"They have left this earth and they've done so together," said Wayne Galloway, pastor of Fort Logan Church of Christ, the church that the couple attended. "I think their leaving together is just representative of the kind of life that they had with each other."
Hearses carrying the caskets of the Bentons led a slow caravan through Stanford's Main Street on Friday, heading out Hustonville Road to Buffalo Springs Cemetery, a place where, as a child, Bobbie Benton and her siblings once played games. The Demrow children had grown up around the cemetery with their father, the late Jake Demrow, working as a gravedigger.
Clark Benton, a retired Major in the United States Marine Corps, was buried with full military honors. Marines in dress blue uniforms folded the American flag that lay across his casket and presented it to the couple's children, Richard and Mary Benton.
Red-jacketed members of the Marine Corps League presented a 21-gun salute before the playing of "Taps".
As the graveside services concluded tearful mourners, both family and friends, looked on as Richard and Mary Benton, released mourning doves in memory of their parents. They also released additional doves, all of which circled the cemetery a few times before flying out of sight.
Galloway, who stood by the Demrow and Benton families as a source of comfort in the days following the tragedy, said the couple's deaths are a loss to all who knew them.
"It's a great loss to the congregation. It's a great loss to the community," Galloway said. "Only God can take us through this."
Galloway said that he felt one of the young men of his church summed up the Benton's final journey in life very well.
"He said, 'Bobbie wanted to go to Aruba to celebrate her birthday and she flew all the way to paradise.'"
