Alistair Cooke's bones stolen - not kidding

In the creepiest story I've ever run across, the bones of the late, great Alistair Cooke appear to have been stolen prior to his cremation.

Cooke, the longtime host of BBC's Letter From America, and PBS's Alistair Cooke's America, died of cancer (which had spread to his bones) in March 2004. He was 95.

The story is that a ring of body-part thieves, including surgeons, mortuary workers, and "entrepreneurs", surgically removed his bones prior to his cremation. His family was given the ashes of his remaining, um, remains, which they then spread around Central Park in New York.

Needless to say, his family is outraged. Also needless to say, the theft of cancerous bones from an elderly body for reuse in transplants violates about a billion laws of both man and God.