Sacred Grounds Desecrated: How Murderers and Rapists Found Rest Among America's Fallen Heroes
by M. P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Once, society refused to let killers and rapists share the same earth as ordinary citizens. They dumped the bodies at crossroads or tossed them into ditches. Today the battle has moved to America’s most sacred ground—national cemeteries meant only for those who served with honor. When convicted and unconvicted monsters still end up buried among the fallen, families of the dead refuse to accept it. They dig. They petition. They force the government to open the graves.
Guillermo Aillon
Digging up the dead used to mean something different. Authorities once buried murderers, rapists, and common criminals at lonely crossroads or flung their corpses into ditches—anywhere but the consecrated ground where the rest of the community rested.
Congress finally drew a hard line in 1997, banning the burial of convicted murderers and rapists in veterans’ cemeteries specifically to keep Oklahoma City bomber and Army veteran Timothy McVeigh out of Arlington National Cemetery.
Yet some still slipped through.
In 2017, workers lifted the remains of Army Vietnam veteran Guillermo Aillon from a Middletown, Connecticut cemetery for a reason that should have blocked him from the start.
In August 1972, someone stabbed George and Bernice Montano and their daughter Barbara Aillon to death inside the family’s New Haven home.
Barbara, 28, had left Guillermo only days earlier and moved in with her parents. Investigators found all three victims still in their pajamas. A seven-month-old baby girl sat blood-splattered and screaming under a kitchen chair a few feet from her mother’s body—unharmed.
Guillermo Aillon, a Bolivian immigrant and community activist, had used a steak knife. After three jury trials, a court sentenced him in 1984 to 75 years to life. He died in prison in 2014. Only then did the truth catch up with his grave.
Michael Leshawn Anderson
Army veteran Michael Leshawn Anderson left a different trail of blood. In 2012, he opened fire inside the apartment building where he lived, shooting Alicia Koehl—wife, mother of two, and leasing-office worker—thirteen times. He wounded three others before turning the gun on himself. No one ever discovered a motive. The autopsy found no drugs. His family hid the murders when they applied for burial, and officials interred him at Fort Custer National Cemetery.
Alicia’s husband later said, “That monster murdered my wife. I have reason to believe she begged for her life. He showed her no mercy. Why should I show him any?”
In 2013, driven by the Koehl family’s fight and named for Alicia, a new federal law closed the loophole that had allowed people who committed murder or rape but died before trial to rest in military cemeteries. The next year, workers removed Anderson’s remains.
The application for burial in a national cemetery asks the family straight out whether the deceased committed murder or serious sexual offenses. Some states now force funeral directors to confirm the answer. Still, the system fails.
Gregory Lavon Curtis
Courtney Renee Dwyer, 28, left three young sons when a Navy veteran named Gregory Lavon Curtis, 54, shot her in the head. Police found her face down beside a car, items still in her hands as she unloaded the back seat. Curtis lay dead on the ground nearby.
Investigators recovered multiple pistol magazines from his apartment a short distance away. No connection linked the two strangers. Authorities released Courtney’s name immediately but refused to identify Curtis for weeks, citing the privacy of a suicide victim.
A detective told the family he needed a supervisor’s permission to speak the name. They finally learned it from a newspaper reporter. A quick search showed Curtis already rested in South Florida National Cemetery in Lake Worth Beach after twenty years of military service and full funeral honors from a Navy honor guard—at the church, not the cemetery.
Courtney’s step-grandmother Lynn Jones, daughter of a 94-year-old veteran and longtime advocate for military burial grounds, contacted the Department of Veterans Affairs and demanded the body come out. “Those grounds are for heroes, not for murderers,” she said.
She launched preservesacredgrounds.org and a petition demanding a permanent ban on anyone who has committed murder. “We all, as taxpayers, paid for her assailant’s burial,” she wrote. “Placing a murderer in the same soil where our American heroes rest dishonors the integrity of these sacred grounds.”
The cemetery claimed ignorance. A Newport News funeral home had simply checked the box stating Curtis had no serious criminal history.
Federal law bars capital murderers even if they die before prosecution, but second-degree murder—the charge Newport News police said they would have filed—falls outside that protection.
In October 2021, prosecutor Howard Gwynn told the VA the Ring-camera footage left no doubt. He would have charged first-degree murder. Whether Curtis’s remains will ever leave the cemetery remains unresolved.
As of 2026, he remains buried in a military cemetery. Why? Only a picture of a young Curtis in a Navy uniform exists. There is no reference as to whether he had any history of violence, just a description of his glowing military service.
Andrew Chabrol
Another Navy officer’s crimes still haunt Arlington. In 1991, Lt. Andrew Chabrol abducted, raped, and murdered Petty Officer 2nd Class Melissa Harrington, 27. Harrington had reported him for stalking and harassment. His superiors let him leave the service without consequence.
Chabrol filled a journal with plans he called “Operation Nemesis,” revenge for the complaints that destroyed his career and marriage. With an accomplice, he snatched Harrington from her Virginia Beach home while her husband was away, drove her to his house in Chesapeake, strapped her to a bed, and raped her. When she freed one hand and fought, he wrapped her head in duct tape and strangled her with a rope. Investigators found her body rolled in a rug inside his home.
Chabrol pleaded guilty and died in the electric chair in June 1993. His accomplice, Stanley J. Berkeley, received three life sentences, which he is still serving in Virginia.
Navy veteran Judi Farmer, an advocate for sexual-assault survivors, discovered the case after her own retirement and launched a petition to remove Chabrol from Arlington.
The Army, which operates the cemetery, never answered. Melissa’s widower, also a Navy veteran, learned only in 2021 that his wife’s killer rested among the honored dead. He was stunned. In 2023, after years of pressure, workers finally disinterred Chabrol’s remains.
Fernando Velazco Cota
In April 2026, officials removed the body of Fernando Velazco Cota from Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in Texas. A December 2025 federal law directed Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins to act. Cota, a Vietnam-era Army sergeant and convicted rapist, had long stood as a suspected serial killer.
On the night of October 14, 1984, traffic officers spotted Cota’s white Chevrolet van weaving on Highway 101 near San Carlos, California. He ignored commands, pulled a .22 revolver, and screamed, “Kill me! Kill me! I’m very sick. If you don’t kill me, I’ll kill myself!” Then he shot himself through the palate. In the back of the van lay the body of 21-year-old Kim Marie Dunham, an Orchard Supply Hardware employee missing only a day. He had beaten, raped, and strangled her, leaving her in underwear and stockings.
Inside Cota’s San Jose apartment, detectives discovered a closet converted into a torture chamber—metal brackets bolted to the floor for chains and manacles, walls covered in fingerprints, a peephole drilled in the door. They found false police badges, women’s clothing and shoes, and flyers Cota had distributed around San Jose State University seeking female student tenants. He had never registered as a sex offender despite a legal requirement.
Cota’s earlier history was a mystery. He was born in Mexico, and married Minerva Valdez in 1969. In 1970, he became a naturalized citizen. By the early 1970s, his behavior turned predatory.
In El Paso in 1975, he bound, bathed, and raped a nurse, then mailed her a note: “Sorry for the argument we had. Still loving you.” A court sentenced him to twenty years.
His wife divorced him in 1978.
He earned early parole in 1983 as an “exemplary” inmate, moved to Silicon Valley, and took a job as a computer programmer. Co-workers described him as strange and eccentric around women.
Investigators linked him to a cluster of unsolved murders of young women that autumn: Kelly Ralston, stabbed in her apartment; Gwendolyn Hoffman, strangled with a wire and left in her car trunk; Lori Leigh Miller, strangled near a road; Teresa Linda Sunder, dead of a head injury in an abandoned house. Miller had lived directly across from Cota. Sunder’s body turned up near his apartment. Only one case—Tania Zack—was later cleared when another man confessed. Authorities never eliminated Cota as the suspect in the rest.
Michael Alan Silka
One of Alaska’s most prolific killers rests in a place of honor.
Michael Silka’s grave sits inside the Sitka National Cemetery, a short stone’s throw from the Alaska Public Safety Academy. That proximity stings officers like Grant Cooper. Silka’s final victim was a state trooper.
A drifter who called himself a mountain man, Silka murdered nine Alaskans in 1984. He started with his neighbor on Chena Ridge outside Fairbanks. Weeks later, in a single afternoon, he killed or vanished seven residents of the remote Interior town of Manley Hot Springs.
Alaska State Troopers launched a manhunt. Trooper Troy Duncan flew in a helicopter that spotted Silka on the ground. The two men traded fire. Both died in the shootout.
Silka had served a short stint in the Army at Fort Wainwright a few years earlier. After his death, his father Frank requested that the cremated remains go to Sitka National Cemetery. Frank Silka himself died in 2007. The family has stayed silent about growing efforts to dig the killer up.
The Department of Veterans Affairs now lists Silka as one of at least seven deceased veterans nationwide whose remains could leave national cemeteries if the law finally permits it.
Each of these cases follows the same grim pattern: a man who once wore the uniform commits an unforgivable crime, dies, and somehow reaches hallowed ground. Families of the victims refuse to let the story end there. They dig up the records, force new laws, and finally force the graves open. The soil of national cemeteries belongs to those who earned it. Murderers and rapists do not.