Wilderness
Joyce Zamazanuk knew that her son was dying. She knew it when the
nurses quietly wheeled Jim to a private room on the seventh floor of
the hospital in San Diego. His new room had a bed, a metal chair,
and an oxygen tube, but little else. Outside, few visitors wandered
the halls. A hush hung over the nursing station. Joyce thought, This
must be where they bring the sick patients to die.
Six days in the hospital had done little to help Jim. AIDS had
ravaged his body. The tumor that engulfed his lungs appeared larger
in each new CAT scan. Always slender, Jim Farrelly, forty-five, was
now reedlike beneath the cotton sheets and blankets. His thick brown
hair had thinned to a soft, downy fur. He had trouble talking. Death
by asphyxiation was certain.
Joyce wondered what awaited her beloved son: Would he feel pain in
the moment of his passing? How much longer before he left her?
Joyce had been just seventeen years old when Jim, her third son, was
born; the two had always been close. Even as a baby, Jim was gentle
in his manners and feminine in his tastes. He wanted to do whatever
his mother did. Unlike his macho brothers, Jim would learn to cook
and to sew. Later, when his sister was born, he styled her hair and
embroidered flowers on her clothing. At school, the other children
called him all the usual names: sissy and mama’s boy.
But Jim was a scrapper, tougher, his mother always said, than any of
his tough brothers. When they lost Jim’s father, it was Jim who
stepped in and took care of Joyce. Jim planned his father’s funeral.
He bought the Christmas presents. He was a comfort to his mother.
When he grew up and settled in San Diego, Joyce often came to stay.
She and Jim shared their sorrows and secrets.
AIDS was one secret Jim had tried to keep. When he was diagnosed
with HIV in 1994, he lied to his mother and said, “The doctor just
found a polyp. Nothing for you to worry about.” Joyce was relieved.
But within a year, the virus had progressed to full-blown AIDS.
Jim tried to prepare his family for his death. He knew it was
coming-he’d seen many of his friends die-and so he made sure
everything was ready. With the little money that he had, he bought a
cemetery plot in Arizona. He drew up a will and arranged to be
cremated through a funeral home in San Diego. With his debts paid
and his last wishes clear, Jim assured his mother there was nothing
more to worry about.
The end came quickly. Jim had only been on the seventh floor for six
or seven hours when he began making a guttural, gasping sound. By
now, everyone had arrived: Jim’s sister, Joy; his best friend,
Billy, and countless others. Startled, they rushed to his bed.
“What is it, Jim?” his mother asked.
“Can I help you? You’re not crying. Please don’t cry.”
Jim shook his head. He was laughing. “It’s okay, Mom,” he whispered.
“I am less and less. There is more and more.” Then he fell into a
coma. Soon after, he was dead.
Everything went as planned. In the hospital room, Joyce said
good-bye to her son. After she went home, the nurses came and took
Jim’s body down the long hall, into the freight elevator, and
downstairs to the morgue. Several weeks later, someone from the
mortuary called Joyce to say that Jim’s ashes were ready. “Okay,
send them along,” Joyce replied. But when the urn arrived, she
didn’t open it. She clutched it and placed it on her shelf, where
she gazed at it for weeks. Finally, she sent it on to Tucson, where
it was buried beside the urn of Jim’s father.
Fourteen months passed. Then, one afternoon, the telephone rang in
Joyce’s house. When she answered it, a woman asked, “Are you the mother of Jim
Farrelly?”
“Yes,” Joyce said. “What is this regarding?”
“I’m a victim’s advocate.”
Joyce wondered if one of her sons was playing a joke. “But my son is
dead,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” the woman said.
Could it be identity theft? Joyce pressed the phone to her ear and
took a deep breath. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is this
about?”
The female caller paused. “I’m calling to tell you that your son has
been the victim of a crime.”
“A crime?” Joyce almost laughed.
“Ma’am,” the woman’s voice was somber. “We have identified your son’s
body parts at a crematorium. His body was dismembered.”
Dismembered? But Jim’s ashes … He’d been buried. He was fine.
Joyce said, “I’m going to have to call you back.”
Later, Joyce would recall that final night in the hospital. In
retrospect, it seemed odd to have left Jim alone. And yet, what
could she have done? No one had invited her to the morgue. Did the
hospital even have one? Joyce had never thought to ask. The nurses,
who had been so solicitous when Jim was alive, said nothing about
his corpse. Joyce had signed some papers at the funeral home. But
she never saw Jim’s body. Now, Joyce wondered: Where had they taken
him? Why hadn’t she been there for her son?
Corpses lead a perilous existence. Whisked from the arms of family
and friends, they embark on a journey under the care of strangers.
In most cases, those to whom we entrust our dead take care to ensure
that they’re laid to rest safely. Most morgue workers, funeral
directors, and crematorium operators keep careful track of each
body. Indeed, many care for them as they would the dead bodies of
their own relatives. Still, body brokers have been known to haunt
this dark landscape, hunting for body parts, which they can later
sell.
At each stage of the journey, there is ample opportunity for theft.
At the hospital, a nurse or an attendant shuttles the corpse first to
the morgue, where it’s stored in a steel refrigerator. If a family
requests it, an autopsy may be performed. As it happens, an autopsy
is an ideal situation for body brokers inclined to theft.
Pathologists routinely take samples of specimens relevant to their
investigation-a slice of kidney, for instance-which get preserved in
paraffin blocks and transferred onto slides. An honest pathologist
may remove a whole brain and keep it fixed in preservative for weeks.
Otherwise, the brain matter will not yield its secrets. This is
perfectly legal as long as the doctor has permission from the
deceased’s family.
But consent forms vary in their specificity, and pathologists often
work with unlicensed assistants known as dieners, a word derived
from the German for servant. Dieners do the work that no one else
wants to do: They dissect bodies, cutting through bone and muscle
and removing whole organs so that the pathologists can weigh and
examine them. They are responsible for cleaning up the morgue and
assisting pathologists. A diener may work with a pathologist, while
at the same time harvesting body parts for tissue banks. Stealing
body parts is easy for a diener, and the money is good. Dieners
often become brokers.
Numerous diener thefts have been discovered over the years, from
Maine to Los Angeles. Nearly all of these cases were uncovered
purely by chance. Often the families of the dead noticed something
odd on an autopsy report. Only later did they learn that parts of
their family member’s body had disappeared owing to an intricate
deception.
If an autopsy isn’t ordered, someone at the hospital calls the
funeral home of the family’s choice. A driver comes to pick the body
up and take it to the funeral home. There, the body is refrigerated
until the time comes for what’s known in the funeral trade as “final
disposition.” If the body is to be cremated, it may be sent to
another funeral home equipped with a crematorium or to a crematorium
at a nearby cemetery. Here, once again, a stranger, who often has
little training or supervision, assumes control of the body. If the
crematorium operator is so inclined or is familiar with the market,
he may be tempted to remove a body part before sliding the cadaver
into an oven. Once a body is cremated, there’s no way to know if
anything is missing.
If the body is to be embalmed, the procedure takes place at a
funeral home. But there too, a corpse may not be safe. The funeral
home may have an agreement with a tissue bank. Each body may produce
a tidy kickback, a thousand dollars, perhaps. Or, more disturbing,
the funeral director may own his own tissue bank, earning thousands
of dollars selling the parts of each corpse entrusted to his care.
He might not bother to ask permission.
Relatives rarely have the opportunity-or the inclination-to
accompany their deceased loved ones into the realm of hospital
morgues and funeral homes. They sit by their bedsides while they are
alive, clutching at any sign of life. But once death comes, they are
quick to release them into a world, which, for many, is a kind of
wilderness. And there, as in the wild, vultures are drawn to the
dead.
Chapter Two
An Ideal Situation
In 2001, Michael Brown had a thriving cremation business in Lake
Elsinore, California, a pleasant suburban town seventy miles
southeast of Los Angeles. He had five admiring employees, a beautiful
wife, and two sons. Brown, who was in his early forties, was a
loving and supportive father. On most weekends, he could be found
racing dirt bikes with his older son and attending the boys’ ice
hockey games. Brown took both boys camping in the Nevada wilderness.
He Jet Skied with them on the town lake, played golf with them, and
taught them how to fly radio airplanes. Brown beamed when he spoke of
his children. “Those kids are my heart and soul,” he said.
Brown wasn’t a devout Christian, although he displayed in his spare
office a Bible engraved with his name. Sometimes he even quoted
Matthew 7:3-“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye,
but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
The California state crematorium inspector, Dan Redmond, saw this
same humble philosophy in Brown’s work and was impressed by it. “You
can honestly tell when these guys are just in the business to make
an extra buck, and Mike was not like that,” Redmond said. Redmond
noticed that when Brown talked to grieving families, he listened,
counseled, and was careful to avoid any sales talk or to push a
fancy coffin. If a family couldn’t afford a funeral, Brown offered to
cut his rates or provide a service free of charge.
“He had one of the best crematorium in southern California,” Redmond
said with a smile. In 1996, when a nearby funeral home got in
trouble for improperly storing bodies, Brown was the first man
Redmond called as his expert witness. “When other guys in the
business had problems, I used to tell them to go and look at Brown’s
place. That’s how a crematorium ought to be run.” Brown’s records
were always in order; there was never a document out of place, never
a signature missing. He was constantly mopping and sweeping.
But beneath his caring manner, Brown had little feeling for his
customers, living or dead. Later, he would say, “I don’t believe a
body is worth more than garbage once you pass away.”
One afternoon in February 1999, Jennifer Bittner stood in the
parking lot of Brown’s crematorium. She was a pretty, pale-skinned
girl, with delicate features, blue eyes, and long brown hair that
she wore loose down her back. Bittner appeared older than her
eighteen years. Her shoulders slumped and her face was drawn with
grief.
Shading her eyes from the glaring sun, Bittner stared at the long,
low building. Made of stucco and stone, the crematorium was like all
of the other buildings in the office park. It was flat and rectangular
and resembled a warehouse. Bittner couldn’t see much through the
tinted glass door. But looking up, she could make out three small
chimneys.
When Bittner appeared in Michael Brown’s doorway, he jumped up,
shook her hand, and led her into a back office. Brown made an
impression on the young woman. He was about six feet tall, blond and
blue-eyed, with the muscular build of a high school football star.
Bittner admired his neatly trimmed goatee. Later, she recalled
finding him “very attractive.” He was also instantly empathetic.
Brown listened and patted her arm as she explained that her cousin
had just died and her family didn’t have enough money for his
funeral.
“It was gang violence,” Bittner said softly. “My cousin was
murdered.”
Brown nodded gently and offered to arrange for a discounted funeral.
“I’ll take care of everything,” he promised.
After they made the funeral arrangements, Bittner asked Brown if she
could take a look around. She had always been curious about dead
bodies. In her spare time, she read Patricia Cornwell mysteries,
books like Postmortem and Cause of Death, and she dreamed about one
day investigating crime scenes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Body Brokers
by Annie Cheney
Copyright © 2006 by Annie Cheney.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Broadway
Copyright © 2006
Annie Cheney
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7679-1733-2
