the remains were hidden there, they've yet to say. On Friday, state regulators said they concluded their administrative investigation and cited numerous acts of “fraud, deceit, dishonesty, incompetence and gross negligence.”

Some former employees they spoke with denied any knowledge of the hidden remains and others wouldn’t talk, but two anonymous tips accused a family member of orchestrating concealment of the remains. Although the state's findings identify the target of the anonymous tips, there is no indication the state considered the accusations against that person credible. Officials would not comment on the allegations.

Records show problems have plagued the business and its employees for years including accusations that they:

Improperly embalmed a man, causing maggots to crawl out of his nose and mouth

Transformed a woman into “a monster” with another botched embalming job

Looted the estates of grieving families

Refused to bury a baby that had been dead about four years because of an unpaid bill

Put a dead man in another man’s clothes and casket

The funeral home founded by Raymond Cantrell Sr., provided services on the east side for more than a half century. He died two years ago at 96. Since then, his namesake business has been tarnished by jaw-dropping violations.

The problems culminated with the letter, which claimed family infighting and forged death certificates, and led investigators to the fetuses.

“You watch them take them out and count, it really imprints upon you the callousness of it all,” said Julia Dale, a supervisor with the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. “And it makes you wonder … ‘How do you get to a place like this or why do you do something like that?'”

Read more:

Previous Cantrell Funeral Home stories

Fetuses in attic prompt Michigan to make change

Every Detroit funeral home just got inspected

Cantrell Sr. opened his funeral home in the 1950s, moved into a bigger building on Mack in 1964 and built the business on the motto “Where beauty lives.”

"Everything was pristine," said Eugene Gillespie of Detroit, a former embalmer, who said Cantrell Sr. would inspect each body to "make sure it was correct for the families."

The business grew into one of Detroit's largest black-owned funeral homes. People who learned the trade from Cantrell described him as honest, ethical and respected.

“There’s a long line of funeral directors he trained,” said Stephen Kemp Sr., a funeral director in Southfield who called Cantrell his mentor. “He was a community guy.”

While Cantrell's business thrived, his marriage failed. In 1987, his wife of 40 years, Allene, filed for divorce.

The pair had two adult children — Raymond II and Crystal — who were set to inherit the funeral home when their parents died, according to their divorce settlement.

After the divorce, Allene Cantrell moved out of state and her ex-husband continued to operate the funeral home. In 1998, Cantrell Sr. married a woman nearly 40 years his junior, with whom he'd already had two daughters. His new wife, Annetta, switched careers, leaving a job as a letter carrier for U.S. Postal Service to work in his funeral home, according to a deposition reviewed by the Free Press.

It was a family-operated business and Cantrell’s son, Raymond Cantrell II, also worked there until problems surfaced and he became estranged from his father.

“Many years ago, when I had a stroke, I placed him on several accounts, for purposes of running the business while I was incapacitated,” Cantrell Sr. said in a court filing in 2004. “I had learned that when I was sufficiently able to return to running my business affairs, that he had taken money from the funeral home, and purchased his girlfriend a car.”

That filing came after a court officer tried to seize Cantrell Sr.'s funeral home vehicles, wrongly thinking they belonged to his son, who had defaulted on a loan for his 1988 Jaguar XJ6, court records said.

It was one of several money issues Cantrell II faced.

In 2002, a Wayne County Probate judge hammered him for looting the estates of dead clients. A lawyer in the case said at the time that Cantrell II, then vice president of the funeral home, preyed on poor people who couldn't afford funerals.

The judge said Cantrell II acted inappropriately when he persuaded families to appoint him personal representative to the estates of their deceased relatives. The judge ordered him off 25 cases.

During the hearing, Cantrell II admitted to misappropriating funds and told a judge: “There is no justification.”

That wasn't the first time a judge rebuked Cantrell II. Months earlier, an administrative law judge fined him $6,000 and suspended his mortuary science license until he repaid $41,455 for a similar violation.

Free Press reporters made several attempts to contact Cantrell II, leaving messages at a Detroit address and phone numbers associated with him. He never responded.

Problems extended beyond financial matters. Former customers complained about operations inside the approximately 20,000-square-foot building, including allegations of botched work.

In 1987, a family sued, claiming Cantrell Funeral Home improperly embalmed a man's body before it was flown to Mississippi for a viewing. That’s when a “large bubbling mass of maggots” crawled from the nose and mouth “causing severe shock and emotional distress.”

A 1996 letter to state regulators detailed another improper embalming that left a woman looking "like a monster." The complaint described liquid seeping from her mouth and eyes and soaking her gown and said her lips appeared three times their normal size.

Cantrell II said the dead woman had experienced an allergic reaction to the embalming fluid, according to the letter, obtained by the Free Press.

When family members saw the body, they decided to have a closed casket.

“No matter how much I wanted all of her family and friends to see her and give (their) last farewells, I could not let anyone else see her like that,” said the writer, whose name was redacted from state records. “This also meant that this would be my last memory of my mother.”

Lawsuits filed in the 1990s and early 2000s accused the funeral home of a series of screw-ups, including putting the wrong body in a casket.

In that case, a dead man's family selected a casket and provided Cantrell with some clothes in which to bury him. When the family arrived for the service, the casket and the clothes were correct, but another man's corpse lay in repose.

The first one to notice was the dead man's mother, who had a heart condition and became "emotionally upset," according to the suit.

Cantrell II apologized for the mistake and had the bodies switched within 25 minutes, the document said.

Another court case said Cantrell held a funeral service at noon instead of the scheduled time, 1 p.m., causing some loved ones to miss the service.

A funeral home lawyer wrote that no one objected to the noon service. The error happened because the funeral time was changed from noon to 1 p.m. and the change wasn't logged in a scheduling book.

Over the years, allegations piled up against Cantrell Funeral Home and prompted state investigations.

The home was accused of employing unlicensed embalmers, failing to embalm bodies in a timely fashion, incompetence and gross negligence, according to regulators.

In one case in 2000, inspectors found a baby’s body stored at the funeral home. It was still there when they returned a year later. By then, the baby boy had been dead about four years.

A state record said $600 was still owed and Cantrell would not "provide an act of goodwill and bury the baby." The agency wrote the baby's grandmother to have him buried, the document said. Records don't indicate how the handling of the remains was resolved.

According to a summary of records provided by the state, regulators investigated issues dating to at least the mid-1990s and issued multiple fines. The largest fine listed was $10,000 in 2004, based on a complaint alleging unlicensed people worked at the funeral home.

Records provided by the state show a more than 10-year gap in contact with the funeral home following those problems. It's unclear if the gap reflects lax oversight or lost records.

"Due to retention schedules as well as changing staff, I cannot speak to enforcement decisions made in 1990s and 2000s by individuals no longer within the Bureau," Jason Moon, a state spokesman, told the Free Press in an email.

The east side neighborhood served by Cantrell Funeral Home has long been plagued by violent crime, which sometimes extended inside.

In February 2007, a brawl erupted inside the funeral home during the service for a suspected gang member who’d been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Detroit police shot dead Artrell Dickerson, 18, after he fled from the fight carrying a blue steel revolver. Police said he turned and pointed the gun at them before he was shot. Prosecutors later determined the shooting was justified.

Cantrell Sr. was known to carry a gun for protection and discussed crime in the area a decade ago.

"They've been robbing and stealing and breaking in ever since I've been here," he told the Free Press. Cantrell Sr. lived for a time in the residence above the funeral home and recounted how he once repelled three would-be burglars who had climbed to the second-floor porch of his home and were coming inside.

"I had my .45 in hand, sat up in bed and said, ‘Come on in, fellas.' They took off running," he said.

As Cantrell Sr. aged, his wife, Annetta, held various titles with the company, state records show. In 2009, she was vice president but in 2010 she was listed as president. As recently as May 2015, her title was office manager, according to a letter she signed.

Annetta Cantrell wasn't licensed in mortuary science and her attorney, Arnold Reed, told the Free Press that she didn't run day-to-day operations at Cantrell.

In 2015, Annetta Cantrell, with her husband's financial assistance, formed a new funeral home, Q A Cantrell Funeral Services, LLC., on Kelly Road in Eastpointe. Records list her as owner and her daughter, Quanika Cantrell, who has a mortuary science license, as an employee.

Annetta Cantrell declined comment, but her attorney took pains to distance her business from the troubled Mack location.

"Q A Cantrell is not affiliated in any form or fashion with this Detroit funeral home on Mack Avenue," Reed said.

In 2016, Cantrell Sr. died. His oldest daughter, Crystal, had died the previous year. That left Cantrell II to run the business.

He returned to the funeral home business after a 14-year hiatus, in which he sold mortgages, worked at Target and taught special education, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Troubles soon emerged again.

Inspectors received a complaint and visited the funeral home repeatedly in late 2017 and early 2018. They found "deplorable, unsanitary conditions," including a dirty, stained embalming room, decomposing bodies covered in mold and embalmed bodies in an unrefrigerated garage.

Crews removed 269 containers of cremated remains found in the basement and nearly two dozen bodies on the property.

One of the bodies was Marcia Jordan, according to a lawsuit that accused the funeral home of not burying her after a cemetery service. Family members said they paid more than $7,300 for the funeral, but instead of burying the body, Cantrell returned it to the funeral home and left it in the garage.

On April 25, about a month after Jordan's funeral, inspectors discovered her body and shut down Cantrell Funeral Home that day, still unaware of the other secrets still lurking inside.

Lawsuits stacked up in Detroit's 36th District Court accusing Cantrell II of not paying bills.

The funeral home was sued by a cemetery, cremation business, casket and printing companies, each claiming they were owed money for services provided.

By September, the dilapidated building had landed in a tax foreclosure auction.

Naveed Syed snapped it up. He said he paid $101,000 to cover the building and taxes and planned to renovate it into a community center where people could take classes, get a shower, do their laundry and get job training.

“You have nothing in this neighborhood,” he said. “But you have liquor shops.”

Vandals had frequented the vacant building, so Syed hired around-the-clock security.

Among the items left in the building were caskets, dozens of filing cabinets filled with records, office furniture, organs, even a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the basement.

It wouldn’t be long before his fixer upper turned into a crime scene.

Aided by the anonymous letter received in the mail Oct. 12, inspectors immediately returned to the building they had searched weeks earlier.

The state provided the letter and the envelope it was mailed in to the Free Press under a Freedom of Information Act request, but redacted key words from the text as well as the return address on the envelope, saying it appeared to be fictitious.

Inspectors followed the step-by-step directions, found the mummified fetuses and notified Detroit Police.

Several lawsuits followed the discovery:

The parents of a boy stillborn in January 2014 claim their son's remains were stored for months, unrefrigerated, in a Tupperware container at Cantrell Funeral Home.

The mother of another child, stillborn in 2011, claims she was informed by Detroit Police that her son's remains may have been among those found hidden at Cantrell. She had been told earlier that the hospital had cremated the remains.

The parents of a third baby, stillborn in 2009, claim Cantrell was paid for a funeral. Michigan State Police asked the mother in October for a DNA sample to compare with fetal remains.

On Friday, state regulators said seven of the 11 remains found hidden in the funeral home in October have been identified and their dates of death precede Cantrell II inheriting the business.

Police have declined to elaborate on the criminal investigation, but said some of the remains date as far back as 1998.

A Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs spokesman declined to say whether the state has determined how the remains ended up stashed above the first-floor ceiling.

The state announced it is seeking to revoke the mortuary science licenses held by the Cantrell Funeral Home and Jameca Boone, who was the manager at the time the business was shut down. This follows suspensions of their licenses in April.

Boone spoke to state investigators earlier this month. Though she was the designated manager, Boone told officials she hadn't been at the funeral home for months before it was shut down. The Free Press could not reach her for comment Friday night.

The state is also seeking to revoke the funeral home’s prepaid funeral and cemetery sales registration and prevent Cantrell II from ever being licensed again.

The investigation pointed to multiple serious violations, including fraud, mishandling of money and making a false statement on a death certificate. The state accused funeral home officials of falsifying the death certificate of an infant, recording that she had been buried in a cemetery when her remains were really at the funeral home.

To better understand the funeral home's operations, the Free Press sought out several former Cantrell employees who had worked there over the decades. Some didn't respond to Free Press messages. Others declined to comment and some spoke with the agreement that their names not be used.

Annetta Cantrell declined to talk to state investigators as well as the Free Press. But her attorney said her business, Q A Cantrell Funeral Home, has suffered as a result of the scandal.

"The bad publicity has killed her business," said Reed, her attorney. "She's going to have to start letting people go."

Reed described "huge family drama" between Annetta Cantrell and her stepson, Cantrell II. After the fetuses were found, investigators searched her home and seized several computers, but Reed said she had nothing to do with the problems at the funeral home her late husband owned.

"There's been no criminal finding," Reed said, adding investigators have returned most of the seized items.

Michigan’s funeral industry has been under increased scrutiny since the discovery at Cantrell. A week after the find, investigators discovered the remains of 63 fetuses in a second Detroit building, Perry Funeral Home. The state shut down Perry after the discovery Oct. 19 and police launched another investigation.

Meanwhile, a major transformation has taken place inside the old Cantrell Funeral Home as the new owner is turning the space into Quality Behavioral Health Community Center, a resource for people in the neighborhood.

Ten dumpsters of garbage have been removed. Flooring, drywall and ceiling tiles are gone. In parts of the building, new paint, carpet and security cameras now appear.

Syed hopes to open the community center in mid-March.

“Yes, it was a funeral home. People might be scared of this place,” he said. “But life goes on. ... We did not want this building to be left abandoned like a bunch of other ones that we have in the neighborhood. This building had a sound structure and I thought there’s definitely hope that we could do something here.”

Contact Elisha Anderson: eanderson@freepress.com or 313-222-5144. Contact John Wisely: jwisely@freepress.com or 313-222-5144. Contact Gina Kaufman: gkaufman@freepress.com or 313-223-4526. Free Press Staff Writers Christina Hall, Fiona Kelliher and Omar Abdel-Baqui contributed to this report.