Lilly Gray, Victim of The Beast
Salt Lake City, Utah
The secret behind the cryptic epitaph of Lilly Gray, "Victim of the Beast 666," rests with her apparently nutcase husband Elmer. In an appeal to the Board of Pardons at Utah State Prison -- Elmer was locked up at the time -- he claimed that his parents "died of grief when kidnappers murdered my wife." That's his previous wife. He married Lilly three years later; she died eight years after that.
According to the Utah State Historical Society, which fields frequent questions about Lilly, she died of natural causes (she was 77), but Elmer blamed her death on the "Beast 666" of government, and particularly Democrats. The company that made the headstone recalls that Lilly's family hated Elmer, and when he died in 1964 he was buried in the same cemetery but as far from Lilly as possible.