The longtime groundskeeper of Kalispell’s Conrad Memorial Cemetery — who vanished last year along with the historic burial ground’s records — died in Utah last month.    

James “Jim” Korn and his son, Kevin Korn, disappeared in the spring of 2025, absconding with the documents needed to sell gravesites. The loss left the cemetery in limbo for six months, and families looking to buy graves for loved ones were turned away because cemetery employees couldn’t identify which sites were already sold.    

With help from Kevin’s daughter, Michaela Preece, the missing deed books and plot maps were eventually recovered from a distant relative’s home outside Libby in October. The trove filled the back of an SUV and included the original deed book from when Alicia Conrad established the cemetery in 1903.   

Preece suspected Kevin, who did not respond to inquiries before press time, was behind the theft of the documents from a floor-to-ceiling safe tucked in the basement of the yellow cottage at the cemetery’s entrance. She believed it was his reaction to the cemetery board’s decision not to let him take over for his father.  

Jim, 92, oversaw cemetery operations for more than two decades before heart problems in the winter of 2025 began affecting his job performance, prompting the cemetery board to search for a successor.   

Jim died May 17 at a hospital in Murray, Utah, just outside of Salt Lake City, according to Preece.  

His body was buried in Conrad Cemetery beside his wife, Norah, and his parents.  

“I think a lot of us are just grateful that he is at peace and gets to be with his wife and his other family now,” Preece said.  

Preece said she was unaware Jim was in intensive care until days before his death. She learned of his condition only after her husband began receiving calls from the hospital.   

“We were a little bit afraid that it was some sort of scam,” Preece said.   

When she returned the call, a nurse informed her that Kevin had withheld familial information.  

“When asked about other family, [Kevin] was saying that we didn’t want to be there and we didn’t care,” she said.  

Nurses tracked down Preece after searching Jim’s name online and finding the Inter Lake’s previous reporting on his mysterious departure from the Flathead Valley.  

Jim had been hospitalized for more than a week before staff reached her. He had suffered a cardiac event, and life-saving measures were no longer an option.   

Preece, her husband and her children immediately left their home outside of Salt Lake City to see him and informed the rest of their family of the news.   

“When we would talk to him, we felt that he was still a little bit there, he just wasn’t awake” Preece said. “It was a real blessing to me that I got to spend that time with him.”   

Preece spent the night beside her grandfather, reading aloud Louis L’Amour’s “Haunted Mesa" — a nod to the stories they read together when she was young.   

“I got to make peace with everything,” she said.  

BEFORE PREECE said her final goodbye, she had not heard from Kevin or Jim since December. That’s when Kevin called late one night seeking help.   

The two had been kicked out of a hotel over noise complaints, and Kevin asked Preece to remove their belongings from the room because he had taken Jim to the hospital.  

When Preece arrived at the hotel, she said the room showed signs of hoarding and was filled with trash and discarded clothes.   

When she arrived at Kevin’s car parked outside of the hospital, she said its condition was just as disturbing. So many clothes, food containers and boxes were piled inside that the passenger seat — where she believed Jim often slept — could not be pushed flat.  

By the time she had finished moving their things, visiting hours at the hospital had ended. 

The following morning, she said Kevin came by her house and told her he was involving attorneys in the cemetery dispute. By the time he left — he declined repeated offers to stay in her home — it was again too late to visit Jim in the hospital, Preece said.  

When Preece later contacted the hospital, she learned that Kevin had discharged Jim. Her calls to Kevin went unanswered for weeks, prompting her to contact Montana and Utah’s adult protective services agencies.   

“I wasn’t trying to get anybody arrested or even have grandpa taken away. It was their living conditions. They were living out of a hoarded sedan car,” Preece said. “I was trying to get my grandpa out of a situation that he shouldn’t have been in.”  

But because there had been no prior attempts to prove that Jim was incompetent, it was hard for authorities to take action. Without knowing their location, it was impossible to conduct a welfare check either.  

While Jim had been dealing with serious health issues for over a year, Preece believed that living out of a car for months on end may have worsened his health.   

“You take someone that age, already having severe health problems, and putting them in unclean and unsafe conditions can only add to the deterioration [of health],” Preece said.   

“I don’t even know how, part of the time, grandpa was able to fit in the car,” she said.  

BUT BEING able to see her grandfather one last time — and to see him free of those living conditions — brought a sense of relief for Preece.  

She has fond memories of him, particularly those from her childhood.   

“He always exuded a kindness, a love for other people and just a genuine respect for people,” she said. “He just loved everybody.”   

“He would remark on the beauty of things, whether it be a snail shell or the fish you caught or the sunset going down over the mountain,” she added.   

Jim always enjoyed working at Conrad Cemetery and cherished every interaction with a customer, Preece said.  

“We enjoyed our relationship with Jim for many, many years,” Conrad Cemetery board President Jeff Ellingson told the Inter Lake after Jim’s death. “The deterioration of our relationship is very regrettable, and we extend our condolences to the family.”   

The cemetery initially filed a lawsuit in Flathead County Justice Court against Jim and Kevin to recoup revenue lost during the six months it was unable to sell graves. The case has since been refiled in Flathead County District Court, which allows for broader out of state subpoena power, according to Ellingson.   

Kevin has not yet been served, and the cemetery continues searching for the computers that went missing when the pair vanished and any data they may have stored on them.  

Cemetery operations have largely returned to normal, though new sexton Jeff Epperly is still deciphering Jim’s unique record-keeping system, Ellingson said. Epperly is working on digitizing the burial logging system after Jim had relied on paper records for two decades.   

Ellingson hopes to have a cemetery website up and running this month and is in negotiations to purchase a building off Conrad Drive for client meetings.   

“I see great things ahead for the operations of the cemetery,” Ellingson said.    

Reporter Jack Underhill can be reached at 406-758-4407 or [email protected]. If you value local journalism, pledge your support at dailyinterlake.com/support. 

    Jim Korn with family members. (Courtesy of Michaela Preece)
  

    Jim Korn and Michaela Preece. (Courtesy of Michaela Preece)
  

    James Korn, sexton at C.E. Conrad Memorial Cemetery, describes the stone on the exterior of the Conrad mausoleum on the cemetery's grounds in Kalispell in 2019. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)