Body Parts

A Philadelphia funeral director, depicted in court as a Jekyll and Hyde, was sentenced yesterday to 3 1/2 to 10 years in prison after admitting his role in a multimillion-dollar scheme in which body parts were stolen from the dead for use in surgery. "It's like a Frankenstein movie," a relative of a victim told Common Pleas Court Judge Glenn Bronson. James A. McCafferty Jr., 38, of Frankford, had pleaded guilty to his role in a multistate ring that stole body parts, and had agreed to cooperate in the trial of two other morticians.

When Angela Morris's father died of cancer in 2005, she picked a funeral home to handle his cremation simply because it was close to his Philadelphia hospice. She selected the Garzone Funeral Home, one of two funeral homes accused earlier this month in a scheme to steal body parts from cadavers without family consent. Those body parts - bones, skin, tendons and other tissue - were sold to medical body-parts distributors in a lucrative transplant industry, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office said.

Dr. Martin Spector, charged in an alleged scheme to remove body parts from cadavers and sell them for profit to research facilities out of state, was released on his own recognizance yesterday after spending the night in jail. Spector, 70, was arrested Wednesday along with four morgue employees of local hospitals and medical schools. As police described the arrangement, the workers would sever heads, ears and arms from bodies that had been donated for research and sell the parts to Spector.

Selling illegally obtained body parts for use in implant surgery was a profitable fallback career for Michael Mastromarino, a North Jersey oral surgeon who had lost his license for drug offenses. But not profitable enough. Removing bones, skin and tendons from corpses was time-consuming and expensive: PVC pipe was needed to fill out the deboned limbs if there was a viewing. That all changed in early 2004, a city prosecutor said yesterday, when Mastromarino met three Philadelphia morticians who had just what he needed - a crematorium.

Human remains recovered from a kitchen freezer in the Franklinville home of torture and murder suspect Gary Michael Heidnik have been positively identified as those of Sandra Lindsay, according to an assistant Philadelphia medical examiner. Dr. Paul Hoyer, a forensic pathologist with the Medical Examiner's Office, said yesterday that the body parts were identified as Lindsay's on Thursday. Lindsay, 24, had lived in the 400 block of North Holly Street in West Philadelphia. Hoyer said the identification was made after he traveled to the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in St. Louis and consulted with another forensic radiologist.

Mutilated body parts of a missing 12-year-old have been discovered entombed in chunks of fresh concrete that oozed blood. Police arrested seven people yesterday for investigation of murder in the death of sixth-grader Juan Delgado, last seen Tuesday and reported missing Thursday. The seven people lived near the suburban lawn where one of two concrete blocks was apparently dumped overnight and found Saturday. Capt. John Rees listed off the evidence recovered from a tool shed that ties them to the murder.

Arrest warrants were issued today for a Philadelphia ear, nose and throat specialist and four employees of three area hospitals who allegedly were involved in shipping body parts for profit. The warrants were issued for Dr. Martin Spector, 70, whose office and residence is at 22nd and Locust streets, and four morgue workers. Spector surrendered to police at 1:15 p.m. The four other suspects were not in custody early this afternoon. They are Lynwood Summers, 56, of Franklinville, N.J., and Wilbert Richardson, 58, of Chester, who both worked at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; Reuben Whitehead, 53, of Philadelphia, an employee of the Veterans Administration Hospital in West Philadelphia and Lenard Stephens, 60, of Philadelphia, an employee of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

The movie "Body Parts" opened without fanfare in 1,300 theaters nationwide Friday, accompanied by revised advertisements intended to remove any association between the film and the grisly discovery of nearly a dozen dismembered corpses in a Milwaukee apartment July 22. Even in Milwaukee, where Jeffrey L. Dahmer, 31, now stands accused of having murdered as many as 11 young men, the movie was showing in four theaters. The television advertisement campaign that was halted in southern Wisconsin after the bodies were found, has now resumed.

A receptionist for Dr. Martin Spector testified yesterday that she routinely accepted human heads and other body parts from workers at hospital morgues and shipped them in boxes through United Parcel Service to a research facility in Colorado. Karen Morton said the doctor paid $150 per head, $65 per arm and $20 per pair of ear bones to the men who delivered the body parts to his office. She testified that in July, she boxed a shipment of heads and sent them to the Colorado Ontological Research Center in Denver.

OXFORD, Miss. - The stories from family and acquaintances of a Mississippi man charged with sending ricin-laced letters to the president and other officials describe a caring father and enthusiastic musician who struggled with mental illness and pursued a conspiracy theory to its farthest reaches. Paul Kevin Curtis, 45, wrote numerous Web posts over the last several years describing the event he said "changed my life forever": the chance discovery of body parts and organs wrapped in plastic in small refrigerator at a hospital where he worked as a janitor more than a decade ago. He tried to talk to officials about and publicize what he claimed was an elaborate conspiracy theory to sell body parts on the black markets, but he thought he was being railroaded by the government.

Q: I was single most of my life. I raised my children alone. Throughout my life, I was frequently invited to events and attended alone. I have reached the point in my life where my daughter's friends are getting married. The problem is I got married two years ago, and I am still receiving invitations addressed only to me. I understand that when you have a catered event, the number of guests is very important. I would love to attend these special events with my husband, but I don't want to be rude.

ALGIERS, Algeria - The death toll from the terrorist siege at a natural-gas plant in the Sahara climbed to at least 81 Sunday as Algerian forces searching the refinery for explosives found dozens more bodies, many so badly disfigured it was unclear whether they were hostages or militants, a security official said. Algerian special forces stormed the plant on Saturday to end the four-day siege, moving in to thwart what government officials said was a plot by the Islamist militants to blow up the complex and kill all their hostages with mines sown throughout the site.

Staff Sgt. Zoltan Dobovich's family knew he died in the crash of a B-17 in the Alps on the Italian-French border on Nov. 1, 1946. And they knew remains found at the crash site the following summer were buried in a common grave at Arlington Cemetery under a tombstone listing the names of all eight Army Air Force officers and airmen killed. But they did not know whether any of the body parts recovered then or in subsequent decades as the glaciers on the Mont Blanc range retreated belonged to the radioman from Bucks County - until now. Thanks in part to some detective work by a Haddonfield genealogist, the military was able to conduct DNA testing that identified some of the remains as those of Dobovich.

NEW YORK - A New York City police officer has pleaded not guilty to charges that he plotted to abduct and cook women so he could eat their body parts. Gilberto Valle entered the plea Monday in federal court in Manhattan. Authorities arrested the 28-year-old NYPD officer last month based on a tip from his estranged wife. The FBI says it uncovered emails from Valle to an unidentified co-conspirator "discussing plans to kidnap, rape, torture, kill, cook and eat body parts of a number of women.

Laquanta Chapman, 33, of Coatesville, who was convicted Friday of murdering and butchering a Coatesville Area High School student because of a drug deal gone bad, was sentenced to death Wednesday night by a Chester County jury. "Thank you, Jesus," was the soft-voiced reaction from a cluster of family members of the slain Aaron Turner, 16, when the jury forewoman announced the sentence. Jurors deliberated from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. On Oct. 30, 2008, prosecutors charged, Chapman took Turner, who lived across the street in Coatesville, to Chapman's basement, stripped him naked, and shot him dead.

The body of a missing 10-month-old child has been found at the King of Prussia apartment complex where she was snatched as her grandmother tried to save her life, authorities said today. The body of Saanvi Venna was discovered at 4:30 a.m. in a basement area of the apartment building, said Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Ferman. Police arrested Raghunanean Yandamuri, a family friend, who they said had sought a $50,000 ransom. Yandamuri, who lives in the same Marquis apartments complex, left a chilling ransom note.

MAYBE IT'S because they live just a few miles from a stone memorial to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson's severed left arm. But when a group of residents from Virginia's Northern Neck heard that the cremated body parts of American troops had been dumped unceremoniously in a local landfill, they knew what to do: Mark the place - rotting garbage and all - as sacred ground. "People bring trash here. That's what it is, a dump," said Richard Lorey, an Army veteran who lives a few miles from the King George County Landfill just east of Fredericksburg.

PENSACOLA, Fla. - A former medical examiner crudely preserved human brains, hearts, and lungs in soda cups and plastic food containers found inside a storage unit in Florida, authorities said Tuesday. A man bought the contents of a storage unit at auction last week in Pensacola and made the gruesome discovery after being overpowered by a strange smell while sifting through furniture and boxes. Investigators found formaldehyde, a chemical used to embalm and preserve bodies, leaking from a 32-ounce drink cup with a cracked lid that was holding a heart, said Jeff Martin, director of the District 1 Medical Examiner's Office in Pensacola.

STERLING HEIGHTS, MICH. - Contractors found about a dozen pieces of human flesh and other body parts Wednesday while they were clearing debris in a sewer pipe 50 feet below a busy suburban Detroit roadway. Workers stumbled upon the parts about 8:30 a.m. while beginning their daily work in the 9-foot, 6-inch-wide pipe in Sterling Heights. "It's not like there were arms or legs, it was small pieces," said Sterling Heights Police Lt. Luke Riley. "One of the pieces has what appears to be part of a tattoo.