CHEYENNE, Wyo. &$8212 The city cemetery’s assistant director readily admits it was his dead steer exhumed from the cemetery earlier this year. But he says another worker who likes to spread tall tales buried it there.

Scott Heatherington convinced Cheyenne’s Personnel Commission and was reinstated after losing his job earlier this year over the buried carcass.

“I’m very happy with this decision,” Heatherington said Thursday.

In April, one of Heatherington’s employees told the city parks director that he’d buried the steer carcass at the cemetery under Heatherington’s orders, according to city documents.

The animal was exhumed and Heatherington was fired in May. He was reinstated Sept. 6 after cemetery employees told the Personnel Commission that the worker had “a penchant for tall tales.”

Heatherington said the employee had offered to take the dead steer off his hands and hauled the carcass off his property in a pickup truck.

Heatherington hired former Wyoming Attorney General Gay Woodhouse as his attorney and said it cost him $20,000 to be reinstated.