LOSING her dad to cancer on Christmas Eve, Farrah Fasold clung to the hope that his dying wish – donating his body to science – could at least make the world a better place.
Instead, just weeks later, she was left horrified as cops explained they’d identified Harold Dillard’s arm stuffed in a barrel with other people’s remains. Every last piece of him has been tossed heartlessly into tubs, with private firms feared to have cashed in on his selfless final act in a morbid, little-known industry dubbed “body brokering”.
The 49-year-old nurse from Albuquerque, New Mexico, was even hit with fresh heartbreak when she realised the ashes she’d been sent a week earlier – supposedly Harold’s – couldn’t possibly have been his.
Farrah told The Sun she suffered from PTSD as a result of the haunting ordeal.
She said: “I developed insomnia, I had a really hard time sleeping. Anytime I closed my eyes, I would instantly see visions of the big red medical waste tubs that they had found all the body parts in.
“I went to therapy, I got diagnosed with PTSD… it was very traumatic and affected me for years after.”
She added: “It traumatised me to hear how they treated my dad’s body, and the things that they did.”
Uncovering her dad’s true fate opened Farrah’s eyes to the shadowy world of unregulated corpse trading – a grisly industry known as “body brokering”.
It’s a controversial network of for-profit operators who snap up fresh corpses within hours of death, sometimes carving them apart before selling the pieces on for cash.
Defenders of the trade insist it serves a necessary purpose – claiming it stops unwanted or donated bodies from going to waste.
But research has shown that some private companies – who dub themselves “non-transplant tissue banks” – make millions in profit by taking part in the polarising practice.
Investigative research by journalist Brian Gow in 2017 identified 25 well-established body brokering firms in the US – one of which earned an eye-watering £9.3million over three years of trading corpses.
Some have even speculated that after bodies are experimented with they are then sold off to blood-curdling exhibits.
Farrah’s harrowing story began the day after Thanksgiving 2009 when her dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and given just weeks to live.
“It was very, very quick. Very sudden, very tragic,” she said.
“And he was so young, he was 56, so we were all in shock and not at all prepared.”
Harold was transferred to an end-of-life hospice shortly after his diagnosis, before he was approached by a firm called Bio Care – just one week before his eventual death.
They asked him if he would be willing to donate his body to science – and claimed that doctors would use his gifted limbs to practise knee replacement surgery.
Any of his unused body parts would then be cremated and returned to Farrah and her family at no cost whatsoever, they added.
“He thought: ‘Well, if I donate my body to science, maybe they can research what cancer I had and help with medical advancements,’” Farrah said.
“So that’s really what led to him making that decision, that he wanted to donate his body to science.”
Troubling questions
When Harold died days later on December 24, a car arrived within hours to pick up his body and take it away.
Farrah was told she’d receive her dad’s ashes within four to six weeks – but after week six she said she “hadn’t heard a word”.
She put in countless calls to Bio Care boss Paul Montano, who said Harold’s donation process was taking longer than expected.
After being strung along for weeks on end over phone and growing increasingly impatient, she eventually received a box in the mail containing what she was told was Harold’s ashes.
She opened the package to find a tan-coloured grainy substance, which she thought might be sand or dirt.
Farrah said: “It was very obvious they were not real ashes.”
Days later, while visiting the zoo with her children on April Fool’s Day, she received a call from an unknown number.
It was a journalist asking her to provide a statement on what had happened to her dad’s body.
Confused, Farrah asked what they meant before being told to contact Albuquerque Police.
Cops broke to her the horrific news that Harold’s head had been found at a medical incinerator.
They said they made the harrowing discovery after intercepting a semi-truck containing a dozen or so large red bins in the back – all filled to the brim with severed human remains.
One of them contained one of Harold’s arms – which was initially identified due to the medical ID bracelet with his name written on it.
Farrah was then informed that Bio Care were in the “body brokering” business.
“The profiting part never came into play, we never discussed how they would profit,” she said.
“That was never even a topic of discussion.”
She added: “What they did with my dad’s body is not what he signed up for.”
“There was no justification, no justice.”
Inside Bio Care’s warehouse, authorities said they found at least 127 body parts belonging to 45 people.
A police detective wrote in an affidavit: “All of the bodies appeared to have been dismembered by a coarse cutting instrument, such as a chainsaw.”
Bio Care owner Montano was charged with fraud but prosecutors later withdrew the charge saying they could not prove deception or any other crime.
The district attorney told Farrah there was no law protecting the handling of deceased bodies – before describing Montano as simply a “bad businessman”.
“He took my dad’s body, chopped it up, put it in a bunch of tubs with a bunch of other deceased bodies, and tried to send it to a medical waste company to be incinerated on the sly, and in the meantime, sends me a bag of dirt telling me it’s my dad’s ashes,” she explained.
“That, to me, is a little bit worse than just being a bad businessman.”
She continued: “My dad’s dying wish, the last selfless thing he could do, which was donate his body to science – that goal, that wish was taken from him.
“He was never used in that purpose. He was never used in that purpose, and we had no idea.”
Farrah said the Bio Care employees never discussed how exactly his body would be dismembered – one of the most disturbing aspects of her dad’s treatment which still lingers in her mind.
“Learning that part of how his body was handled and how his body was treated was probably one of the most traumatic parts of the entire ordeal,” she noted.
“I couldn’t get those thoughts out of my head, and it’s all I could think about.”
The distraught nurse added: “It’s been 16 years since this happened to my dad, and there’s been no change in the laws of the protecting of the handling of the bodies.
“Dealing with these companies… Are they accredited? Are they insured? Bio Care was not accredited.
“They were not following any rules or regulations. No laws, no standards.
were being set for them.”
But haunting accounts such as Farrah’s are not uncommon.
In December 2016, more than 20 bodies reportedly donated to an Arizona broker – not affiliated with Bio Care – were used in secret US Army blast experiments.
The loved ones of those used soon complained after saying they gave no consent for the bodies to be treated so horribly.
Inside human body exhibits
SCATTERED across the globe, real body exhibits showcase what the inside of a human truly looks like by using plastinated corpses.
Two of the main body exhibits in the world have faced serious criticism and scandal since opening up in various locations.
Real Bodies: The Exhibition and Body Worlds have both been hit by complaints over where they source their cadavers from.
They both claim to get the plastinated corpses from China and deem what they do as educational by showing the public about the human anatomy.
But in 2021, it was claimed that a Real Bodies exhibition in Birmingham, England, used political prisoners executed in China as models.
The organisers later admitted they were given all the specimens from a suspected body brokering firm in Dalian, China.
These used bodies were initially acquired from the local police force, according to an investigation by the New York Attorney General’s Office.
A series of Body Worlds anatomical exhibitions have faced similar accusations.
In 2004, they even chose to return seven corpses to China because they showed evidence of being from executed prisoners.
Despite this, organisers maintain that all human specimens were obtained with the full knowledge and consent of the donors before they died.
Funeral homes can often have deals with body brokers as well.
In 2022, a former funeral home owner pleaded guilty to mail fraud in a scheme where she dissected corpses and sold body parts without consent from the deceased’s family.
Megan Hess ran Sunset Mesa Funeral Home alongside a human body parts business called Donor Services in the same building – before she was later accused of keeping heads, spines, arms and legs and selling them on.
And in 2015, Las Vegas authorities found a man in medical scrubs defrosting a frozen human torso with a garden hose, after locals alerted police to a strange stench and blood-soaked boxes in a dumpster.
The nightmare discovery allowed cops to expose a deal between Southern Nevada Donor Services and a funeral home called Valley Cremation and Burial – with both firms collaborating in a body brokering scheme.
Over in the UK, body brokers are outlawed through the Human Tissue Act with much of Europe also ruling the trade as being improper use of a corpse.
But in America, the buying and selling of body parts for research and education is largely unregulated and legal under US law.
Farrah said: “When I tell my dad’s story to people who have never heard it before, they are shocked, they cannot believe that something like this actually could happen to people.
“And what’s even more shocking is that now, 16 years later, there are still no laws that have been changed, no matter how many times I’ve told my dad’s story.”
The Sun could not contact Bio Care for comment.