In Kansas last week, a grisly discovery: Seven bodies that should have been cremated were instead found dismembered aboard a truck at a medical waste facility.
The severed heads and torsos were traced back to Bio Care Southwest, a New Mexico company that harvests and sells organs from people who had agreed to donate their bodies to science. The heads were hacked off with some kind of chain saw, according to The Associated Press.
Earlier this week, New Mexico police arrested Bio Care's owner, Paul Montano, and charged him with three counts of fraud. On Thursday, Montano pleaded not guilty.
After scientists returned the organs to Bio Care, the company was supposed to cremate the bodies and send the ashes back to the families at no cost. On its Web site, Bio Care reassures its potential clients, "At Bio Care, you will always be treated with dignity, respect and honesty."
But police say that's not what happened. Instead, at least 12 containers' worth of dismembered heads and limbs from Bio Care turned up at Stericycle, a Kansas City, Kan., medical waste treatment plant, leaving many families in shock and wondering whose ashes they had received.
A Stericycle employee alerted police after finding a partly burned head and torso in a truck at the facility. Stericycle said it routinely processes soft-tissue organs, "but never heads and torsos."
Families were stunned.
"To not give you everything and to have the head shipped someplace else, it's really disturbing," New Mexico resident Chuck Hines told the AP. Hines' 83-year-old father died of a stroke, and his body was donated to Bio Care.
On Thursday, investigators identified another of the bodies as the husband of Darlene Dillard. "What sick people," Dillard told The Kansas City Star. "That is so sick."
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