McHenry County Coroner Marlene Lantz Retiring at Term’s End

Marlene Lantz

Starting as a deputy  under Coroner Al Querhammer, Marlene Lantz has served since then.

In reply to an email from McHenry County Blog asking about her intentions, Lantz wrote,

“No, I am not running again and will retire at the end of my term.”

Here is an article I wrote about her appearance at Crystal Lake Kiwanis.

Here’s part of what she said.

Asked what her most interesting case had been, she point to the 1982 Charles Albanese arsenic murders.

“When we arrested him, they let me put the handcuffs on him,” Lantz said. She also said she witness his execution in 1995.

Asked the biggest health hazard, the coroner answered, “Hepatitis and AIDS.”

She stressed the personal touch in her dealings with relatives of those deaths handled by her office. Lantz kept in touch with one woman after her husband died and “got invited to the wedding” when she remarried “years later.”

Lantz also explained the necessity of keeping in good mental health “in order to help others.”

She said she had gone to counseling after, I believe, the Fox River Grove bus-train accident.

Lantz was also negatively affected after she saw a man in her official line of work who looked like her stepfather ten years after he had died. It didn’t help matters that the wife resembled her mother.

Her sense of humor shown through when she remarked,

”A lot of people think I’m tall, bald headed and pale.”


Comments

McHenry County Coroner Marlene Lantz Retiring at Term’s End — 2 Comments

  1. I thought her bedside manner was just atrocious. She called me to inform me that my children’s Father was killed in a car accident. A phone call!!!! When the screaming stopped and we went to the county to get information… (IN front of the children, mind you, and in her work uniform covered with blood) She announced that the lungs of the body reeked of alcohol! Nice touch, there.

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