Paper records stolen from Kalispell’s Conrad Memorial Cemetery have been retrieved, but a long road of rebuilding lays ahead as the cemetery digitizes its burial logging system.  

The cache of records was found with the help of a concerned family member months after longtime groundskeeper James “Jim” Korn and his son, Kevin Korn, skipped town in the spring, taking with them documents and equipment needed to sell gravesites and inter bodies.  

Without the documents, the cemetery had been left in limbo since June. Families looking to buy graves for loved ones were turned away because cemetery employees couldn’t identify which were already sold.   

Now that they’ve been found, new sexton Jeff Epperly said the cemetery will get back to selling graves within a few weeks, and that the growing waitlist of customers looking to buy new plots will finally get moving.   

The records were sniffed out at a distant relative’s house outside of Libby, but Jim, Kevin and the stolen work computers have still not been tracked down.    

Epperly has received hundreds of calls from community members offering their deeds to help resurrect the once lost records. He still encouraged people to send him copies of their deed receipts because Korn had written down additional charges — such as grave openings and closings or prepayment of monuments — that do not appear elsewhere.  

“I'm still learning how he did things,” Epperly said.  

Korn was a trusted employee who oversaw the cemetery’s operations for over two decades and had his own way of recording grave sales, which he did exclusively. He preferred to conduct business almost entirely on paper.  

The recovered records included cemetery plot maps and plot sale index cards that indicate which gravesites are available and which were already sold. The first deed book used when Alicia Conrad established the cemetery in 1903 was also part of the stash. 

The C.E. Conrad Cemetery Association, which owns and operates the burial ground, is suing the Korns for taking off with the documents. Attorneys representing the association filed a civil proceeding against the Korns in the Flathead County Justice Court on Aug. 13. 

How did we get here? 

The person responsible for finding the vanished deed books and plot maps was Michaela Preece, Kevin’s daughter.  

Preece lives an hour outside of Salt Lake City, but grew up visiting Kalispell to spend time with her grandfather, Jim, who is now 92 years old.  

Jim taught Michaela how to fish. He would take her out on Ashley Lake in his small motorboat, where he showed her how to tie on a lure and clean a fish. During the winter, they’d stroll through the woods around the lake, identifying trees and animal tracks in the snow.  

Jim was quiet but had a sneaky sense of humor, Preece said.  

“You’d almost have to do a double take, because it’s like, oh my gosh, he’s being funny,” she said.  

Jim has lived with Kevin in Kalispell for decades. 

In January, he was struggling with health issues that culminated with an emergency flight to Salt Lake City. 

“From that point on, knowing that he was sick, I’ve been trying to keep in touch with him every week or so, but depending on when I could get a hold of him, I kind of never knew where (Kevin and Jim) were,” she said, noting that they would sometimes show up unannounced in Salt Lake City for medical visits. 

January was also when the cemetery board began discussing a search for Jim’s successor. Customers and funeral homes were complaining about calls going unanswered, and the grounds crew had to record grave sales as Jim continued to struggle with his health, according to Epperly.  

“We knew we were going to need a replacement because his health was so serious,” said the cemetery’s board president Jeff Ellingson.  

Jim offered his son to take over as groundskeeper while he dealt with his health, but the board determined Kevin was not the right fit for the job. Customer calls still went unanswered, and funeral home arrangements were left incomplete, according to Ellingson. 

“It was so sporadic that you couldn’t count on him,” he said.  

In February, the board scheduled a meeting to discuss a succession plan and intended to include Jim in the hiring process, but he was difficult to get a hold of, as he was undergoing infusion therapy at the time, Ellingson said.  

In April, the board held another meeting to consider hiring a part-time sexton, “but [Jim] didn’t attend and stopped communicating,” Ellingson said.

There were few emails exchanged throughout the month, but that stopped at the end of April, which was also when Preece stopped hearing from her father or grandfather.   

In May, Adam Mills, managing partner of Johnson-Gloschat Funeral Home, was hired as a consultant on cemetery operations to help find a new sexton.  

Later that month, the grounds crew informed Ellingson that the keys to the cemetery office were missing. The office is tucked on the ground floor of a yellow cottage by the burial ground’s gated entrance. 

After asking Jim, Kevin and their attorney to return the keys, they were eventually put back on June 23.  

Ellingson and other maintenance staff opened the doors the next morning to find the office ransacked. Four drawers of index cars identifying sold plots were missing from a floor-to-ceiling fire safe.  

Preece was unable to contact Jim or Kevin all summer. She found out in August that they were in Utah again, but staying with family for longer than usual. Preece didn’t think much of it at the time, “other than it was odd,” she said.  

Toward the end of the week-long visit, “Grandpa admitted to me that sometimes they sleep in rest stops or parking lots,” she said. “I had no idea about anything going on in Kalispell.”  

Since then, the two bounced between staying with family in Boise, Idaho and Utah for medical visits. Jim's long stints away from Kalispell concerned Preece.  

“My grandpa’s not that way. He didn’t go on long trips and different things like that. He just didn’t,” she said. 

The Korns were still trying to conduct cemetery business via phone throughout August, Epperly said. He had to cancel a monument engraving that they had ordered.  

Preece called the cemetery in September to check in on her grandfather. As far as she knew, he was still employed there. Epperly directed her to the Daily Inter Lake’s article on the stolen records, which is how she found out the two had been accused of stealing cemetery property.  

She started reaching out to immediate family members, which eventually stretched to distant relatives in search of Jim and Kevin’s whereabouts.  

“I just knew that I needed to do what I could to help my grandpa by trying to get the cemetery’s property returned,” Preece said. “I just want what’s best for my grandpa.”  

In October, Travis Bruyer caught wind of the Korns’ disappearance. The private investigator with 406 Investigations and Consulting, based out of Kalispell, had known Jim his whole life and felt a responsibility to check up on him and track the records down.  

“Everyone I ever loved and have buried is in [Conrad Cemetery]” he said. “It was just important to be involved.”  

Using Jim's cell phone data, Bruyer tracked the Korns to a residence in Boise where he attempted to talk to them but was not let in the door. Bruyer then called the Boise Police to conduct a welfare check, who determined they were safe.  

That same month, Preece recalled spending some of her childhood with distant relatives who lived outside of Libby. Kevin spoke of them several times over the years, and she figured they were just far enough out of the loop to be none the wiser about the events that unraveled in Kalispell.   

By the end of October, she reached out to them and found out Jim and Kevin had visited in July. She asked whether the two had left anything at their house.  

“They answered in the affirmative and told me I could come get anything at any time,” Preece said.  

Based on the phone call, Preece could tell that the family had no idea they were harboring stolen documents. Epperly and Bruyer picked up the records on Oct. 20.  

“[The documents] filled in the entire back end of an SUV, all the way up to the top,” Epperly said.  

Moving forward 

Now that they are back under cemetery supervision; Epperly is tasked with transferring sale information from each index card to a computer.  

“There’s thousands of these cards, so that’s my number one thing that I have to try to get digitized and preserved, because that is it. Those grave cards tell the entire story,” he said. “We’re going to be able to piece it all back together and tidy it up. It’s just going to take a little bit of time.” 

While Ellingson doesn’t know what exactly is on the computers that are still missing, he assumed they were used as another storage place for grave sales as a matter of redundancy.   

“The board had operated under the assumption that all sales were recorded, but until we get those computer records back, we don’t know,” he said. 

The cemetery plans to make its operations more transparent by crafting a website. Planned to go online in the spring, the site will allow people to search for interred bodies and obituaries, Epperly said.  

“Information has been kind of hidden, and you had to go to the cemetery office and Jim to get any information at all. So now it's going to be much more widely known,” he said.  

Moving digital will also ensure that the cemetery doesn’t end up in a similar situation again. 

“There’s a lot of things he did old school in terms of his record keeping. When you have a system that elaborate and it's all handwritten, and then in time when he’s not as capable as he was or as sharp as he was, the system kind of falls apart,” Epperly said.  

Why steal the records? 

When asked why the Korns did what they did, Ellingson said it may have been a reaction to feeling wronged by the cemetery for initiating a succession plan. He referred to written notes left behind among the records that indicated Jim’s outlook on the cemetery had soured.  

“I think [Jim] actually thought he was protecting the cemetery by taking the records,” Epperly said. “We’re left to speculate until we’re able to talk it through with him.”   

Preece suspected that her father was the driving force behind stealing the documents.  

“Having grown up and known Kevin, him being denied that job. I think the ransacking of the office was basically a tantrum,” she said.  

The cemetery is maintaining its civil lawsuit to recoup revenue lost from going nearly six months without selling any graves. The association also pressed criminal charges in October but plans to drop them after the records were found, according to Epperly.  

While the cemetery is recovering from a financial hit, the community also took an emotional one.  

“It’s been a little traumatic to our community, especially to those who are obviously older who are nearing the end of their lives, and they want everything in order,” Epperly said. 

Many of the calls to the burial ground also came from people concerned about Jim, who had been involved in the community for years. 

“People just can’t believe it any more than we could as to what happened,” Ellingson said. 

The cemetery can be reached at 406-955-9808.  

Reporter Jack Underhill can be reached at 758-4407 and [email protected].