I've spent the last 11 years or so working in the death field. Well, at least death field adjacent. I've always been fascinated by the whole process, even tossing around the idea of going back to school for mortuary science. Between some of the more crazy funeral home scandals that I've dealt with personally and reading far too much Wikipedia… There have truly been some weird morticians.
There used to be a funeral director that was so busy and held such a monopoly that his nickname was “Little Hitler” because of the sheer number of bodies being cremated. His license plate read “I BRN 4U.”
Jerry Sconce was caught selling black market organs and gold teeth from the corpses the Lamb Funeral Home processed; the funeral home harvested hundreds of brains, hearts and lungs over a period of 90 days. They cremated multiple people in the retort at once, then gave the families random cremains mixed in with those of their loved one. They scooped cremains out of barrels, giving a certain weight depending on if the deceased were a man or a woman. At one point, the crematory burned down after employees stuffed two small furnaces with 38 bodies. They broke the leg of one corpse to get it to fit. Ironically, a leg blocked part of the oven off, causing the fire.
The whole horribleness only ended in 1987 when they ended up also owning a nondescript building, Oscar Ceramics. A local man called the police because he saw black smoke coming from the ceramics shop. He had been at Auschwitz more than 40 years prior; he recognized it as the smell of burning human flesh. The officer who responded found trash cans full of cremains, human prosthetics and thick black soot. When he opened the door of one of the massive furnaces, a foot fell out.
With the crematory gone, they were performing mass cremations in the kiln.
Sconce and his wife were both sentenced to 44 months in prison. Because of them, the government cracked down and changed the laws in the funeral home industry.
This has been your Mortuary Minute.