Little Shop of Horrors
Allen Tyler had a good job looking after corpses that had been donated to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He stored them, chopped them up, packed and shipped the parts. Then he got a wonderful idea: he would start his own enterprise on the side. What's a few toenails among friends?
(Page 3 of 3)
But that was a minor operation compared with the one Michael Francis Brown (no relation to Christopher) was soon running in Riverside, California—with the assistance of Allen Tyler. The two men had met when Agostino Perna's company IMET was putting on a seminar in the San Diego area in early 2000. Brown was the owner of three companies in Riverside: Pacific Family Funeral Home, a crematorium called Pacific Cremation Care, and a body-supply company called Bio-Tech Anatomical. IMET needed a place where Tyler could prepare the bodies, and Bio-Tech Anatomical loaned its lab for IMET's use.
Brown watched Tyler work, and he was impressed. He told Tyler that he had more frozen cadavers than he could handle and did not know how to disarticulate them. And so Tyler, assuming that the bodies in question had been willed to Brown's private company—as it is legal to do in some states—began working with Brown on a regular basis.
The job paid well. For twelve weekends between February 2000 and February 2001, Brown paid Tyler $2,500 a weekend plus expenses to disarticulate heads, shoulders, knees, elbows, and legs from 160 cadavers. Brown appreciated Tyler's work; he told Tyler that he would like to make him a business partner. There were, however, slight imperfections with this partnership.
The main problem was that Brown could be disturbingly unprofessional. On one occasion, Tyler arrived at the Bio-Tech lab to find a body whose spine had been sloppily cut out of its torso. Tyler discovered that Brown had performed this ham-handed dismemberment himself. Apparently, Tyler thought, Brown had wanted to impress some hanger-on at the facility.
Then there was the situation Brown had put himself in with his 21-year-old assistant, Jennifer Bittner. Bittner had started performing clerical work for Brown in 1999, and she had also helped Tyler disarticulate bodies. She would rinse the blood off the parts and place them in plastic trash bags. The bundles were then taken to the freezers, where Brown kept an inventory of parts. In the final three months of 1999, Bittner became romantically involved with Brown, and in December that relationship soured and Bittner left the company. In February 2001, a year after her departure, she told a friend at the Riverside County coroner's office what she knew about her ex-lover's business.
This was a serious problem for Brown, since not all of the bodies had in fact been willed to his company after all; some were the corpses of indigents in the Riverside community. Brown had been underbidding his competitors in the area by a $200 to $500 margin for the county contract to cremate indigents, a margin he could afford since he didn't cremate them at all: He stored them until Tyler could help sever them into parts, and then he sold them through his Bio-Tech company. A few days later, after Bittner talked to the coroner's office, a team of sheriff's deputies raided Brown's crematorium and found 5 heads, 74 cadavers, and 128 other body parts.
Soon after Brown's arrest, Tyler got a phone call from him. According to Tyler's April 2002 grand jury testimony, Tyler asked Brown what had happened. Brown said that Bittner had told the authorities about him. "What he said to me initially was that Jennifer was never back there [in the lab]. He intimated that perhaps that's what my testimony would be . . . I told him I wasn't going to do it, that she was back there."
Yet in spite of his claims that he wasn't aware of wrongdoing in Riverside, his testimony made it clear that he had witnessed convincing evidence of impropriety. He said he had cut up an embalmed body, one that had obviously been prepared for a viewing, not a medical lab—a request anybody in the body-supply business would consider highly unusual.
Q: And when you did disarticulations for Michael Brown, did you ever disarticulate an embalmed body?
Tyler: The one that stands out in my mind was an autopsied body that was initially put on the table. And once I started working on it, I discovered that it appeared to be embalmed.
Q: What about the body led you to believe it had been embalmed?
Tyler: Well, the consistency of the tissue was not that of a fresh body.
Q: And that's based on your experience as an anatomist?
Tyler: Another clue that it was an autopsied body is it did have the sawdust in it, and that's a classic clue right there that it had been embalmed—the sawdust and the way it was sewn up.
Q: Did you mention your observations to anyone?
Tyler: Yes.
Q: Who did you mention your observations to?
Tyler: Mr. Brown.
Q: What did you tell him in that regard?
Tyler: That this was an autopsied body. It appeared to be autopsied—an embalmed body.
Q: What was his response?
Tyler: I don't remember exactly what the—at the time what the response was. "Oh, gee," or something maybe to that nature.
Q: Did you continue with the disarticulation of that body?
Tyler: I think the head was saved, and I don't think anything else was saved off of that. Maybe just the head.
"A funeral-home body should have automatically thrown up a red flag," says Ronn Wade. "I don't know of any program in the U.S. that would accept an autopsied or embalmed body."
BY 2002 RESIDENTS OF TYLER'S block had become more than a bit curious about their quiet neighbor. They guessed that he made only a little more than $50,000 and that his house hadn't cost much more than their modest $50,000 homes. But he was regularly remodeling the place, installing new appliances and carpeting. He drove a green 2000 Lexus SUV, priced at $40,000 the year he bought it. His colleagues were becoming suspicious too. The news of Tyler's testimony created a huge buzz in the willed-body community. Then, a routine audit conducted after the director of UTMB's program, Dr. Andrew Payer, left unexpectedly, revealed the paperwork routing checks to Tyler's home address. On May 1, with campus security on alert, university administrators met with Tyler and asked him to explain why he had asked Watson Laboratories to send checks to his home. In an e-mail response to my questions, UTMB officials said that Tyler's explanation was not adequate and that he was escorted off the campus and, eight days later, fired. They said the reason he was fired was that he "may have been diverting state resources for personal gain." Soon after being fired, he was visited at his home by FBI agents, who were tipped off by UTMB.
But UTMB's suffering was just beginning. Apparently Tyler's record-keeping had gotten sloppy. The institution admitted that under Tyler's direction, the cremains of willed-body-program participants were often dusted together and sifted into a single drum—even those that were supposed to be matched up with their corresponding parts and sent to families. But Tyler hadn't told the families that the cremains were mixed, and so families could not be sure that their urns contained their loved ones at all.
On July 11, 2002, UTMB president John Stobo stopped accepting and exporting bodies through the university's willed-body program indefinitely and wrote a letter of explanation and apology to the editor of the Galveston County Daily News: "Approximately two weeks ago, we realized that inadequate record-keeping has made it impossible for us to determine in every case precisely whose ashes donors' families received," he wrote. "As a result, we now believe that, beginning in the summer of 1999, ashes of some of the donors who had requested that their remains be returned to their families were instead commingled with ashes intended for burial at sea."
One of the most disturbing revelations to the family members of willed-body donors was that Tyler had had little supervision in his job at UTMB. It was bad enough that he had mixed the ashes, but it was UTMB's lack of oversight that opened the floodgates for lawsuits from the grieving families, who filed against every possible offender: UTMB, Allen Tyler, Agostino Perna, Andrew Payer, and the UTMB cremation subcontractor, EnviroClean Management Services.
The public was soon treated to the gory details of Tyler's operation. Houston Chronicle newspaper headlines read "The Body Business: Demand Remains High for Human Tissue and Organs" and "Fees for Cadavers Allegedly Inflated: UTMB Body Parts Involved in Dispute." The hearings elicited even more graphic details. At a hearing in May 2003, David George, one of the plaintiffs lawyers, stood before a room packed with willed-body-program donors' family members. He displayed an enlarged copy of a UTMB record showing that "Jane Doe" went for $1,700 within a matter of months: Her head went for $450, her spine for $350, her breasts for $200, her knees for $700. She was received on January 12, 2000 and disarticulated the following day. Some in the room covered their eyes; others clasped their hands to their mouths to keep from gasping. And what George was describing was legal.
IN THE MONTHS AFTER THE scandal broke, Tyler retreated to his small, square, salmon-colored home on the west end of Galveston Island. He spent his time in the house with the hurricane shutters closed, the lights dimmed. Those who have known him over the years say that his depression comes and goes and that his weight has dropped from 200 to 160 pounds.
Though the FBI investigation continues, Tyler has not been charged with any crime. The FBI and the U.S. attorney refuse to speculate on what sort of sentencing he might face if he is convicted. But Tyler's erstwhile associate Michael Francis Brown has been charged with 144 counts of embezzlement and 128 counts of "mutilating grave remains" and faces up to 186 years in state prison. Lawyers for the plaintiffs say that the multimillion-dollar civil suit against UTMB and Tyler will most likely come to trial in 2004. Tyler is scheduled to give a deposition this month.
One late afternoon this spring, as the sun was going down and shedding a diffuse light between the leaves of the trees, I visited Tyler at his home to try one last time to get an interview. He spoke to me from behind the hurricane shutters in his doorway. I could not see his face, only a set of teeth, illuminated by the television's fluorescence, moving behind a dark screen as he spoke in a low and serious voice, saying that nobody understood this business. He had no further comment. To take my card, he opened the door just enough to make room for his arm, then he retreated inside.
My Library
