Drum – 22 August 2019

66 |^22 AUGUST^2019 http://www.drum.co.za

i e wit arms

and legs, heaps of male

genitalia and a pile of

sawn-off heads – Amer-

ican investigators felt

as if they’d stepped into

a horror movie as they

conducted a raid on a

laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona.
What they discovered was so gro-
tesque that FBI bosses decided it’d be

better to keep it under wraps and so for
five years it was a closely guarded secret.
But now all is being revealed as 33
families go to court to get justice for

their deceased loved ones.

ey’d all been devastated when their

atives died but found comfort in the

a that by donating the bodies, they’d

making a valuable contribution to

edical science. What they didn’t

ow was that the Biological Resource

entre (BRC) was an illegal chop shop

at intended cashing in on their loss

y dismembering their family mem-

ers’ corpses with chainsaws and

en selling the parts.

In court former FBI assistant spe-

ial agent Mark Cwynar recently

escribed the nightmarish scenario

e encountered in a raid on the lab

in 2014.

Buckets of frozen body parts were

piled on top of one another inside

building. None of the limbs was

properly tagged to identify which donor

they’d come from.

It was all, of course, highly illegal but

even worse was the undignified way the

centre treated the bodies.

During the raid, officers found the

head of a small woman sewn onto a large

male torso and hung on a wall, apparent-

ly as some kind of morbid joke.

“This is a horror story,” says Troy Harp,

one of the complainants in the lawsuit

against the facility. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Troy donated both his mother’s and

grandmother’s bodies. He believed the

BRC was a body-donation and tis-

sue-bank facility and that the bodies

would be used for scientific purposes. He

says he was told that sample cells would

be harvested from the bodies to be used

in cancer and leukaemia research.

But now he doubts this ever happened.

Troy is even questioning whether the

small container filled with his mother’s

ashes couriered to him shortly after the

raid even really held her remains.

With so many questions unlikely to be

answered, how will he find closure?

“I don’t feel I ever will,” he says.

T

HE FBI was led to the BRC lab

after raiding the warehouse

of one of its clients in 2013.

The client, Arthur Rathburn,

a body broker (someone who

buys and sells cadavers or

human body parts), had been accused of

endangering healthcare workers by pro-

viding them with corpses and severed

heads infected with HIV and hepatitis.

While investigating his activities, FBI

agents followed a paper trail that led

them to the BRC, which had been pro-

viding Rathburn with body parts.

It’s estimated that during its existence

around 5 000 bodies were donated to the

facility. News organisation Reuters did a

detailed analysis of the BRC’s records

and shone a spotlight on the calculated

and mercenary manner in which the

enterprise operated.

For example, the liver of a school care-

LAB OF

HORROR

Their bodiesweredonated

to help medicalscience

• but insteadthey were

choppedupandsoldoff

COMPILED BY KIMABRAHAMS

LEFT: Stephen Gore, founder and former owner of the facility, with his family. Last year he pleaded

guilty to fraud and received what victims’ families see as a “slap on the wrist”.

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