Karen Greenlee: The Sacramento Embalmer Who Stole a Hearse and a Body
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On December 17, 1979, a 23 year old apprentice embalmer named Karen Greenlee climbed into a hearse in Sacramento, California, and drove off with a dead man in the back. She wasn't supposed to go anywhere near a funeral home. She was supposed to deliver John L. Mercure's body to his own burial. Instead she vanished for two days, and when police finally caught up with her, they found a suicide attempt, a stolen corpse, and a four and a half page confession that would make her the most infamous female necrophile in American history.
Who Was John Mercure
Mercure was 33 years old and had been found dead in his Sacramento apartment on December 10, 1979, in what was believed at the time to be an intentional overdose. A week later his body was in Greenlee's care at Memorial Lawn Mortuary, awaiting the private burial his family had arranged. He had no idea, and neither did they, that he'd become the centre of a national scandal before he ever made it into the ground.
A Funeral That Never Happened
Greenlee worked at Memorial Lawn Mortuary in Sacramento, learning the embalming trade. On the day in question she was behind the wheel of a 1975 Cadillac hearse, carrying the body of Mercure, a 33 year old man who'd died the week before, to his private burial. According to Lynne Stopkewich, who later made a film based on Greenlee's story, Greenlee actually arrived at the intended location. Then she spotted Mercure's grieving family waiting for the hearse. Instead of parking, she "did a big donut and took off," in Stopkewich's words, leaving the family standing there without a body to bury.
Sacramento police launched a search. Greenlee and the hearse turned up days later near Alleghany, a remote community in Sierra County, more than a hundred miles from the mortuary. She'd overdosed on around 20 tablets of Tylenol with codeine. Dr. Robert Rocheleau, the physician who treated her, later described her as "extremely depressed." She survived.
The Letter That Became Evidence
What made the case impossible to bury quietly was the letter Greenlee left behind. Four and a half pages long, it was written as both a confession and, by her own account, a goodbye. In it she admitted to having sex with somewhere between 20 and 40 male corpses during her time in the funeral industry, describing the behaviour as something closer to compulsion than choice. She wrote about a fear of relationships and romance, framed her attraction to the dead as an addiction she couldn't shake, and referred to herself repeatedly as a "morgue rat." The letter was never meant for a courtroom. It ended up read into evidence anyway, and lines from it have circulated in true crime writing ever since.
She wrote that she preferred young men in their twenties, the ones she found least intimidating and, in her words, most aesthetically appealing.
A Charge That Didn't Quite Fit the Crime
Here's the strange legal wrinkle at the centre of the whole case. California had no law against necrophilia in 1979. None. So despite a written confession to dozens of encounters with corpses, prosecutors couldn't charge Greenlee with anything related to what she'd actually admitted doing. Instead she was charged with theft of the hearse and interfering with a funeral. She pleaded to those charges and received 11 days in jail and a $255 fine, a sentence so mismatched to the substance of her confession that it became a talking point in its own right.
The mismatch wasn't lost on Mercure's family. His mother, Marian Gonzales, sued Greenlee and Memorial Lawn Mortuary for $1 million over the emotional distress caused by the theft of her son's body. At the civil hearing, the defense psychiatrist argued the incident hadn't had "much of a lasting impact" on Gonzales, pointing to her history of alcoholism and depression, while a former colleague of Greenlee's testified there'd been "no reason to suspect" her of anything, describing her as quiet and competent. The case eventually settled for $117,000 in combined general and punitive damages.
The Exhumation Greenlee Watched From a Field
Gonzales was so unsettled by what had happened to her son that she had him exhumed and moved. According to Greenlee's own account, given years later in an interview with CVLT Nation, she found out about the exhumation order by accident, reading case files during one of her after hours break ins at a different funeral home she was working at by then. Gonzales had reportedly said she wouldn't bury her own cat in that cemetery after what happened. On the day of the exhumation, Greenlee snuck out into a field across from the burial site and watched from a distance as workers dug Mercure's body up and handed him over to another mortician. He was shipped back to Michigan, presumably to family who wanted him as far from Sacramento, and from her, as possible. It's a detail that rarely makes it into shorter summaries of the case, but it says a lot about how far Greenlee's fixation went even after her arrest.
What Came Before Sacramento
Greenlee's own father, Al Meyers, later gave an interview offering a darker backstory to the case. He said his daughter had been molested at age eight and raped by a teacher at fourteen, while the family was living in Sonoma County. Afterward the family relocated to Colfax, California, where Greenlee finished high school. By the time of her arrest she was married but living separately from her husband, and had taken a job as a motel desk clerk in the southwestern United States, though she was unemployed again by the time her case went to trial. She'd later trace her fascination with death back even further, describing childhood rituals like holding funerals for dead pets.
The 1987 Interview That Made Her Notorious
Greenlee's case might have faded into a footnote if she hadn't agreed, in 1987, to an unusually candid interview with writer Jim Morton for the anthology Apocalypse Culture, published by Feral House. The chapter was titled "The Unrepentant Necrophile," and the name fit. Greenlee described the physical realities of what she did in blunt, matter of fact language, and talked openly about being drawn to the smell and temperature of the recently embalmed. She told Morton her family's reaction had been mixed. One brother wanted nothing to do with her afterward. The other stayed supportive but still had to ask how she'd done it. She gave a similarly frank interview to CVLT Nation around the same period, describing a boyfriend who found out about her case before the trial and slapped her, telling her she wasn't even a woman. Talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael reportedly taped an interview with Greenlee too, but never aired it, allegedly because Greenlee refused to perform any remorse for the cameras.
From Confession to Cult Film
Greenlee's story didn't stay contained to true crime circles. It inspired Barbara Gowdy's 1992 short story We So Seldom Look On Love, which itself became the basis for the 1996 Canadian film Kissed, directed by Stopkewich and starring Molly Parker as a young embalmer drawn into the same compulsion. Parker's performance won Best Actress at the Genie Awards, Canada's equivalent of the Oscars at the time. Greenlee also contributed a chapter to The Gospel of Filth, a book on the extreme metal band Cradle of Filth, and for a stretch in the mid nineties she reportedly toured North America giving talks on necrophilia and sexual liberation alongside readings of her poetry. It's a strange afterlife for a case that started with a $255 fine, but it fits a pattern true crime followers will recognise from cases like Adeline Watkins, the woman who claimed to love Ed Gein. A crime built on a taboo around death tends to outlive the original headlines by decades.
Where She Went Next
At some point after the wave of publicity from the Apocalypse Culture chapter, Greenlee reportedly changed her name, moved to a new city, and stopped giving interviews altogether. Writers who've since tried to track her down come up empty. Devin Faraci, writing for Birth.Movies.Death in 2013, put it bluntly: nobody seems to know what became of her. What's left is a case file that still gets cited in discussions of paraphilia and gender, precisely because female necrophiles are so rarely documented. Roughly nine in ten known necrophiles are men, which is part of why Greenlee's confession drew the scrutiny it did. It wasn't just what she admitted to. It was who was admitting it.
A Case That Exposed a Legal Gap
The most lasting impact of the Greenlee case may be procedural rather than personal. Her prosecution exposed a genuine hole in California law, one that meant a documented pattern of necrophilia carried no criminal weight on its own. States across the country eventually moved to close similar gaps, adding specific statutes against sexual acts involving the dead. It's a rare case where a four page letter never meant for a judge ended up nudging the law itself. Karen Greenlee never set out to become a legal footnote or a cult film's inspiration. She was an apprentice embalmer who wrote what she thought would be her last words, and instead handed investigators, journalists, and eventually filmmakers, a case they couldn't stop returning to.
