Body Brokers Read online

  In 1830, a special state committee in Massachusetts studied the problem of body snatching. Its members acknowledged that dissection was “an ultimate good for the future of medical science,” without which “valuable lives would be lost.” They even went so far as to ennoble anatomical dissection: “Who would not prefer, to be useful even after death to his survivors, rather than to fester and decay, to feed the numerous worms and to undergo the slow and disgusting process of chemical decomposition?”

  The committee members would have had little luck convincing the American public. So they proposed legalizing the system that the anatomists and ghouls already had in place: “Why not legalize the dissection of those who died without family or friends? Those whose bodies would be unclaimed, are the vicious and depraved,” they argued. “They shared the benefits, but bore none of the burdens of the social state and of civilization.” This solution ensured that the “better” people would no longer have to worry about having their bodies snatched from their graves and the bodies of the “vicious” would repay their debt to society. “Can an intelligent legislator, divesting himself of prejudice, refuse to give this aid to the cause of science?”

  So it was that the Massachusetts Anatomy Act passed in 1831. Eventually, every state would adopt similar laws designating unclaimed bodies, including the bodies of those people who died without family or friends in state-run institutions like prisons and insane asylums—and in some cases the very poor—for anatomical dissection. In 1947, Tennessee was the last state to pass such a law.

  Laws about unclaimed bodies and the bodies of paupers exist in most states today, but few Americans realize it, and only seven of the fifty states enforce these laws. In Maryland, whenever a person dies in a hospital and is not claimed within seventy-two hours, his body is shipped to the state anatomy board. Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Delaware, and Arkansas enforce similar laws.

  Beginning in the 1950s, medical schools began to accept body donations from the public. The first state to legalize body donation was California. Dr. Horace Magoun, chair of the Anatomy Department at UCLA, pioneered the anatomical-gift program. In 1950, he convinced the California legislature to pass a law allowing citizens to donate their bodies for medical education.

  Five years later, UCLA had enough bodies to meet its needs for thirty years. By 1968, every state in the union had passed some version of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act. Through donations and unclaimed bodies, most schools were able to meet their needs. But that would change as the demand for flesh and bones grew once again.

  Several factors fueled the underground cadaver trade of today. Between 1965 and 1980, the number of accredited medical schools in the United States grew from 88 to 126. Class sizes grew, too, so the number of doctors in training more than doubled. By the 1970s, medical school curricula were also expanding to include special education courses using cadaver parts for teaching in areas like emergency medicine and orthopedic anatomy.

  Anatomy departments felt growing pressure. Some of the pressure came from within medical programs. Some of it came from outside advocacy groups. In the late 1970s, associations like the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons began holding their own surgical-skills workshops. They, too, required cadavers and body parts. As surgical technology advanced, medical-device companies started hosting their own courses to showcase their wares. They, too, needed body parts. Bodies were being distributed in new ways, funneled out of medical schools, and in some cases from funeral homes, into a new underground trade.

  chapter 6

  “Brokered Sounds Bad, Doesn’t It?”

  On July 24, 1986, UPS workers at the Standiford Field Sorting Center in Louisville, Kentucky, were inspecting cargo for an overnight flight, when they spotted several boxes from Philadelphia marked “aerosol.” UPS won’t transport aerosol containers, so the workers pulled the boxes aside.

  That’s when they noticed a smell. It was sweet, overripe, like something that had spoiled. Meat perhaps? The boxes were also leaking. Better open them up, the workers thought.

  Nestled inside were five human heads wrapped in plastic. They looked alive but for their severed necks, which oozed a rancid, bloody fluid. The workers were appalled.

  Before long, the phones were ringing in the office of the local coroner, Dr. Richard Greathouse. Greathouse is a plainspoken southern doctor. He’s seen plenty of strange cases in his twenty-nine years on the job, but this was one of the weirdest he’d seen yet. “Something really hokey was going on that boiled down to one thing,” he said. “Somebody had murdered these people in Philly and was getting rid of the evidence.” Greathouse called the Philadelphia Police Department.

  Within hours, homicide detective Daniel Rosenstein had traced the boxes to a four-story Philadelphia mansion on a quiet, tree-lined street in the elegant neighborhood of Rittenhouse Square. The limestone mansion was home to Dr. Martin Spector, a well-known eye, ear, and nose doctor. Spector lived upstairs with his wife and used the bottom floors as his office.

  Inside, in a second-floor refrigerator, Rosenstein and his partners found eight pairs of frozen ears. They also found an order for seventeen frozen arms and “half heads with brains,” from a Boulder, Colorado, research institute. When they asked Spector about these parts, the elderly doctor conceded that he’d been shipping ears and heads around the country to doctors and researchers for about fifteen years. But he refused to name his source, other than to say he got the parts from a “pathologist’s assistant.”

  Soon, other pieces of the story emerged. One of Spector’s former secretaries claimed that a mysterious man in a white lab coat had delivered ears to the office in paper lunch bags. Sometimes, she said, he brought heads wrapped in plastic garbage bags. She said Spector told her to give the man cash as payment for the deliveries.

  Spector’s body business was a casual enterprise. While his patients thumbed through People magazine in the waiting room, his secretaries sat upstairs, packing arms, heads, and ears into boxes for the UPS man. During coffee breaks, they joked about the doctor’s side business. There was the time his precious heads fell off a UPS truck and rolled down the street. That one always got a lot of laughs.

  The story was horrific and strange, but the consensus in the Philadelphia medical community was that this was the work of one old, and very sick, man. While police continued to investigate, Dr. Edward J. Stemmler, who was then dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, promised to review Dr. Spector’s privileges at the hospital. Perhaps it was time Spector retired, said Stemmler.

  Little did Stemmler know what was going on in the university’s morgue. In a search of Spector’s downtown office, detectives turned up the name of a University of Pennsylvania diener and those of several employees of other local medical schools, whom Spector admitted he had enticed to supply him with parts. The men stole the body parts from dismembered medical school cadavers and autopsied bodies in the morgue.

  Soon, Lynwood Summers of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital was arrested after confessing that he’d been supplying Spector with stolen body parts for ten years, earning $150 per head, $65 per arm, and $20 for a set of ears. On some occasions, he said, he made as much as $2,000 in cash for just one delivery. Summers harvested the parts from corpses that had undergone autopsies at the hospital but weren’t donors.

  Wilbert Richardson, a diener at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, was also arrested. Later, two other employees were implicated: Reuben Whitehead of Philadelphia VA Medical Center, and Lenard Stephen of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. All of these men had sold body parts to Spector, who resold them to places like the Otologic Research Center in Denver, Colorado, where doctors used them to hone their surgery skills.

  Unlike most states, Pennsylvania prohibits the exportation of body parts. The law also requires that anyone receiving a donated body have a license from the state, which Spector did not. The Philadelphia District Attorney charged the dieners and Spector with conspiracy, the
ft, receiving stolen property, abuse of a corpse, and violating the health code by shipping body parts out of the state. Spector lost his license to practice medicine. Summers, Richardson, and Whitehead were all fired.

  The Philadelphia medical community was shocked by these further developments. “The medical center is deeply disturbed by the possibility that its carefully managed systems for the handling of human cadavers may have been violated,” Dr. Stemmler told a reporter.

  The medical schools trusted that the criminals had been punished and that these were isolated cases. Across America, there was little discussion of the scandal and its implications. But every medical school in the country should have taken notice. The Spector scandal was the first of many to come.

  For the past twenty years, some medical schools have exploited their generous donors over and over again. Inspired by the growing demand for parts, their employees have sold bodies for profit into the underground business without a second thought. In some cases, these “brokers” have been lowly dieners like the Pennsylvania men. But in others, professors have sanctioned the business, accepting donated bodies that they know they don’t need and selling them to supplement their departmental budgets.

  People who donate their bodies to medical schools rarely know anything about their final destination. The consent form they sign may well be vague, giving little if any information about how the body will be used, when, by whom, and for what purpose. Many of these donors are also very trusting, assuming that medical institutions and physicians will not betray them.

  By the time Dr. Spector was arrested in Philadelphia, Arthur Rathburn had already been a diener at the University of Michigan Medical School for two years. A funeral director by trade, Rathburn is, according to those who know him, a tall man with an impressive mustache and a friendly demeanor. At the university, he was responsible for tagging corpses and setting them up for students. When necessary, he arranged for the shipment of corpses to other medical schools in need of bodies, and to brokers. Rathburn was the school’s contact person, which may explain how he got the idea to become a broker himself.

  Rathburn showed a lot of savvy in his approach to the cadaver trade. In 1987, he applied to join the American Association of Clinical Anatomists. The AACA had been founded in 1982 by a group of anatomical educators concerned that anatomy was losing favor in medical schools. With the rise of new technologies during the 1960s and 70s, medical school curricula had become more focused on microscope work in the labs. Even though the cadaver was the classic subject of anatomy, the new scientists were eager to shunt it aside.

  The AACA wanted to promote the continued study of cadavers, which its members thought was crucial to a doctor’s education. With this goal in mind, the association, which accepted professional members of all kinds—dental and medical school professors, as well as surgeons—extended its membership to dieners.

  Arthur Rathburn submitted an impressive resume to the AACA, listing a degree from Western Michigan University and a stint at a coroner’s office, which the secretary treasurer later discovered to be falsified. The AACA took Rathburn at his word, and he was quickly accepted.

  In the meantime, Rathburn had started a business on the side supplying body parts. By 1990, he had been fired from his job at the university. The University of Michigan has instructed its employees not to talk about why Rathburn was dismissed. But a former administrator said that at the very least, he was commingling ashes of donated bodies. Rathburn’s then assistant, Richard Lawson, confirmed this. “He was burning more than one body at once. It was more expedient,” Lawson explained. “We operated like we were moving product around a warehouse.” Throughout my research into the cadaver trade, I left several messages for Rathburn, but never received a return phone call.

  In Rathburn’s defense, Lawson, who described his former boss as “good company,” said the medical school administration was partly to blame for whatever may have happened since they exercised little oversight over the morgue. “There was nothing explicit that was made clear to me by the administration that you had to cremate one body at a time. If they wanted to be explicit about that, they could’ve come down to the morgue.” As for Rathburn’s side business, Lawson said that Rathburn had hired him after hours to help him transport bodies in one of Rathburn’s vehicles to other locations. But Lawson saw nothing improper about this at the time. “I can’t be accountable for the cash I was receiving. For all I knew it was something that was condoned by his supervisors.”

  In June 1990, Rathburn was fired from the university. The following year, Rathburn sued the school to prevent it from releasing any of his personnel files.

  The AACA, having discovered that his credentials were falsified, expelled Rathburn from the association.

  But Rathburn had no trouble staying in the business. Clients were easy to come by. As for the corpses, he simply contacted other medical schools. On October 8, 1990, he sent a letter to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York requesting body parts. His “requested needs” included 180 hands and wrists, 261 heads and necks, 250 skulls, 30 spines, and 240 feet. “Professional Mortuary Service assures each institution that any University or state requirements, rules and regulations will be explicitly adhered to,” Rathburn promised in his letter to Dr. Peter Satir, the chairman of the Anatomy Department at Albert Einstein.

  Satir didn’t bite. But other schools were more than happy to supply Rathburn. In the mid-1990s, for example, Rathburn regularly bought bodies from the State University of New York in Syracuse. Between 1992 and 1999, the school billed Rathburn $159,435 for bodies and parts.

  Arthur Rathburn now owns a successful body-brokerage company called International Biological, and in 2005 he paid nearly a million dollars for a crematorium in Richmond, Virginia. These days, he obtains corpses from a variety of suppliers, including a crematorium outside of Chicago, Anatomical Services, Inc., which he then supplies to the likes of Augie Perna’s companies, the surgical equipment giant Medtronic, and to an assortment of plastic surgeons.

  Rathburn’s company is even licensed by the New York State Health Department. Every year, as required, Rathburn sends the department a report detailing his activities. In 2000, for example, he reported supplying thirty-one pairs of shoulders, fifteen pairs of feet, six pairs of knees, two pairs of hands, and five pairs of legs to two hospitals in New York, all of which he claimed were obtained in-house, from his own company, though Rathburn does not have a donor program. In 2002, by his own account Rathburn delivered forty-two heads and necks to the Marriott Marquis on Broadway. These, too, came from his company in Detroit.

  Had the University of Michigan pursued a more rigorous, public investigation of Arthur Rathburn, it’s possible that the information they uncovered about the trade in body parts would have forced them and any number of other medical schools to take steps to re-evaluate their programs.

  But only one group of anatomists paid attention. In 1990, members of the AACA convened a special forum on the “Exploitation of Body Donor Programs.” Among the thirty-odd people who met in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, were Rathburn’s former boss, Dr. William Burkel of the University of Michigan, Dr. Donald Cahill of the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Andrew Payer of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Together they issued a cautionary memorandum about body-donor programs to their members. “Some programs,” they noted, “appear to be exploited by individuals, groups and institutions. Of particular concern are independent entrepreneurs, acting as third-party brokers.” In 1991, the anatomists formed a “special-interest group” and vowed to raise awareness about the problem.

  Together with Dr. Donald Cahill, chair of the Anatomy Department at the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Andrew Payer began publishing a newsletter that was meant to serve as a forum for dieners and medical school faculty overseeing willed-body programs. In Volume 1, Number 1, an article co-authored by Dr. Cahill recommended that “cadaveric specimens be labeled in such a way that we know which participants, instructors, or investigators
were working with each specimen. . . . Thus, if any untoward event occurred, tracking could be done to determine the association between participant, instructor, or investigator and cadaveric specimen.” But it was difficult to get an audience. With the growing emphasis in anatomy departments on cellular biology, faculty and administrators were paying less and less attention to willed-body programs.

  Many schools no longer even called their departments “Anatomy Departments.” They were now departments of cellular biology. “They kept the bodies, but cared even less about how it was being run,” Dr. Todd Olson, professor of anatomy at Albert Einstein, told me. “It was, you know, take your problems somewhere else. And, if you can bring in another $75,000 from the willed-body program so that we can use it for the general departmental fund, that would be great.”

  After three years, the newsletter died. History was bound to repeat itself. When it did, it happened right under Payer’s nose.

  In 1962, thirty-seven years before he met Michael Brown, Allen Tyler went to work at the University of Texas Medical Branch. His first job was in the cafeteria. Tyler was only sixteen then, but he was diligent and mature for his age, “like a little man,” his best friend said. He always wore a jacket and a tie. When his friends went off to college, Tyler stayed behind and married his girlfriend, Rose, and they settled down in a bungalow in Galveston and had a baby girl. Like many ambitious people who never make it to college, Tyler was preoccupied with learning. Rose said, “He always wanted to engage with people that were above his level.”

  In 1965, Tyler moved up from the cafeteria and took a new job at the medical school working in the morgue. There, while he mopped the floors, he mixed with the doctors, whom he so much admired. Surgeons often dropped in to harvest specimens they needed for their courses. While they removed a pair of knees or shoulders from a corpse, Tyler watched them. “Doctor,” he said, “why are you cutting here? Why are you cutting there? Why do you hold the knife that way?” And they told him. At lunch, Tyler went to the library and withdrew mysteries and anatomy books. At night, he and Rose lay in their big wooden bed and he read to her. Rose was blind. Tyler put his arm around her small body and whispered, “Chief, listen to this.”