Body Brokers Page 4

  He dedicated a section of the brochure to the “culture” and “values” of the company. “We are in this business because we want to offer a rational and compassionate alternative to the ‘closed-door,’ costly, and unsatisfying services put forth by the Funeral Industry,” he wrote. “And if we can make a living in the process, that is the kind of incentive we can all accept. And we can hold our heads before God and our neighbors.”

  Brown christened himself president of the company. Allen Tyler received the title supervisor of anatomy, and Perna was restyled “Dr. Agostino Perna, Ph.D.” Perna never even graduated college, but the Ph.D. attached to his name was enough to make him look like the head of an anatomy department at a medical school.

  Once he’d taken care of these details, Brown sat down with Tyler to come up with a price list. For heads, they would charge $500; shoulders, $350; elbows, $350; torsos, $600; spines, $1,250; and knees, $400. Altogether, one cadaver would yield $4,450, more than four times what Brown earned from a cremation.

  Tyler agreed to fly out to California every other weekend to disarticulate the bodies. Brown paid him $2,500, plus expenses, for each trip. Perna’s companies, in turn, got all the body parts they needed.

  Twelve miles south of Brown’s crematorium in Murrieta, Ronald King, sixty-nine years old, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. It would have been hard news for anyone, but King had already lost his beloved wife, Margaret.

  King tried his best. In the afternoon, he watched a little television on the couch in his mobile home. He read the local newspaper. At suppertime, he heated up a box of macaroni and cheese in the microwave. Once in a while, when he was feeling particularly lonesome, he put on a Glenn Miller record to remind him of happier times.

  Three or four days a week, King’s stepson, Mike DiMeglio, stopped by. “Come on,” he’d say. “Let’s take a little walk and enjoy the weather.” But King preferred to stay close to home. The only things that really cheered him were his plants. He’d take his stepson out to the backyard and show off his cactus collection. There were at least fifty of them, in pots of different sizes. They were perfectly kept. King was forever fertilizing them, trimming the old flowers, fussing over the new buds. “This one here’s not blooming yet,” he’d say. “But this other one’s just about to start. It’s going to be beautiful.”

  King once said these things with great enthusiasm, but now he was just talking to comfort himself. On the morning of May 3, 2000, he stayed inside and lowered the blinds. Then he got out his prized 1918 Winchester pistol. He placed a pillow behind his head. On the table, he left a check for $850. It was exactly enough for his cremation. He also left a note: “I want to be cremated.” Then, just like that, Ronald King was dead.

  Nine days later, Allen Tyler boarded a plane for California. Tyler was sporting a new look, which had surprised his wife of thirty years. Gone were the penny loafers and dress slacks that he usually wore. “Mr. Conservative is wearing blue jeans!” his daughter teased when she saw him in his new burgundy cowboy boots and jeans. Tyler just smiled and nodded.

  It was a beautiful spring weekend in Lake Elsinore. The air was fragrant with the smell of rose blossoms. On the hillsides, even the Mexican sage, which just months before had appeared withered and near death, had burst forth with new purple flowers. Hummingbirds hovered, supping on the delicate sage nectar. The boughs of the Valencia orange trees strained under the weight of their ripening fruit, which would be ready to pick in just a few days. The bees made their rounds among the bougainvillea and the pink hibiscus flowers. All over the parched valley, a rebirth was under way.

  Jennifer Bittner awoke feeling cheerful. She knew that Tyler was coming. For the past several months, he’d arrived promptly every other Friday. She looked forward to his visits, when she got to put on doctor scrubs and rubber gloves and hang out in the embalming room. Lately, she’d been dreaming about moving to Texas and becoming Tyler’s apprentice. He had been her age when he got his job at the university. I could follow in his footsteps, she thought. It would be a step up in her career—the fantasy of working in forensics seemed ever closer—and she’d need the money soon enough.

  Bittner, it turns out, was five months pregnant. Her belly was just beginning to show under the blouse she wore to work. But it wasn’t Brown’s baby. She had a new boyfriend now, a young man named Steven McCarty, who worked construction laying bathroom tiles.

  Even with a baby growing inside her, Bittner was unfazed by the corpses around her. In fact, she loved going in on the weekends to help out. “Show me how to cut,” she’d say to Tyler. Then she’d watch closely as he maneuvered his steel blade through the yellow fat and pink muscle and along the smooth white bones of his subjects.

  The extra money didn’t hurt, either. Always generous, Brown now lavished Bittner with cash and gifts. Each weekend that she worked for Bio-Tech, Brown paid her an extra $200. He gave her $3,000 to put a down payment on a car. He paid to have the windows tinted, he gave her money for a stereo system, and every so often he slipped her $300 just to buy new clothes. She said, “There was hardly ever a time when I could ask for money and he would tell me no.”

  When Tyler and Brown arrived at the crematorium on Saturday morning, they went into Brown’s office and closed the door. Bittner knew to leave them alone. While she waited, she slipped a blue paper gown over her jeans and T-shirt and covered her sneakers with elasticized paper covers. She brushed her long, chestnut hair into a ponytail, making sure that all of the stray hairs were caught in the elastic. She washed her hands and dried them and put on a pair of new powdered rubber gloves. When she was finished, she waited eagerly in the back of the embalming room for Brown and Tyler.

  The room was narrow, like a shoe box, with a white linoleum floor polished to a glossy finish. There were two porcelain basins in the back, with hoses attached. Lined up lengthwise in the center stood two stainless-steel gurneys.

  Next door, Ronald King lay in the darkness of the walk-in refrigerator on a metal shelf along the wall. He was dressed as he was on any other day—in Levi’s, a flannel shirt, and tennis shoes. King had been dead for ten days.

  Stacked above and below him were other corpses in various states of decay. Like King, they came packaged in coffin-shaped cardboard boxes used for cremation, and body bags, inside which some of them wore their own clothing—a velvet dress, a pair of old shorts, shoes without socks. Others wore hospital gowns. A few had been dead a long time and were crawling with maggots.

  Brown had flagged the choice specimens. Now Ronald King was hauled in and hoisted up on the table, and his cool body slid out of the box. Once King’s clothes were removed, Tyler stepped back to survey his subject. He walked around the table, peering at King’s feet and hands and head. He pointed out to Bittner the bullet hole in King’s cranium.

  Then, Tyler snapped a pair of pale rubber gloves over his ebony skin. He straightened out King’s limbs and set to work.

  Holding a large butcher knife, Tyler positioned the wide, shiny blade at the sternum and began cutting through the fat and muscle around the outside of King’s pale shoulder until it detached in one piece. It was striking to Bittner how quickly he could do it, how easily the body came apart if you knew where to cut, piece by piece, flesh separating from flesh as if God had meant it to be taken apart this way.

  Even Michael Brown was awestruck. He had seen human bodies in every condition imaginable, “bloated and shot up,” but until he met Allen Tyler, he’d never actually gotten inside a human corpse. There was something primitive and barbaric about it that aroused his emotions—the blood splattered about the embalming table, Tyler’s wet, sticky gloves. Yet Tyler was so precise, his motions so masterful. It was hypnotizing to watch his slender hands move about the corpse. With each slice of the knife, Ronald King became less recognizable—until, at last, he lay in pieces.

  Tyler handed King’s shoulders to Bittner, who rinsed off the blood, wrapped them in a plastic bag, and secured the bag with gray masking
tape. Then she neatly placed a label on the package of flesh and set it aside. Later, she would take it upstairs to the attic and lay it in one of the meat freezers.

  The three of them went on in this way, methodically moving from body to body, part to part. Tyler removed Ronald King’s elbows—one slice on the forearm and two swift strokes forward with his saw until the bones snapped in two. Then his hands and his knees. One slice on his calf and his thigh, a few cuts of his saw, and the leg came right off. Then his head. Tyler plucked out King’s brain like a smooth boiled egg from its shell.

  When Tyler was finished, the only thing remaining on the table was the old man’s torso. Bittner hosed the blood off King’s pale chest, wrapped the torso, and set it aside with the other parts. Then, in her girlish print, she listed each part on a scrap of paper as Brown had instructed her: King, K66M—mid tibias, knees, torsos, forearms, elbows, shoulders, head w/out Calveria.

  Over the course of a weekend, Tyler could make it through ten corpses, depending on what he removed—sometimes more if he was feeling energetic. By the time he was finished on Saturday, he had also cut up a sprightly seventy-two-year-old, who had died in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, and a Navy veteran. Tyler tossed the leftover scraps of flesh into a cardboard box. Then he and Brown went out to eat and have a few beers.

  It wasn’t until a week or so later that Bittner found time to sit down at her desk and type out the death certificates. She turned on her typewriter, settled herself in her chair, and gathered her papers. Bittner enjoyed this part of her job. Naturally organized, she sorted her files by color: a blue folder was for a body that had been donated to Bio-Tech Anatomical, and a manila folder was for a regular body that was supposed to be cremated. Each time she filled in a death certificate with the name of a deceased person and tucked it away in the right file, she was filled with a sense of satisfaction at knowing that everything was being done just right.

  But today something was wrong. Ronald King’s folder was missing the consent form required for any body that had been donated to Bio-Tech. By law, King’s family had to sign a form giving permission for his body to be used for science. Bittner looked through the papers in King’s file again, but all she could find was a request for cremation signed by King’s stepson. She checked again, but sure enough, the Bio-Tech consent form was missing.

  There must be some mistake, Bittner told herself. But as she looked for the papers, she nervously recalled other cases. When Tyler cut up a body, it had been her job to record the name of the corpse. She didn’t usually pay much attention to the names, but in several cases she’d noticed that they had been indigents, people who’d been sent to Brown by the coroner’s office for cremation. Bittner had just assumed it was okay to cut them up. After all, many of them didn’t even have families. But now she wasn’t so sure.

  Bittner could hear Brown trooping in and out of the refrigerator. Allen Tyler was due back in a week. Brown had already piled up corpses in the cooler in preparation for his arrival. There must have been at least fifteen of them, Bittner thought, growing more anxious now. Looking around, she gathered all of the papers from the new cases that had come in and started to go through them, one by one. I’ve got two signed Bio-Tech consent forms here, she remembers thinking. And last week I may have filed two. So we’re looking at four Bio-Tech cases, maybe. She paused and glanced at the doorway. Where are the eleven extra bodies coming from?

  chapter 3

  The “Toolers”

  Word traveled fast about Bio-Tech Anatomical. Allen Tyler made sure everyone knew about the company. If anyone called him at the University of Texas Medical Branch looking for body parts, he simply referred them to Mike Brown. Soon everyone in the market for parts knew about the unusually fertile source of corpses in southern California, and the orders started pouring in.

  Most of the buyers were medical-device companies, or “toolers,” as Brown called them. “You ever go into a doctor’s office and the drug reps are trying to get their product into the doctor? Well, the same thing happens in tooling for surgery,” he said. “It’s the best way to get the product in front of the doctors. I’ve got a plane ticket for you, I’m going to put you up at the best hotel and give you cadavers to work on, but you’ve got to use my product. Nine out of ten of those doctors will leave there and buy those tools.”

  The buyers included such surgical-equipment companies as Johnson & Johnson, Arthrex, Richard Wolf, Pacific Surgical, Arthrotek, and Nuvasive. They also included brokers, like Perna, who contract to provide a kind of deluxe corpse service to some of the same companies, transporting the parts, setting them up, keeping them fresh, and hauling them away at the end of a seminar.

  Tyler had one of the easiest sales jobs around. The customers came to him. For example, on September 29, 2000, he got an e-mail from Neil Crawford, Ph.D., the lab coordinator for Spinal Biomechanics at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. It said: “Allen, when we talked last, you said you thought a company on the west coast might have specimens that they could sell us. Any word on that? They have not contacted me. We still need several more specimens, especially with the skull base intact, and would be very appreciative.”

  Tyler replied the same day: “Neil, I am Ccing Michael Brown with Bio-Tech Anatomical. He will be in touch with you on Monday regarding inventory in stock.”

  Crawford would later buy twenty-two cervical spines from Brown and pay him $13,200. Tyler made $5,000 from the transaction, for the two weekends that it took him to dismember twenty-two bodies.

  Every day, the fax machine churned out more orders:

  One knee specimen, two shoulder specimens. Please wrap individually.

  Per our conversation this afternoon, I am in need of 10 knee, 10 shoulder and 1 wrist specimen.

  Two cadaver torsos, preferably female in their sixties, weighing 150 pounds. Must not have had any spinal surgeries.

  From her desk, Jennifer Bittner could hear Brown on the phone. “Not a problem,” he assured the callers. “We’ll get them to you right away.” Then, like an eager kid, he bounded up the stairs, packaged the parts in a Styrofoam box, and sent them off.

  Bittner still hadn’t mentioned her worries to Brown. In fact, she’d tried to forget about the incident with Ronald King. Having grown up around drug addicts, she was used to vague suspicions and, dreading the inevitable disappointment, she’d grown expert at talking herself out of them. In Brown’s case, it was easy. Mike knows what he’s doing, she told herself. He wouldn’t jeopardize his company or get into trouble. He’s a businessman. Besides, she thought, maybe he got permission.

  The buyers were equally trusting of Brown. They didn’t ask questions, and Brown never told them more than they needed to know. This type of arrangement is typical in the underground cadaver trade. Donor names are considered confidential, so buyers never see consent forms. They get a list of ID numbers and a package of parts, and they take the supplier’s word for the rest.

  If they order through a broker, they may not even know where the parts come from. One of Brown’s clients, a company called Arthrotek, which has offices in Ontario, California, ordered shoulders through a San Francisco broker named Michelle Johnson. Johnson, in turn, ordered the shoulders from Brown. An unknown third company delivered the shoulders in a white van to the Arthrotek offices. The driver slipped the package to the Arthrotek employee and both men went on their way.

  By the summer of 2000, just six months after founding Bio-Tech, Brown was making plans to open another willed-body company. Brown was a proponent of “diversifying.” As he put it, “Multiple things means multiple money.” But he had another good reason to diversify. He needed someplace to hide the earnings from Bio-Tech. Each week, Brown received checks for thousands of dollars. But Bio-Tech got just one donated body a week.

  A new company would provide a new bank account, new bills, everything he’d need to explain away the money he was making from stolen bodies. Now he just needed a partner. An excellent
prospect was his son’s roller hockey coach, John Schultz. Schultz was a placid man who made a living repairing laser tools. Brown saw him as a “typical middle-class guy, picket fence, green grass, one boy and one girl.”

  Like other people who are tempted by the cadaver trade, Schultz was looking for an easy way to earn some extra cash. He made a good living, but he was worried he wouldn’t have enough to put his kids through college. He hadn’t taken them on a vacation trip in years. He thought maybe he’d start a little business on the side.

  In the summer of 2000, John Schultz almost bought a gas station. Everyone needs gas, he told himself. You don’t need to be a marketing genius to sell the product—just make sure you have a big sign on a good corner. Schultz could hire someone to run the station for him, pay all his bills, and still clear a nice profit.

  But most of the gas stations Schultz looked at cost at least $125,000 up front. That would mean a second mortgage on his house, and he’d probably have to raid his retirement account, too.

  One hot, dry day outside Michael Brown’s crematorium, Schultz and Brown’s conversation about the roller hockey team veered off course. Schultz confessed that he couldn’t afford to buy the gas station that he’d looked at that morning.

  Michael Brown said suddenly, “Why don’t you go into business with me?”

  Schultz was startled. What business? he wondered. The crematorium or the funeral home?

  “What do you mean?” he asked, trying to be cautious around this very successful man.

  But already he knew that he badly wanted to accept. Michael Brown was making real money—and having fun at it.