For decades, their work has brought Crown Hill Cemetery's 'people museum' to life

Editor's note: This story was originally published in 2022. We are republishing it as part of our fall coverage.

Among the graves of President Benjamin Harrison, several vice presidents and scores of well-known Hoosiers, a monarch butterfly named Warren is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery.

On a chilly autumn day years ago, Marty Davis found a dying butterfly in the sand at Warren Dunes State Park in Northern Indiana. His wings were torn, but when she cradled him in her hand, he came to life.

Marty has spent much of her life caring for others — whether that’s raising monarch butterflies, rescuing house rabbits or helping make Crown Hill Cemetery a place of remembrance for grieving people.

So, naturally, Marty brought the butterfly home, nursed him to health and named him for the beach where he was found.

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Despite his infirmities, Warren lived for weeks — without Marty, he surely would have died that day. When he passed, she buried him on her plot at Crown Hill.

Marty, 65, retired in early August after 40 years at Crown Hill Cemetery and Funeral Home, many of which were spent with the cemetery’s Heritage Foundation.

Marty’s husband, 69-year-old Tom, gives tours and is the cemetery’s historian in his spare time. He retired, on the same day as his wife, from his full-time job as an accountant.

For Marty and Tom, Crown Hill isn’t just a place of work — it’s a site of history and natural beauty to be treasured and preserved. It’s full of stories — a “people museum,” as Tom likes to say.

“These people just aren't somebody underneath the ground with a headstone on top,” Marty said. “They lived lives.”

40 years of history

Marty and Tom have been married for 44 years, and Crown Hill has been a presence in their lives for nearly as long. They met in college at Indiana State University, through a Christian fellowship group. In 1982, when they moved to Indianapolis with their church, Marty advertised herself for employment in The Indianapolis Star. She got hired at Crown Hill, starting work in the service yard.

“I wasn't really looking for any kind of specific job when I started here,” she said.

That’s been a theme over the years. Marty is a renaissance woman: public relations and tour coordinator, graphic designer, photographer, social media manager, event planner.

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Her contributions to the Crown Hill Heritage Foundation have been invaluable, longtime co-worker Marianne Randjelovic said.

“When she needed and wanted to develop a new skill and utilize that skill to further promote and enhance the cemetery experience, she did it,” Randjelovic, vice president of advancement at the foundation, told IndyStar. “Whatever she set her mind to, she accomplished.”

Their enthusiasm for Crown Hill and its history is one of many shared passions — hiking and traveling, appreciation for living creatures (they’re part of the Indiana House Rabbit Society) and family — their son, Zane, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters.

Tom got “roped in,” as Marty put it, to giving tours of Crown Hill sometime in the mid-1990s. His English degree, along with his passion for history, books and research, made him an ideal guide.

“If you want to know where something is, ask Tom,” Randjelovic said. “He’s just like a walking encyclopedia of (the) cemetery.”

Tom and Marty work on social media, and the Crown Hill newsletter. Tom will write and Marty pulls double duty, editing and sometimes writing. Tom’s creative streak will sometimes get in the way of Marty’s straightforward preferences — she’s not harsh, he said, but she can be particular.

“Because she takes ownership of the cemetery, sometimes she edits me that way,” Tom said.

Marty has also captured her love for Crown Hill through “many, many, many thousands of photographs.” Her passion is cataloged through intimate images of deer, perfectly illuminated headstones, brilliant sunsets. Generations of visitors will see the place as she does — and, hopefully, know that beauty and grief can coexist.

“I just hope I've done the place justice,” she said.

Calling all angels

One Saturday night in August, a crowd gathered as the sun set on Crown Hill. The light is gorgeous at this time of day, Marty says — when the sun’s low in the sky, casting a glow over green hills.

Tom adjusted his headset microphone. He sported an aqua button-up shirt patterned with skulls and crossbones, ready to take this group on a tour of the cemetery’s many angel statues.

The 20 or so assembled were a mix of strangers, Marty and their granddaughters and many of Tom’s former coworkers and their families. Perhaps an unusual setting for work happy hour, but it’s fitting.

Karen Earnest, Tom’s former colleague, said he wouldn’t allow them to throw him a retirement party, so they decided to come to him.

Before Earnest got to know Tom, she’d see him reading obituaries at his desk. While her immediate reaction was one of skepticism, once she learned about Tom’s work at Crown Hill, she was moved.

Though Earnest did say that they eventually had to move Tom to a different cubicle so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea, the unusual pastime is superseded by his good will.

“If they are buried at Crown Hill Cemetery, then they deserve the same level of his time as … the presidents and the race car owners and the bank robbers, that he'll still learn about them, that everybody gets that level of attention,” Earnest said, “that he will at least know their name.”

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Tom was in his element in front of the crowd. As the tour passed by various headstones, he provided facts about the grave’s inhabitants as if describing an old friend.

As the sun sank lower, Tom guided the group to a grave with a unique feature. The stone statue, over a century old, is weathered, the angel pointing to heaven as the girl is directed to gaze up. But the gravestone, in patriarchal fashion, identified the occupant only as the "Wife of John C. Fisher,” dead in 1886.

“It always kind of bugged me that you know, here she is, (the) nicest statue in the cemetery,” Tom told the group, “and we don't know her name.”

But Tom’s not one to let a mystery lie. He did some research and found legal documents detailing who could be buried in the lot, leading him to conclude only one possible person — Anna Mary Fisher.

A place of grief and beauty 

Imagining Crown Hill as a nature preserve contradicts how most people view the place. But for Marty, the opportunity to work outside is one of the things about her career for which she’s most grateful.

Deeply rooted in her faith, she sees God in the wonders of the natural world. Nature saved her life when she was young, when she’d go outside to escape an abusive childhood, she said.

“I've seen the most beautiful things out here,” she said, speaking of Crown Hill.

Still, that natural beauty exists in tandem with grief and mourning. Crown Hill is bursting with life, though its purpose is rooted in death.

For years, Marty sat in her office, watching out of her window as thousands of new Crown Hill residents and their loved ones processed through the gates at West 34th Street and Boulevard Place.

She’ll tell you herself that she has always had “a passion for bereaved people.” Marty’s father died by suicide when she was 12. She knows what it’s like to grieve — and to heal.

“It has been a lifelong honor to work in a place where we help people remember and bury their loved ones with honor and dignity,” she said.

Marty, in all aspects of her life, is not uncomfortable with grief. She has an extraordinary ability to comfort those experiencing their deepest sorrows.

“She is the kind of friend who can sit with you in your pain, and not try to fix it,” Anne Ryder, a former WTHR-13 anchor and longtime friend, said.

The two met at Camp Healing Tree, a camp for kids who’ve lost a loved one, where Marty volunteers and administers an annual monarch butterfly release.

Among Marty’s many passions, monarchs are top of mind. She’s been raising them for years — from eggs to fully-fledged butterflies.

Marty’s legacy at Crown Hill will be a butterfly garden that bears her name — filled with different types of milkweed, the only plants monarch caterpillars eat. The butterfly wing-shaped garden will be right across from the building where she worked for so many years.

The process by which a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly is spiritual, Marty said. The metamorphosis signals that “they shed everything that they know, in order to become everything they’ve never been before.”

“There's so much hope in that, which is what I like to try to convey to people,” Marty said, “that death is really not the end.”

“Flying towards the light”

While Marty and Tom have both retired from full-time work, Crown Hill will continue to be a presence in their lives.

Tom will still work as a tour guide; Marty’s aiming to work around 10 hours a month, taking photos and helping with projects. They’ll both continue to do social media and the newsletter. But for the first time in their over 40 years together, most of their time is free.

They’re excited to travel — they love the American Southwest — hike, and spend time with their grandchildren. But even positive change is bittersweet.

One balmy August evening, the final step in the transformation of monarch butterflies took place — release.

Tom and Marty’s Indianapolis backyard is lush with greenery. There’s a pond bordered by milkweed for caterpillars to eat and where the monarchs can return to lay eggs. But that night, the butterflies were ready to be let go.

Each monarch lingered for a moment, flitting in the mesh enclosure that was their previous refuge. But they all eventually flew in the same direction: towards the sun, soaring higher and higher until each one was out of sight.

“There's something to be said,” Marty observed, “about flying towards the light.”

Contact IndyStar trending reporter Claire Rafford at crafford@gannett.com or on Twitter @clairerafford.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Crown Hill Cemetery shaped by contributions of couple over decades