The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [23]
The funeral directors apparently felt little obligation to their unsuspecting customers, even failing to make sure that the ashes returned to them were actually those of their loved ones. One family held its memorial the day before the relative was actually cremated. Another conducted a service in the family home at the precise time cutters were at work on the body.
What then, exactly, is their crime? How to categorize it? Prosecutors have labeled it fraud. Theft. Fraud and theft committed upon the families who trusted the funeral directors to render the agreed-upon services. But also, implicitly, theft upon the dead, the very pilfering of their parts. Such thinking, though, not only places the dead, strangely, at the center of the victimization; it also ignores the underlying basis of what funeral directors do, which is, after all, to traffic in death.
We have given them that. Until the Civil War—when sons died far from home and needed to be preserved for transport, and when hundreds of thousands of Americans were exposed for the first time to an embalmed body vis-à-vis Abraham Lincoln’s epic train journey from Washington to Philadelphia to New York to Illinois—there was no such thing as embalming here, or funeral directors. Americans took care of their dead. They stood by them when they died, washed them, built them wooden coffins, laid them out in front parlors (hence “funeral parlor”), and then buried them themselves, paying more than lip service to the axiom of “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Now we hand off our loved ones’ bodies before they’ve even appreciably cooled to funeral directors charged with transforming corpses into what’s called, in funerary parlance, “a memory picture,” to drain them of blood, pump them full of dye and formaldehyde, glue their eyes and wire their mouths shut; to jab a metal instrument through their abdomens and pierce their vital organs, vacuuming up their discharge; to paint them with makeup and position them in coffins in mimicry of peaceful sleep. Or, in cases of cremation, to introduce their bodies into ovens heated to 1,600 degrees, and stoke their bones during an hours-long combustion. This is their job.
Yes, the dead may have been victims of a sort, but beyond them, there was what the funeral directors and cutters did to the living, and not just to the families of the dead. For once their work was finished, the cutters packed the flesh and bones into picnic coolers and headed back north with them. BTS then forwarded the bones and tissue to its client processing companies, which cleaned, handled and supposedly sterilized the parts. Next they were repacked and shipped to doctors and hospitals around the world, including Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where on the morning of May 12, 2005, 65-year-old Betty Pfaff lay unconscious in an operating room as her surgeon tore open a plastic package containing AlloDerm—a white freeze-dried substance, derived from cadaver skin, that dissolves into a wound and stimulates rapid tissue regeneration—which he lowered into the opening stretching across the woman’s abdomen.
LYING IN THE RECOVERY ROOM, draped in covers and her mind foggy, Betty Pfaff was informed that her surgery—a somewhat complicated one, due to the fact that her abdomen had been opened so many times before—had been a success. Everything went well. You’re going to be fine, she was told. At this moment, these sentences were not only accurate as far as anyone knew, but provided Pfaff with great solace.
Pfaff, a sweet,