Spencerport, N.Y. - Bob and Muriel Wilson bought their $2,000 headstone from Schilling Memorial last July even though they are both very much alive but the headstone never showed up.
"You know you trust people, we were brought up that way and he seemed like and exceptionally good man," says 82-year-old Muriel Wilson.
Muriel and Bob's children live in Arizona, so they decided that taking care of their own funeral arrangements would be the best option for their family. That brought them to Mel Schilling's custom headstone business in Spencerport, where Mel accepted a $2,000 check from the Wilsons and in return said he would make them a headstone for the cemetery plot which they had purchased in Henrietta.
"I paid him that same day that we signed the contract," Bob recalls.
Months went by, phone calls went unreturned and their headstone never showed up. By October, the Wilsons and close to a dozen other families learned Mel Schilling had died and never completed the work he'd been paid to do.
"You know at our age, it's kind of hard to lose $2,000," Muriel adds.
Most of Schilling's customers had put their money down already, thousands of dollars in some cases that no one can seem to account for anymore.
"They had paid Schilling for monuments and they weren't completed, so the money was lost," says Tena Kelly who runs Hilton Monument Co. in Hilton.
Kelly and her husband have helped at least 17 former customers of Schilling's start their order from scratch, a process that isn't cheap.
"We helped them by cutting the cost and in some cases putting our own money in," Tena explains.
13WHAM tried reaching the Schilling family multiple times for this story, but our phone calls went unreturned.
