Box 310: A Life Left Behind
Md. Government Employee Struggles to Find Final Resting Place for Woman's Ashes

By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 15, 2007

Of hundreds of brown cardboard boxes pulled from a vault in the Unclaimed Property Unit of the Maryland comptroller's office last year for auction on eBay, the contents of No. 310 have remained on a shelf, untouched.

The opera glasses inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the gold bead necklace, the cameo inscribed "to Donald, from Grandma," the tiny wedding band and the coin collection commemorating the British royal wedding of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles on July 29, 1981 -- these once-treasured keepsakes are available to the highest online bidder. But there's something else the property office can't part with, not yet: a yellowed, plastic box the size of a carton of cereal.

For 12 years, a woman's ashes have rested inside, packed in a blue-and-white Priority Mail box from Smithsburg Crematorium. They sat in the woman's safe deposit box at Allfirst Bank in Frederick, where in life she saved what she valued most and in death has all but vanished.

Four years ago, after the rent on the safe deposit box had gone unpaid for three years, the woman's remains arrived at Lynn Hall's doorstep. The manager of Maryland's unclaimed property receives as many as 600 boxes every year from banks. If her staff members are unable to unite a box's contents with an owner or heir within a year, they're sold. But Hall, a small, chatty woman with curly gray hair and a fierce devotion to her job, saw in the ashes an unsolved case that nagged at her.

In a state as transient as Maryland, which has a large military and government presence and a growing population of immigrants, as many as 75,000 uncashed checks, stock dividends, insurance policies and mementos land in the comptroller's office every year. But in 18 years of sifting through people's personal effects, Hall had never encountered a story quite like this: not just a life's treasures, but a life itself. Why had it landed before her?

"We consider this a little too personal to let it go," she said in her Baltimore office as she gently opened five plastic evidence bags containing the woman's ashes, jewelry, papers and other mementos. A label on the ashes read: "Barbara B. de Gruchy, Sept. 29, 1995," marking the day she was cremated for $700. De Gruchy was 86 and had lived in Frederick.

Hall shook the box and quietly said, "I've never opened it. They're probably in a bag." But for four years Hall has wondered why this woman was forgotten as if she had never lived, and what to do with her remains. There seemed to be no finality to de Gruchy's life, and that unsettled Hall.

It has happened before. Jeff Davis, whose family business handled de Gruchy's cremation, has at least 50 sets of remains in the closet of his office next to Camp David. Families paid to cremate their loved ones but never collected the remains.

At the comptroller's office, de Gruchy's ashes and unclaimed keepsakes became Unclaimed Property No. 911746 in a voluminous advertising supplement that appeared in newspapers across the state in spring 2003.

No one claimed them. So Hall's staff members put de Gruchy's name (pronounced de-groo-shee) on several Web sites the state uses to locate owners. The office tried to match income tax records with her name. But the trail was cold: She had been dead almost 10 years.

Then Hall took over the case. "There's a story in every box," she said. "I wondered what this one was." In the papers inside Box No. 310, she noticed real estate contracts signed two months apart, shortly before de Gruchy's death. In that short time, her signature went from weak to barely legible. Hall concluded that de Gruchy's health had rapidly declined. "Apparently she must have gotten sick, and maybe unexpectedly and traumatically," she said.

Among the papers was a lease for the safe deposit box signed by Henry de Gruchy. He co-signed the lease and placed his mother's ashes inside, but his name wasn't on the bank documents. He had a Mount Airy address and apparently worked as a trucker in the late 1990s, during which his address is listed as a truck stop on Interstate 70. Six weeks ago, Hall's staff members sent him a claim form advising him to contact the comptroller's office to claim his mother's property.

"I can't imagine that he doesn't remember the ashes being in that box," Hall said.

She has heard nothing from Henry de Gruchy, who is 68. A search by the comptroller's office turned up two motor vehicle warrants and an address and phone number in Falling Waters, W.Va. Recent phone messages left there have gone unreturned. But few of Maryland's 715,000 outstanding property claims get this attention -- the comptroller's office dug deeper only after a reporter began asking questions.

This is what public records reveal about Barbara Blanke de Gruchy:

She was a homemaker, born Jan. 30, 1909, in Greenwich, Conn. In 1984, she moved to a tiny ranch house in Frederick that she purchased for $61,000. Her husband had died three years earlier in Connecticut.

She had two children, Henry and Anne. A search for Anne de Gruchy turned up no one in the United States. On her deathbed, Barbara de Gruchy signed a three-page will dated Sept. 27, 1995, in which she left her estate to her son. She was estranged from her daughter, to whom she left nothing. On the day she was cremated, her house at 313 Heather Ridge Dr. sold for $82,000.

Her husband was British. She had a brother, Donald C. Blanke, whose initials were inscribed in her velvet jewelry box.

Her neighborhood of small, semidetached ranches and ramblers, built in the late 1970s for workers in a growing city on the edges of Washington, has turned over. A young mother from Mexico pushing a stroller, a clerk at the nearby Wal-Mart, a trainer at a health club -- these are the residents starting out now.

The Frederick City volunteer fire chief, de Gruchy's neighbor since 1978, said he can't recall her.

At her death, a brief notice appeared in a local newspaper. "She was the wife of the late Henry H.E.B. de Gruchy. Born Jan 30, 1909, in Greenwich, Conn, she was a homemaker," it read. "She had attended Brook Hill United Methodist Church." Her funeral was private.

Her dying wish, according to her will, was to have her ashes placed next to the remains of her husband, buried in the de Gruchy family grave at St. Andrew's Church in Steyning in the county of West Sussex in England.

"Maybe her son said, "I'll deal with this a little later,' " Hall said. She slid the plastic bag protecting the ashes back into the vault.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.