A woman was left stunned after uncovering the unsettling truth about her father’s body, which he had agreed to donate to medical science before he passed away.
Farrah Fasold’s father, Harold Dillard, from the US, sadly died of cancer aged 56 in 2009. During his final month at a hospice, a company called Bio Care approached and asked if he would consider donating his body to doctors so they could practice knee replacement surgery.
“His eyes lit up,” Fasold recalled in an interview with the BBC.
“He viewed that as lessening the burden on his family. Donating his body was the last selfless thing he could do."
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Mr Dillard died on Christmas Eve in 2009, and within a few hours, his body was collected from the hospice.
The family were told that Mr Dillard’s remains that were not used would be cremated, and his ashes would be returned to the family free of charge.
But Ms Fasold received a shocking phone call a few months later, which would ultimately reveal the horrific truth about what happened to her father’s body.
During the phone call she received from police, Ms Fasold was told that her father’s head was discovered in a warehouse along with over 100 other bodies.
"I would close my eyes at night and see huge red tubs filled with body parts,” she said.
“I had insomnia. I wasn't sleeping."
Ms Fasold believes her father’s body was ‘mutilated’ and not treated with the respect the company had promised.
Authorities told her that the bodies found had been ‘dismembered by a coarse cutting instrument, such as a chainsaw’ and believed that his body had been taken by a company that acquires bodies where they use what they want and sell the rest on, rather than cremating the remains as the family had been told.
Companies like the one that got in contact with Ms Fasold’s father take part in a practice called ‘body brokering’, in which private companies purchase remains and sell them on to other companies that use them for different kinds of research.
There are legitimate ways to donate remains for scientific research.
But body brokers are different from the organ and tissue transplant industry, Reuters reports, which the US government regulates closely.
Selling hearts, kidneys, and tendons for transplantation is illegal, but no federal law regulates the sale of dead bodies or body parts for research or educational purposes.
Sadly, when Farrah tried to go after Bio Care with legal action, she was told they had not broken the law in the US.
The case of fraud against Bio Care, which no longer exists, fell apart as prosecutors could not prove that the company intended to deceive her.
