>> reporter: ruth coker burks told us this unusual inheritance of 262 cemetery plots was left to her after a family feud. >> my mother got in a huge argument with her brother when i was 10 and bought all the remaining spaces in the cemetery so he and his family couldn't be buried with the rest of us. that was the meantime thing she could think to settle the score. >> reporter: the plots sat mostly unused until the aids crisis hit hot springs, arkansas. >> you were with some of these guys as their took their last breaths. >> oh, yeah, death and i got to be old friends. >> reporter: coker burks, a self-described straight church lady, remembers when the disease went by another name. >> there are more lives claimed, victims claimed than toxic shock and legion airs disease combined and yet most people don't know about this cancer. well, i think it's because it's a gay cancer. >> reporter: scientists scrambled to learn more. by 1984, researchers identified that the hiv virus as it would become to be known, caused aids. by 1985, there were more than 20,000 reported aids cases worldwide. >>