Woman to be exhumed from parents' grave after family rift

A daughter is to be removed from the grave of her parents just five months after she was buried there because of a family rift.

The eviction from the grave in a churchyard in Polstead, Suffolk is the result of a bitter family dispute which ended in a Church of England judge ruling that the ashes of Joyce King, who was 89 when she died, must be exhumed. 

Evelyn Julier, Mrs Joyce's sister, and Robert Haynes and David Julier, her sons and grandsons of the late Mr and Mrs Haynes, argued that she should not have been buried there.

David Etherington QC, Chancellor in the diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, said there had been a rift which had "caused distress to a number of family members."

And he said he was satisfied that Mrs Joyce's daughters, Angela Munns and Gloria Worman, had not acted improperly in seeking to have their mother's ashes interred in the grave.

"I do not find it could conceivably be said that she was seeking to inter her mother in this plot secretly," he said.

But he said that the burial had been a mistake and that Mrs King's ashes should be removed from the grave. 

"The two sides of the family do not share the same view as to whether the remains of Joyce King should be interred in this plot and hold differing and strongly opposing views about it," he said.

He said that both sides of the family should have been consulted and that permission for the burial should then have been sought from the Church's Consistory Court, which did not happen. 

Mr Etherington said he accepted it was a "distressing outcome" for Mrs Joyce's daughters and their families, who had followed the advice they had been given by the church authorities.

He ruled that Mrs Joyce's family should be entitled to be present at the exhumation and that her ashes should then be kept in the church until a decision was reached as to what should be done with them.