By John Christian Hopkins
Did someone make a grave mistake?
Between the old Chef’s Palace on Center Street and a former mortuary building at 30 North/200 West in Kanab a tombstone has been quietly resting for some four decades.
“I was just curious about the man, and why the stone was there,” Mel Mognett told the Southern Utah News.
The man – at least the name on the stone – was Ernest Donald Briggs, a U.S. Navy vet from World War II. The birthdates read 1930-1976.
Mognett, the president of J.D.M. Sand and Rock, Inc., of Fredonia, found the stone when he was contracted to do demolition work on the old Chef’s Palace. He found the headstone lying flat on the ground beneath an old piece of carpeting.
But, was there a man lying flat in the ground beneath it?
“The only way to know for sure is with a shovel,” Kanab City Police Chief Tom Cram mused. He first heard about the stone from Dr. Stephen Burst. Who owns the former mortuary building, asked the chief about it.
Is Briggs buried there? And, if so, could whoever buried him be thrown in the brig?
“I doubt if there’s a body buried there,” said mortician Jeff Mosdell. The federal government provides headstones for veterans, Mosdell said. If an error is made, a new stone would be sent and the old one discarded, he added. “The stone with mistakes was often just tossed out back of the mortuary.”
Sometimes, Mosdell said, the stone might end up being used as “decorative stepping stones in the yard.”
With current laws allowing burials only in approved cemeteries, there probably is no body beneath the marker for Ernest Donald Briggs.
But trying to find out who Briggs was breathes new life into the mystery.
For starters, if Briggs was indeed a World War II Navy vet, he must have been in the Kiddie Corps. He would have been only 15 when the war ended!
Now, he might have lied about his age, as many did – including Hollywood star Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in U.S. history.
A search of Kanab records by the Southern Utah News found no one who knew or was related to Briggs. And no one by that name is buried in the Kanab City Cemetery.
If Briggs was a veteran, maybe he would have been involved with the local American Legion Post 69? But Post Chaplain Lloyd Laycook could find no indication of a veteran named Ernest Briggs having any contact with the legion.
Utah’s State Records Department there has never been a birth or death certificate for an Ernest Briggs in Utah!
Just when it looked like the search for Ernest Briggs would come to a dead-end, a new page was turned.
Though there was no match in Utah, but Heidi Stringham of the Research Center of the Utah State Archives and Utah State History uncovered a clue.
An Ernest Briggs died in Page on Dec. 2, 1976!
According to the Social Security Death Index, Briggs was born in 1928 – meaning he might fudged his age and enlisted at 17, just as Audie Murphy had done! But, wait, the Department of Veterans Affairs has him being born in 1930.
Was Briggs born in 1928 or 1930? The only thing the two federal departments agree on was that the day of birth was March 14.
Stringham further discovered that Briggs’ social security number was issued in Washington State. She found no evidence that Briggs had lived or ever been in Kanab.
An earnest search of the Page Cemetery turned up no Ernest Briggs to match what he know – or do we? – about our mysterious vet. But there is a marker for Donald Briggs, whose birth and death dates match the marker found in Kanab.
Maybe dead men tell no tales, but sometimes they do leave an unsolved mystery behind.