Black leaders in Waller County, northwest of Houston, say white county authorities deliberately sabotaged their efforts to have the woman’s unidentified body buried in one of two public black cemeteries. Judge Owen Ralston, the county’s top elected official and the man who decided where the woman would be interred, denies the accusation, insisting that cost — not race — led to her burial on Monday in a white cemetery.

“I had no idea what color the lady was and didn’t care,” Judge Ralston said. “There’ve been some bad racial situations in this county, but I’ve tried to be right about it. I’m not a racially motivated person.”

Upon learning Wednesday night that the burial had taken place without his knowledge, a county justice of the peace, DeWayne Charleston, who is black, said, “I’m going to have that body exhumed.”

Judge Charleston, who was initially legally responsible for dealing with the body, had ordered it handled by a black-owned funeral home, Singleton & Sons, and had asked a black minister to officiate at the burial.

Racial strife is a mainstay of this rural county of about 36,000 residents, 30 percent of whom are black, census figures show. Accusations of racial bias in such matters as access to polling places have been common in recent years. About five years ago, black leaders successfully sued the City of Hempstead, the county seat, for failing to provide the same upkeep of black cemeteries as white ones.

Neither Judge Ralston nor Judge Charleston knew the woman, who was strangled and her body so badly disfigured that a crime laboratory in Houston spent a year trying, unsuccessfully, to identify her. The body, its face mutilated and hands severed, was found March 18, 2007, along a road in the part of Waller County over which Judge Charleston has jurisdiction.

Judge Charleston said that when he was notified last month that the crime laboratory was releasing the body for burial, he saw it as a chance to break the color barrier in the region’s public cemeteries. On June 13, he assigned the task to Singleton & Sons.

“In my time as J.P., I’ve come to understand that I am to call black funeral homes to pick up black people, white funeral homes to pick up white people,” said Judge Charleston, elected the county’s first black justice of the peace in 2003. “I didn’t want to cross that line when I was dealing with white bodies and the families were grieving, because I didn’t want to make a political point out of cases like that. But here was a case where the body was unidentified. I believed this was it, this was the opportunity for the cemeteries to be integrated without offending anyone.”

But Judge Ralston, who oversees the county’s legislative and judicial branches, said he was troubled by the funeral home’s estimate that a pauper’s funeral would cost $3,376. He said he asked the funeral home owner, LeRoy Singleton, a former Hempstead mayor, specifically if the $250 charge for a hearse to carry the body from Singleton & Sons to the grave site was excessive when it cost only $175 to bring the remains from Houston, a much greater distance.

Judge Ralston said he most likely would have approved Mr. Singleton’s handling of the body had Mr. Singleton not insisted on a written guarantee that the county would pay the bill. That was not the county’s procedure, Judge Ralston said, and he was concerned about the cost of delay as well, because the Houston morgue was charging Waller County $45 a day to store the corpse.

So, Judge Ralston said, he assigned another justice of the peace to replace Judge Charleston’s order with one directing the body to be handled by the Canon Funeral Home, known as a white mortuary. Judge Ralston said Canon had told him that it would charge $2,950 for the same services as Singleton & Sons. Mr. Singleton did not return calls for comment.

That reassignment angered Judge Charleston as well as the Rev. Walter Pendleton, the black minister who was to have officiated at the burial. Mr. Pendleton issued a news release on Monday accusing Judge Ralston of thwarting the burial of a white person in a black cemetery.

Judge Ralston denied that he was biased, and insisted that until reading the news release he did not know the victim was white. He had assumed, he said, that she was black because her body was to have been handled by Mr. Singleton’s funeral home. Judge Ralston pointed out that he had not been troubled that in ordering the body handled by the Canon Funeral Home, he was, had his assumption been correct, effectively directing the integration of a white cemetery. And he questioned his critics’ motives.

“I think there are three or four people,” he said, “that are out looking for things all the time to try to identify some racial motivation.”

While Judge Charleston and others disagreed, Mayor Michael Wolfe of Hempstead, who is black, defended Judge Ralston as fair-minded and unbiased.

“People here are aware of segregated cemeteries,” Mr. Wolfe said, but other than a few black activists, “people don’t make it an issue.”

“It’s not,” he added, “a topic of daily conversation.”

But Judge Charleston vowed to fight to have the body moved and, he said, to have something positive emerge from a senseless death.