commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Perhaps you’ve toyed with the idea of murdering your wife or husband. After all, no one can deny the fact that our partners do offend from time-to-time. Of course most of us manage to salve our battle wounds and make up with our spouses whether we want to of not. But suppose you can’t? Suppose you have no choice other than to murder your “better half”? How do you do it?
Actually, it’s simple but only if you run a funeral parlor. So if you’re not an undertaker, you might as well forget about it (and whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of hiring someone to do it for you. It never works out the way it’s supposed to). If you are an undertaker, however (and I say with a straight face that I’ve always wished that a malign fate had smiled more kindly upon me and made me an undertaker), you have a fighting chance of murdering your significant other and getting away with it.
At least it is rumored that Harold Lynch, the alleged funeral director of the Thomas Hites Funeral Home in Chicago, thought the odds were in his favor of murdering his wife and getting away with it based on a seemingly foolproof plan he’d cooked up.
Of course, to execute his scheme, he needed a cooperative third party – in this case a dead client, which is a commodity funeral directors can typically obtain without much difficulty.
A Chicago family was grieving the loss of their son, as they said their final goodbye’s at his funeral.
Then something strange and unnatural happened, something so macabre that the grieving family no doubt thought they had been transported into some awful Edgar Allan Poe story. One of the grieving family members, who reportedly wishes to remain anonymous, recounts:
“We decided to stay for a bit after the funeral, to let it all sink in. When all of a sudden we heard screams, but we could not figure out where they were coming from. We realized it was coming from under the grave where we just laid my brother. We ran and got help.”
As fast as their legs could carry them, I might add.
Other witnesses apparently corroborate that it was approximately 15 minutes after the body of the boy was laid to rest, when the bereaved family began to hear the blood-curdling screams.
The Daily Buzz Live continues:
Police say when firefighters arrived, they received permission from the family to dig up the freshly dug grave. As they did, the screams became louder and louder.
When they reached the coffin, they pried it open, to find 34 year old Linda Lynch inside.
According to a police spokesperson, it was one of the most twisted scenarios they’d ever encountered (and as you know a lot of weird things happen in ChiTown). What apparently happened this time around is alleged Funeral Director Lynch had ingeniously decided to murder his bothersome wife Linda and then pull the old switcheroo, substituting Linda’s corpse for the corpse of a “validly dead” client. The bereaved family would be none the wiser and Harold would to rid of the wretched woman forever. All that would remain would be disposing of the “validly dead” client quickly and surreptitiously.
So here’s what apparently happened. A brief but poignant funeral service was held for the “validly deceased” in the main hall at the Hite Funeral 
Home, with Harold presiding. Then as the mourners headed for the graveyard to witness the closed coffin ceremony, Harold quickly wheeled the coffin back to the cool room, popped the “validly deceased” out of it and replaced him with Linda whom he had fed a walloping dose of arsenic and who appeared to be quite dead. Then he wrapped the validly dead client in a blanket and stashed him in a storage closet.
After that it was easy. Off to the old graveyard and into the ground. It all went off without a hitch except for one serious problem. Linda apparently had the constitution of Keith Richards and woke up 15 minutes after she was six feet under. Thus, it’s quite understandable that she started screaming like a banshee.
Linda is reportedly in stable condition now at the hospital “undergoing an intense detoxification process.” According to some reports, it often takes several days for arsenic to leave the system and can take months in extreme cases. Considering that Linda reportedly ingested enough of the substance to pole-axe a steer, I imagine it will be awhile before she’s back on her mettle.
As for Harold Lynch, first-degree-murder is no joke. His big mistake was resorting to arsenic. Cyanide is far more effective and harder to detect. But he came close to pulling it off. It’s not something I recommend, however. It’s probably better to steel your nerves and start writing checks to a marriage counselor, or if all else fails, to your friendly divorce lawyer.