Woman sentenced for digging up grave looking for 'will'

LANCASTER, N.H. (AP) — 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 1 ½ to three years in prison.

Melanie Nash, 53, didn’t speak during her recent sentencing. She told police last year she dug up the grave “with respect” and her father “would be okay with it.”

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.

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.”