Investigation into Human Remains Trade

Did a warehouse in Detroit become the site of absolute

horror? Stacked heads, fetuses in jars, and a

cutting room that looked like something straight out of a film.

Did the trail that exposed it all come from Israel?

The answer, of course, is yes. In February

2012, customs officers at Detroit Metro opened

a set of coolers that had just come off a flight from

Israel.

When they were opened up, they found eight human heads packed

inside of them. While the manifest claimed the remains

were embalmed

and sitting in embalming fluid, laboratory tests confirmed that the

liquid was actually blood, and that one of the men had died

from sepsis. That single intercepted shipment is

what finally drew federal investigators to Arthur Rathburn,

and to the warehouse he kept on Grinnell Avenue.

When the FBI entered that building in December

2013, they stepped into a place with no

heat and no running water, where dead flies lay in

piles and a chainsaw waited on the cutting room floor.

Agents spent days working with a pneumatic chisel through

frozen masses of heads, arms, legs, and

torsos that had locked together in their own fluids.

Heads had been stacked directly upon heads with nothing between the

faces. Human body parts sat in coolers, paint

cans, and 50-gallon drums. And in one container,

they lifted four fetuses from a brown liquid that also

held human brain tissue. Rathburn had once run the

anatomical donation program at the University of Michigan.

After he was dismissed, he built a business called International

Biological and bought donated corpses cheaply,

especially the diseased ones. He cut them apart, and he

rented the pieces to medical and dental courses that believed they

were receiving clean tissue. Over 16 years, the trade

brought in more than $13 million.

Families signed papers thinking a husband or a father was going

to science, while a head might sell for $500

and a torso for nearly three thousand.

And when the remainder was sent for cremation, parts

were sometimes

held back without anyone being told.

The heads that had returned from Israel had already been used in

training courses overseas and were being flown home so they could be

rented out again. Rathburn told agents from the

CDC and Homeland Security that he had packed the boxes

himself in Israel, a claim the investigation later

showed was false. This pipeline didn't appear out of

nowhere.

Israel had a documented problem with unauthorized taking of

skin, corneas, heart valves, and bone, claiming

to have received it from Israeli soldiers, civilians,

foreign workers, and Palestinians, most of the time

with no family consent. Israeli health officials later

conceded that this did happen. Rathburn was

convicted of moving those remains as hazardous material, and of

sending HIV and hepatitis positive parts

to researchers who never knew what they were handling.

The commercial side never fully died.

Bodies and parts still move as training material and

specimens if you slap the right label on the cooler.

And ever since the war started, the volume of Palestinian bodies

moving through Israeli custody exploded.

And doctors on the Gaza side say that too many of those

corpses coming back have already been opened.

So is this ghoulish practice a real business model?

While the war produces a steady stream of corpses, so the

Israeli body market can keep on humming.