A Bartonville resident has been indicted on five felony counts connected to the theft of human remains from cemeteries in Texas and Oklahoma. Michael Chadwick Fry, 41, was charged with three counts of abuse of a corpse and two counts of tampering with evidence.
The investigation began in March after a family member alerted Bartonville police that Fry had requested funds for a U-Haul truck to transport a body. Officers arrested Fry shortly thereafter, following reports that he had filmed himself discarding skeletal fragments over a fence at the FBI Dallas Field Office.
Fry initially told investigators the bones belonged to Elizabeth Virginia Lyons, a former Denton High School teacher who died in 1949 and was interred at the I.O.O.F. Cemetery in Denton. However, authorities determined Lyons’ grave had not been disturbed. Instead, Fry had removed the remains of Mary Myrtle Wright Magee, a prominent Denton socialite who died in 1940, from her mausoleum at the same cemetery.
The indictment alleges Fry damaged or treated Magee’s remains offensively by placing them in a bucket and leaving them at government buildings. He also posted videos of the skeletal remains on YouTube. While Fry admitted to discarding some bones, he refused to reveal the location of the rest. Investigators later located the remaining fragments in a field near Justin off FM 407.
Magee’s remains were reinterred at the I.O.O.F. Cemetery in June. During interviews with Bartonville investigators, Fry also confessed to stealing an urn from Oklahoma City. Police confirmed this linked to an open case involving Cheryl Ann Camp, a journalist and public information officer for the Oklahoma Supreme Court who died in 2023.
