grave robber

noun, one who plunders valuables from tombs or graves or who steals corpses after burial, as for illicit dissection (AH); see also grave robbing

“One of the grave robbers was asleep in the wagon with the cadaver.”

“Another one … were the grave robbers over here. The medical students always needed a cadaver from the graveyard. So they’d watch the paper and see who was newly interred … So over they go, and up comes a body, and the sun was coming up …  ‘Oh, geez, what’ll we do? Well we’ll hide it in the grain. Hide it in the granary here at this place’… Grampa comes out to get the grain for the horses in the morning and uncovers the body.”

“I can remember Tom telling when his father died. It was the year before we were married because he was waked here, and when it come twelve or one o’clock, he said something about going to bed, and old lady Jones was staying here and, I forget now, some other person that was here and, ‘Oh, well no, we gotta stay up’. And Tom said, ‘I’m not staying up. Nobody’s gonna stay up’. Well, they were gonna, and they stayed up, but in those days they stayed up because of grave robbers and stuff.”