The first discovery was gruesome enough: a head and torso tucked inside a red biohazard tub that arrived at a Kansas company. Then it got worse.
Six more heads and torsos showed up in the next week after someone apparently dismembered the bodies with a chain saw or another cutting device, police said.
Authorities are investigating a New Mexico company that was supposed to have donated the organs in the bodies to science and had the remains cremated. The owner of the Albuquerque company, Paul Montano, was arrested on Thursday.
One man whose father’s head and torso showed up in Kansas in the shipment said the family received ashes of what they thought was their 83-year-old dad after he died of a stroke.
Now they are in shock at the thought that the ashes they scattered in a heartfelt remembrance last year may not have been their father — or at least not all of him.
“To not give you everything and to have the head shipped some place else, it’s really disturbing,” Chuck Hines said.
The owner of Bio Care Southwest denied dismembering any bodies.
Montano told police his father picks up and delivers bodies to Bio Care. The investigation is ongoing; his alleged motive was not immediately known.
Bio Care receives donated bodies and harvests organs and other parts that it sells for medical research. The researchers return the organs to Bio Care once their experiments are complete, then Bio Care sends the remains for cremation and gives the ashes to the families, investigators said.
Bio Care’s Web site said its mission was to advance medicine through donated non-transplantable human tissue, allowing scientists to study a donor’s organs to better understand disease.
“At Bio Care, you will always be treated with dignity, respect and honesty,” its home page says.
The company has a contract with Stericycle, based in Kansas City, Kansas, to dispose of any leftover medical waste.
Stericycle told investigators it receives medical waste, soft tissue and organs and occasional limbs — but never heads and torsos.
Homicide detectives in Kansas City began investigating the grim body part discoveries, and they were eventually traced back to New Mexico.
Court documents identified three of the bodies as Jacquelyn Snyder, Charles Hines and Harold Dillard.
Snyder, 42, died Nov. 1 in Albuquerque of a methadone overdose, and Hines died last September of a stroke, according to officials and family members.
Dillard was from Albuquerque, but the cause of his death was not immediately known.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DISASTROUS VISIT: The talks in Saudi Arabia come after an altercation at the White House that led to the Ukrainian president leaving without signing a minerals deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia yesterday, a day ahead of crucial talks between Ukrainian and US officials on ending the war with Russia. Highly anticipated negotiations today on resolving the three-year conflict would see US and Ukrainian officials meet for the first time since Zelenskiy’s disastrous White House visit last month. Zelenskiy yesterday said that he would meet Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s de facto leader, after which his team “will stay for a meeting on Tuesday with the American team.” At the talks in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, US
RSS