LANCASTER, N.H. — A New Hampshire woman who told police she dug up her father’s grave in search of his “real will” but found only vodka and cigarettes has been sentenced to 1½ to three years in prison.
Melanie Nash didn’t speak during her sentencing Tuesday. She told police last year she dug up the grave “with respect” and her father “would be OK with it.”
The 53-year-old Nash was one of four accused in the plan to open Eddie Nash’s vault in Colebrook, then rifle through his casket last May in a scene a prosecutor compared to an Edgar Allan Poe story. Two pleaded guilty and one was acquitted.
Police said Nash felt she was shorted in her share of the inheritance after her father died in 2004. But no will was found in the casket.
Nash’s lawyer asked for a jail sentence of up to a year, with home confinement after a few months. Family members testified that Nash suffers from chronic pain.
The Caledonian Record reports Judge Peter Bornstein noted the smashed concrete vault that housed the coffin of Eddie Nash and the disturbed body found the next morning.
“The patrolman said the gravesite of Eddie Nash did not look right,” Bornstein said. “That is the understatement of the century.”
The remains have since been re-interred at the cemetery.
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