They Buried the Wrong Man in Her Dad’s Led Zep Shirt & Grave

Before Clifford Zaner died at the age of 72, he told his family that he wanted to be buried in black jeans and his favorite Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

The retired computer programmer was known for his love of classic rock and his “big, Burt Reynolds-style mustache,” according to his daughter Stacy Holzman. “It was even part of my eulogy, that mustache,” Holzman told The Daily Beast.

T-shirt aside, the burial was to be a traditional Jewish affair, at the family gravesite at a cemetery on Long Island.

However, someone else’s corpse wound up in Zaner’s coffin, in Zaner’s favorite clothes, in a plot beside Zaner’s late mother—where the stranger has apparently remained since March 2, when Holzman and her relatives unwittingly said their final goodbyes to someone they never even knew.

“I knew something was wrong the day of the funeral,” Holzman said. “There were red flags when we viewed the body, huge red flags. The first thing I noticed when they opened the casket was no mustache… The first thing I saw was just a bare upper lip, and I couldn’t stop focusing on that.”

Still, an embalmed body can look very different from the way the person appeared in life, and an anguished Holzman said the funeral director convinced her that everything was as it should be.

“It would have taken five minutes to check,” Holzman went on. “They should’ve checked before it even got that far. They never asked me for a picture. I’ve never been through this before. I was so grief-stricken, it never even occurred to me.”

But her gut reaction, it turned out, was well-founded. And more than three weeks later, Holzman and her sister, Megan Zaner, “had to endure a second funeral service with the proper corpse of their father,” according to a $60 million lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York State Supreme Court. In a statement to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson for Star of David Memorial Chapels, one of the two entities blamed for the error, said they were “reviewing all our protocols and will make any recommended changes to ensure the correct identification of family members.”

“We deeply regret any sorrow experienced by the family for the mistake made by the funeral home in South Carolina,” the statement said. “After the family confirmed the identification of the deceased at the cemetery, the burial proceeded. When the funeral home in South Carolina notified us of their mistake, we took swift and decisive action to contact the family and offer whatever services needed to lessen their grief.”

The other provider named in the lawsuit, Fletcher Funeral & Cremation Service, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The shocking mixup meant the real Cliff Zaner languished in storage at an out-of-town funeral chapel for nearly a full month, in contravention of the tenets of traditional Jewish law requiring a speedy burial.

Zaner began working in the tech industry during the 1970s, Holzman said. He designed custom software packages for chiropractors and veterinarians, eventually growing tired of the self-employed life and accepting a position with a company in South Florida. When he retired about a year ago, Zaner moved to Greenville, South Carolina, to live with Holzman and her son.

On Feb. 25, Zaner passed away in a local hospital after a battle with acute respiratory distress syndrome and heart failure. That same day, Holzman and her sister contacted Star of David, in West Babylon, New York, to make funeral arrangements, their lawsuit states.

Star of David contracted with Fletcher, a funeral home in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, to transport the body to Long Island, the lawsuit explains. On Feb. 26, Fletcher dressed a body in Zaner’s prized Zeppelin shirt, placed it in a coffin, and shipped it 750 miles north.

Although Jewish custom dictates that a body must be buried within 24 hours, allowances are generally made for the realities of modern life, Holzman said on Wednesday, noting that much of the family lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and would have to travel. The funeral was scheduled for March 2, four days later.

When Holzman arrived to view the body, the clean-shaven face staring back at her was the initial clue that things were amiss.

“And then the next thing that I saw was that there was an autopsy scar going all the way across the forehead,” Holzman said. “He wasn’t supposed to have an autopsy. I was with him when he passed, so to see a body with an autopsy scar freaked me out… It looked like the stitches on a baseball. I haven’t slept much since that day. Every time I close my eyes, that’s what I see.”

The funeral director “dismissed it,” insisting that a shave and an autopsy were “standard practice,” according to Holzman, who said the funeral director then closed the casket, got her phone, and left the room. When she returned 15 or 20 minutes later, she continued preparing for the ceremony as if nothing was wrong, Holzman said, adding that she assumed the funeral director had managed to confirm that “everything was in order.”

“I would like to know what she was told to make her come back and say, ‘Nope, it’s him. Let’s go,’” Holzman’s attorney, Philip Rizzuto, told The Daily Beast.

Throughout the viewing and the funeral itself, Holzman and her sister were assured again and again that the body was their father’s, Holzman said, a point further emphasized throughout the lawsuit.

A graveside service was held at Mt. Ararat Cemetery in Lindenhurst, New York. And although Holzman and her sister say they still had doubts, they allowed themselves to believe their dad was indeed the one being lowered into the ground. At that point, the sisters felt they had no choice but to go through with the burial, according to Rizzuto.

Nearly two weeks passed without another word. Then, on March 13, a Fletcher employee called Holzman from South Carolina and said her father’s body was still at the funeral home, meaning the one in the family plot was never his, Rizzuto said.

The blunder came to light as Zaner’s body at Fletcher was about to be cremated, Rizzuto said. Holzman immediately went to confirm the remains were indeed her dad’s, and right away set out to provide him a proper burial. Shaken to her core, Holzman said she simply couldn’t handle the thought of returning to Mt. Ararat to go through the process all over again. So a group of cousins in Jacksonville started a new family plot nearby and made arrangements to bury Zaner there—but without his Led Zeppelin tee, which remained on the other corpse.

“At that point, we needed to get him buried, and get his body blessed and cleansed, and make sure that things were done right the second time,” Holzman said. “My uncle had talked to Star of David, who said they would be refunding me for the cost of the funeral… But they never refunded the money, so I still had to go out-of-pocket for the second one.”

In all, Holzman claims she spent nearly $30,000 for the two burials.

“They still have a plaque out there with my dad’s name on it, saying that he’s buried there,” she said.

Astonishingly, this is not the first time Rizzuto has dealt with such a situation. In one instance, he said, the decedent’s children were “so mortified, they didn’t even tell the rest of the family that this happened—they just had a private funeral to properly bury their mother.”

In a few months, Holzman is supposed to be back at Mt. Ararat Cemetery to attend her grandmother’s unveiling ceremony.

“Nobody wants to go up there,” she said. “We’re all just traumatized, we don’t know what to do.”

By telling her story, Holzman is hopeful others might be spared a similar fate.

“My last memory of my father was that I didn’t recognize him,” she said. “They told me it was him, and it wasn’t. It’s so traumatizing to think the last time I saw my dad, I didn’t know who it was.”