News

Shepherd Memorial Park remains in limbo after failed auction

A small group gathered at Henderson County’s Courthouse on Wednesday for the auction of Shepherd Memorial Park.

By Amy McCraw, Published: March 5, 2025

The future of Shepherd Memorial Park remains in limbo after a court-ordered auction on Wednesday failed to produce any bidders.

Superior Court Judge Marvin Pope, who ordered the public sale of the property in December, said shortly after the failed auction that another hearing will likely need to be held to determine the next step in the case.
A court-ordered appraisal of the memorial park set a fair-market value between $900,000 and $1.4 million “with the most likely value being $1.22 million,” Pope’s order said. He set the “likely value” as the minimum sale price and ordered that no transaction take place for less than that amount. The successful bidder must be licensed to operate a cemetery under North Carolina law.
Hendersonville auctioneer Mark White, who Pope appointed to conduct the sale, opened bidding on the cemetery at $1.22 million on Wednesday. But a small group of people gathered for the sale at the base of stairs just inside the lobby of Henderson County’s Courthouse remained silent.
White closed the auction after repeating the opening bid.
At another court-ordered sale in 2022, James E. “Jimmy” Altmeyer Jr., president of Altmeyer Funeral Homes & Crematory, outbid a commercial real estate investor after 24 volleys to purchase The Thos. Shepherd & Son Funeral Directors property. Altmeyer’s bid of $2,025,000 stood after no one filed an upset bid within 10 days.
The funeral home was renamed Church Street Funeral & Cremation after Altmeyer purchased the property.
Altmeyer official Chae Davis represented the company at the auction on Wednesday. She said she did not bid because the $1.22 million price tag was too high.
Shepherd Memorial Park is the last remaining large asset of the family that transitioned to the funeral business in 1903 after first selling coffins at a furniture store.
A lawsuit brought by the North Carolina Cemetery Commission in 2021 failed to produce a resolution that would allow Melody Shepherd to retain control of the Asheville Highway cemetery, which William Shepherd founded in 1954. In previous hearings, Judge Pope had expressed reservations about ordering a sale and instead appointed a guardian ad litem to look after the property’s interest and kept on a receiver, cemetery manager Gary McDowell, who by all accounts had fixed dozens of problems and gotten the grounds into excellent condition.
“The receiver has operated the cemetery well at all times since the entry of the (receivership) order” in April 2022, Pope said.
The court order also bars Melody Shepherd, the sole owner of the business and property, from being on the cemetery grounds — except to visit family members’ graves, and then only with “express written permission” of McDowell — and blocks her from “directly or indirectly” placing a bid to purchase the property or “acquiring any interest in the cemetery.”
The order cites Shepherd’s “disruptive conduct” since the receivership order three years ago, including unauthorized visits to the cemetery and the parking of personal and funeral home vehicles on the grounds. Neither Melody Shepherd nor Shepherd Memorial Park Inc. are currently qualified as licensees to operate the graveyard under the North Carolina Cemetery Act, Pope’s order said.
The court order to sell the cemetery came about, too, after Melody Shepherd’s attorneys, citing a “breakdown in communication” and “unwaivable conflict of interest,” won the judge’s permission last November to withdraw as counsel. In his order granting the motion, Pope agreed that while Lindsey Law PLLC — attorneys Stephen P. Lindsay and Mary Ann J. Hollocker — had “provided valuable and competent representation” to Shepherd, the “breakdown in communication has led to a conflict of interest” making it impossible for the attorneys to continue as counsel for Shepherd.
Business operations at the funeral home and cemetery suffered as Tom Shepherd’s health deteriorated starting around 2020, the N.C. Board of Funeral Service found. In December 2021, the board issued an order that shut down the funeral home, revoked the funeral director license of Thomas R. Shepherd and the crematory manager license of Melody Shepherd and referred investigators’ findings to law enforcement to determine “whether criminal charges are warranted.” (No criminal charges have been filed.) Tom Shepherd died on Dec. 31, 2021, of “major depression,” his physician said in his death certificate.
A few former employees of Thos. Shepherd & Son Funeral Directors attended the failed auction on Wednesday.
Cathleen Blanchard, who is now the general manager at the Moore-Blanchard funeral home in Brevard, said she felt melancholy as she waited for the auction to begin.
“Tom Shepherd gave me my first job. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have been able to go into the funeral business,” she said. “This is certainly the end of that era.”
Very few women worked as funeral directors in the 1980s when she joined Shepherd’s as its first female funeral director, Blanchard said.
“I was the only woman in there besides his aunt,” she said.
Blanchard said she was sorry to see Shepherd Memorial Park up for auction. But she said it needed to happen to help families feel comfortable that their loved ones buried in the cemetery are being cared for properly.
Melody Shepherd herself stands to gain substantial proceeds from the sale of the cemetery, just as she did from the court-ordered sale of the funeral home, after payments to creditors and attorneys and other fees.
Net proceeds of the sale would go to Melody Shepherd after deduction of plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees, payments due to the receiver and guardian ad litem and cost of the sale.
After he became the receiver, McDowell identified $70,095 worth of grave markers that had been paid for and not placed and $6,339 worth of death dates that had not been inscribed on headstones. McDowell had since placed all but two of the markers, the judge said in December.
In addition to the cemetery grounds, sale of the property would also include loader-backhoes, tractors, riding mowers, trimmers, blowers, vehicles and furnishings.