Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Shocking video shows man with 48-year grudge urinating on ex-wife’s grave

‘We have weeks and months of evidence’, family claims

Gino Spocchia
Monday 26 September 2022 19:38 BST
Related video: Arlington Cemetery in Virginia is running out of room

A distraught man has spoken out after he caught his mother’s ex-husband urinating and leaving faeces on her grave on a nearly daily basis for several months.

In a video uploaded to Facebook last week, Dumont, New Jersey, resident Michael Andrew Murphy said he had captured a man desecrating his mother’s grave for months on end, as Daily Voice reported.

He wrote: “A man from Bergen county New Jersey has been leaving bags of poo and p***** on my mothers tombstone almost every morning like a normal routine, assisted by his wife also,”

“We have weeks and months of evidence,” Mr Murphy added, along with a video showing the alleged culprit relieving himself on a grave at the Tappan Reformed Church Cemetery in New York’s Rockland County,

The footage was captured on a mobile phone positioned by Mr Murphy on a nearby tombstone earlier this month after a months-long effort by cemetery officials and the family to record the alleged culprit, with the New Jersey resident saying previous surveillance footage had been too unclear, the report said.

On 18 September, however, Mr Murphy was able to get a clear view of the alleged culprit, who “No one in my family has had contact with him since 1976 so how he found my mothers grave site we are not sure. but this stems back to a problem almost 50 years ago,” he wrote on Facebook.

He told the Daily Voice that he first suspected the man after he passed by his mother’s grave on his way home from work in April to find a zip-locker bag with faeces inside, which he thought belonged to a dog owner.

His sisters, however, found a similar bag in July on a visit to their mother’s grave, and police and cemetery officials assisted the family with investigating the zip-locker bags, which they believed the man – as an employee of a nearby deli counter – had easy access to.

While that individual seen in the footage has not been named, Mr Murphy said he was hoping to file a lawsuit for damages after getting specialists to clean his mother’s tombstone.

Nor had the Orangetown Police Department filed charges against the man, who Mr Murphy said he witness get issued a ticket for public urination.

“It’s been hard to sleep. I’ll start to fall out and suddenly I wake up,” he said to the Daily Voice. “I don’t care who you are. This has to make you sick. This happening to our mother….it’s horrible.”

Orangetown police have been approached for comment by The Independent.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in