Families defrauded by a former South Hadley funeral home director will be made “whole” financially through an agreement with the office of the state attorney general, his defense attorney said last week. Time will tell whether they can reassemble a shattered trust.
Last Friday, some of them watched as William W. Ryder was handcuffed and led from court to the Northampton jail. It was the apparent last chapter in one of the most grueling and offensive sagas of civil and criminal wrongdoing in recent Hampshire County history, a case in which the accused violated one of the most sacred trusts in modern life: dignified treatment of the deceased.
Many customers lost money, and a lot of it, collectively. Even worse, some others, mercifully fewer, had to endure the discovery that the bodies of their loved ones did not receive the prompt and respectful posthumous procedures their families had a right to expect from the Ryder Funeral Home.
Instead, Ryder, who stepped forward to run the business his parents Myron W. and Ruth E. Ryder founded more than half a century before, broke faith with his community. He allowed his personal dissolution and battle with alcohol to undermine standards his parents had long upheld.
There is an element of tragedy in that, at least to those willing to find any empathy for Ryder. When sentencing him, Judge Richard Carey appeared to reach for it. “It’s a case that I think is cloaked with sadness on all sides,” the judge said.
Carey seemed to show mercy in the way he structured Ryder’s sentence to the Hampshire County House of Correction, giving him two years in jail, but staying one year during five years of probation. The judge also allowed six-month sentences for improper disposal of a body to be served concurrently with the year in jail for larceny.
That is a modest sentence for a man who admitted to embezzling $431,625 from 69 clients over more than 13 years. That’s 69 counts of larceny over $250, in courtspeak. It took prosecutor Steven Gagne more than 10 minutes to read through all the charges.
While Ryder may have edged into wrongdoing due to his depression or substance abuse, as his attorney explained, it is important to note that he did not manage, over more than a decade, to ever come to terms with his fraud.
Instead, he used money coming into the business as a kind of personal ATM. Customers who wrote checks for prepaid funeral arrangements hoped they were acting with foresight to spare other family members the burden of this sober duty.
Ryder had years and years to see the error of his ways and to right the course of this business. He never did, and when caught he pleaded not guilty.
His fraud was only revealed when a client came to the funeral home in the town’s Falls section to inquire about a deceased family member. What that person found by accident, grisly evidence of neglect, was horrifying. The criminal charge later brought against Ryder, “improper disposition of a human body,” hardly captures the humiliation involved.
The state moved in to close the funeral home in May 2014; its own inspection program, as a Gazette investigation later showed, failed to catch improprieties in Ryder’s financial record-keeping.
As part of the sentencing, families had a chance to put into words the victimization they suffered.
Karen Eaton, of Granby, and her husband were among several of Ryder’s victims who were in the courtroom Friday.
“We put our trust in Mr Ryder,” Eaton said … “What he did to our trust, that hurt more than taking our money.”
The sight of Ryder being shackled and deprived of his freedom may enable the victims to look past the wrongdoing they and their family members suffered. They deserve to trust that when a funeral home pledges to take care of complicated matters in difficult times, that promise will be fulfilled.