![]() In the days after the head was found, authorities used cadaver dogs to scour the area. I hadn’t had anything where I had a body part like this turn up.” “I’ve been doing this job for a long time. It drives me crazy,” said Andrew Gall, chief of detectives for the Beaver County district attorney’s office. “Two and half years plugging away at this thing. Police say they’ll likely need the public’s help to solve what they call the most bizarre case they’ve handled. “There’s so many places where you can get these parts,” Vitali said. That makes determining the origins of remains like the head found in Economy difficult if not impossible. The driver, Reuters reported at the time, hadn’t noticed that the body was missing.Ĭomplicating the Pennsylvania case: Bodies and parts can be bought, sold and leased across America with relative ease. It had fallen from a van on the way to a body broker in Colorado. Two years ago in Texas, police found an entire cadaver lying by the side of the road. An airline employee in Arkansas discovered 40 severed heads being shipped in plastic containers in 2010. Typically, however, authorities stumble across these cases only by happenstance. In the case of Detroit-based body broker Arthur Rathburn, authorities allege he “stored human heads by stacking them directly on top of each other without any protective barrier.” Rathburn faces trial in January, charged with defrauding health care clients by misleading them about infected human remains and with lying to federal agents. Reuters has identified thousands of body parts that have been misused or desecrated since 2004. One reason the head may have come from the body trade: The industry has been linked to similar abuses in the past. “We see a rather neat surgical dissection,” Wecht said after examining crime scene photos. Pathologist Cyril Wecht, a veteran of more than 20,000 autopsies, agreed that the cutting wasn’t done by an amateur. “She was dismembered professionally,” said Michelle Vitali, an anatomy professor at Edinboro University near Erie who closely examined the head. I want to donate my body, but to whom? Frequently asked questions ![]() Video: Artist Michelle Vitali brings to life the woman’s features on a clay model
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