On August 15, 2015, Julie Mott’s family gathered at Mission Park Funeral Chapel North in San Antonio, Texas, to say goodbye. It was the day she would have turned 26. She had died a week earlier, at 25, of the cystic fibrosis she had fought her entire life.
The service ended at about 1:30 p.m. By the next morning, her casket was empty.
Julie Mott fought cystic fibrosis
Julie Nicole Mott was born on August 15, 1989. Doctors diagnosed her with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that thickens mucus in the body, when she was 2 years old. The illness meant hospital stays and daily treatments, but according to her obituary, it never defined her. She began English riding lessons at 9 and went on to compete in horse shows and show jumping.
She grew up close to her brother, Jonathan, who was five years older, and to her parents, Timothy and Sharlotte. On August 8, 2015, complications from cystic fibrosis ended her life. She was 25.
Her parents turned to Mission Park Funeral Chapels and Cemeteries to arrange the funeral and the cremation Julie had asked for. The business had operated for more than 100 years across five generations of the Tips family. Its owner, Robert “Dick” Tips, was a personal friend of the Motts.
Her family said goodbye
Visitation reportedly took place on Friday, August 14, from 6 to 8 p.m. The funeral followed on Saturday at Mission Park’s North chapel, at 3401 Cherry Ridge. Jonathan had gathered photographs of his sister from birth until her death and set them to a slideshow that played during the service.
One mourner had a complicated place in that room. Bill Wilburn was Julie’s ex-boyfriend. According to accounts of the case, the two had dated for about six years, and the relationship ended roughly two years before she died. The funeral home would later say that Tim Mott noticed Wilburn lingering that day and asked that someone supervise him.
The service ended at about 1:30 p.m. Staff then moved Julie’s casket into a hallway to await transfer to a crematorium, and family and friends spent time with her in a private visitation area at the back of the building. Cremation was set for Monday, August 17.
According to one account of the private viewing, Wilburn noticed a ring on Julie’s finger and tearfully told her mother and brother it was the ring he had given her. Sharlotte knew better. She had given Julie the ring herself.
Wilburn stayed after the others left. By one account, he lingered about 15 minutes before an employee asked him to go. Wilburn later wrote online that three or four employees were still inside and that a woman locked the front door behind him. Jonathan recalled being uncomfortable that Wilburn was the last person to say goodbye to his sister.
At about 4:30 p.m., Mission Park locked its doors for the night.
The casket was found empty
On the morning of Sunday, August 16, employees returned to Mission Park North. Trial testimony would later establish that the doors were locked, the alarm was still on, and the back doors were chained from the inside. Nothing looked disturbed.
Then they checked Julie’s casket. It was empty.
According to later summaries of the trial, the casket sat in an unusual position near an exit, one hinge was damaged, and its stand was out of place. Staff searched the building in case of a mix-up. They found nothing. Police were dispatched to the funeral home.
The building offered no explanation. The alarm had never sounded, and there were no signs of forced entry. The funeral home had no security cameras, and its motion detectors were never triggered. Police concluded that Julie’s body most likely left in the afternoon of August 15, between 1:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., while the doors were still open. Whoever did it had to get past two locked doors that led to the visitation suite.
SAPD Sgt. Javier Salazar said that in 22 years in law enforcement, he had never heard of anything like it. He declined to assume the theft was a one-person job. “It could have been two or several,” he said.
Investigators opened the case as abuse of a corpse, a Class A misdemeanor in Texas. Tips offered a $20,000 reward and floated a theory of his own, that the thief might be someone who did not believe in cremation over traditional burial. Tim Mott told reporters the family wanted one thing, “our daughter’s remains returned.” Volunteers, including funeral home employees, searched McAllister Park and found the badly decomposed remains of an adult. Police said they strongly believed it was not Julie.
Police focused on her ex-boyfriend
A preliminary police report soon described a man invited to the service who was the last to leave. It said he had been “obsessed with calling and texting” Julie. Police redacted his name, but the Motts already had a suspect in mind. Jonathan accused Wilburn on his Facebook page. On October 16, 2015, Sharlotte stood before cameras at police headquarters and pleaded for information, while the family said they believed they knew who was behind the theft. No one had been arrested.
Police named Wilburn a person of interest and questioned him at length. They never charged him with taking Julie’s body. According to later accounts, he called the funeral home more than 200 times in a single day. Cadaver dogs reportedly searched his home, his vehicle, and property linked to his grandparents, but nothing led to charges.
In early September 2015, Mission Park issued Wilburn a criminal trespass notice. Cameras went up afterward. On June 26 of the following year, those cameras recorded him walking into Mission Park North. According to court records, three witnesses recognized him and he fled. On June 29, he came back.
Police arrested Wilburn, then 31, in February 2017 on two counts of criminal trespass. He was released on bond. However, prosecutors told the court that cameras caught him at the property again on February 20, and a judge ordered him to wear a GPS monitor. He was placed on partial house arrest after police found him at a hotel across the street from the funeral home. In 2018, he received a two-day jail sentence on a trespassing charge.
Asked by CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield whether he took Julie’s body, Wilburn answered, “No, of course not, absolutely not.” He admitted returning to the funeral home after the body vanished, and said the company was trying to make him its scapegoat. Tim Mott would later testify that he never imagined anyone would accuse Wilburn of taking his daughter.
The Motts sued Mission Park
In January 2016, the Motts sued Mission Park for negligence and gross negligence, seeking more than $1 million. By then, the family’s attention had shifted. Jonathan testified that when Tips stopped returning his parents’ calls that fall, it opened the family’s eyes to other possibilities.
The Motts accused Mission Park of hiding its use of outside contractors with unlimited access to the building, and argued its locks and security codes were outdated. One of those contractors was Beyer & Beitel Mortuary Services, which embalmed Julie. Tips testified that the codes to activate the security system had not changed in 20 years. He also testified that when he first heard a body was missing, he called his lawyer.
The trial began in early 2018 in Bexar County’s 131st District Court, before Judge Norma Gonzalez. Mission Park’s lawyers insisted that cameras stay out of the courtroom. They told jurors that Wilburn stole the body, and that the company could never have anticipated it. To show how a casket could be broken into, they wheeled in one identical to Julie’s. Both sides agreed her body was stolen.
Testimony also touched on an allegation that an employee of the embalming company had posted satanic imagery online. Reports of the trial did not tie him to the disappearance.
Sharlotte testified that her family never had a chance to grieve properly. She also reportedly spoke about the empty urn the family had bought for Julie’s ashes. The Motts asked the jury for $10 million.
A jury awarded $8 million
On February 13, 2018, after nearly three weeks of trial, a jury found MPII Inc., which does business as Mission Park, negligent. It awarded $8 million for mental anguish, $4 million to each parent. Jurors found the company negligent but not grossly negligent, and only 10 of them signed the verdict. They deliberated for less than three hours.
“MPII lost Julie Mott’s body,” the family’s attorney, Alex Katzman, told jurors in closing arguments.
Jurors were also asked whether an unknown person or Wilburn had unlawfully taken the body with intent to deprive the Motts of it. They answered no for both. Tips said afterward that there was no question the body was stolen. The family’s other attorney, Mark Greenwald, said the jury’s verdict meant the funeral home’s explanation had failed to persuade, but conceded the case had not achieved its purpose. “In the end we failed, as we did not find Julie,” he said.
No arrest has been reported in the case. The reporting available shows that Julie’s remains have never been found, and that her family was still seeking their return as of 2022. Jonathan keeps a public Facebook page in her memory. His daughter carries Julie’s middle name.
Sharlotte told the jury that Julie’s last wish was to be cremated, with some of her ashes spread across the ocean and some buried with her horse, Penny. She said she could not complete it.
Where Julie Mott’s body went after 1:30 p.m. on August 15, 2015, has never been established.
