by Annie Cheney
“It was gang violence,” Bittner said softly. “My cousin was murdered.”
Brown nodded gently and offered to arrange for a discounted funeral. “I’ll take care of everything,” he promised.
After they made the funeral arrangements, Bittner asked Brown if she could take a look around. She had always been curious about dead bodies. In her spare time, she read Patricia Cornwell mysteries, books like Postmortem and Cause of Death, and she dreamed about one day investigating crime scenes.
Brown led her to a front room, past a fifty-gallon saltwater fish tank that he had set up in the corner. Inside the tank, an eel slithered among schools of porcupine fish. Bittner followed Brown, past the couches in the company’s waiting room, to the crematorium facility itself, where dead bodies in cardboard boxes lay on steel gurneys waiting to be cremated.
“Oh, wow!” Bittner said when she saw the bodies. “This is kind of cool.”
“It doesn’t bother you?” Brown asked her.
“No,” Bittner said.
Sensing her interest, Brown noticed something else about the young woman. She was stoic. Despite Brown’s seeming compassion for others, he had little patience for people who freely expressed their emotions. During the short visits that he shared with families, he was able to indulge them their grief and even tears. But inside, he was disdainful of this sort of “drama” as he called it.
A few days later, Bittner stopped by the crematorium again. “She wanted to look at dead bodies,” Brown recalled. He offered her a job.
Jennifer Bittner became Brown’s fourth employee, joining Daniel Schonberger, Louie Terrazas, and Dave Smith, a funeral director who soon left the company. Smith was the only funeral director on staff. When he quit, he left his funeral director license behind, and it hung in the front office. Schonberger did the pickups and the deliveries. Louie Terrazas ran the ovens.
All four employees drank too much, but this didn’t bother Bittner. Their troubles were familiar—a little too much drink, a few too many arguments at home—but, like her, they were all trying to make their way in the world, and she quickly felt like part of the family. Bittner enjoyed Brown most of all.
Every day at five o’clock, after she closed up the office and Terrazas shut down the ovens, Bittner and the others lingered in the downstairs office to talk. As the cool California evening set in, they finished off the day drinking beer. There were days when they would pick up a bottle of tequila or a bottle of gin. Brown would mix a batch of gin and tonics and the four of them would sit around in the office until nine or ten at night, drinking and laughing.
Brown was never in a hurry to get home to his wife and sons. He had an audience at the crematorium. No one nagged him. His employees laughed at his jokes about prissy funeral directors, the ones he called “stiff-necked liars.” Once in a while, they talked about the bodies that they cremated. They wondered aloud about the lives of the deceased, like the six-foot-tall black transvestite who was delivered still dressed in a wig.
Bittner was thrilled with her new job. She was happy that everyone liked to stay after work. It felt like a real family, and Brown always included her in their parties.
There was just one thing that bothered her about the job. Too often, when she answered the phone, there was an angry creditor on the other end looking for Brown. Bittner tired of these unpleasant phone calls, particularly when she realized that Brown never bothered to call the people back.
Still, the phone calls were a minor irritation, and Bittner was growing fond of her boss. One night, after the others had gone, Bittner climbed the wooden flight of stairs to Brown’s office, where he was finishing some paperwork.
Brown had been spending a lot of time up in his office, alone. He had always needed time to brood. Now, with some very ambitious plans, he needed more time than ever.
Shortly before hiring Bittner, Brown had received a phone call from a company called IMET—Innovations in Medical Education and Training. A caller had explained that they were looking for a place to store some human torsos for a surgical training course IMET was sponsoring in San Diego. Afterward, they’d need to have the torsos cremated.
“Can you help out?” the caller asked.
“No problem,” Brown said.
With its unspoiled beaches and easy access to airports, southern California is a popular place for seminars in medical training of all sorts. Throughout the year, hundreds of surgeons, eager to learn the latest techniques and catch some sun, arrive at conferences held at hotels up and down the coast. Some of these courses need suppliers to produce human body parts and to dispose of them afterward.
Brown was intrigued by the opportunity, especially since he was planning to build a new crematorium across the street. Several funeral directors had already invested in the project. It was going to be three times the size of his current one—with a chapel for more than a hundred people. There would be a ceramic-tiled room overlooking the ovens, where family members could witness the cremations of their loved ones. Body parts could be another source of income.
Brown already knew that a crematorium was an ideal location for a body-parts business. He knew it after reading a true-crime paperback that his brother-in-law had given him called Ashes. “I slept and drank that book,” Brown later said. The book described the gruesome exploits of a man named David Sconce. During the 1980s, Sconce ran the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, California, with his parents. Sconce’s great-grandfather, Charles Lamb, had started the business, and by the time David came along, most anyone who was anyone in Pasadena sent their family members to the mission-style mortuary with the charming turret.
Little did the families know that Sconce had set up a tissue bank in the back room of the funeral home. With the help of his Japanese assistant, Sconce carved up bodies that he was supposed to cremate. He removed their teeth, eyeballs, and hearts, which he later sold for thousands of dollars to a biological-supply company. The families got back the ashes of whatever was left over and never suspected a thing.
Brown thought about the market for body parts and his new crematorium. What if he set up a legitimate company that accepted body donations, just like a medical school? He could offer his clients a free cremation in exchange for a body donation. He didn’t need to get a license or take a class. All he had to do was register the business with the state.
Brown had everything that it took to run a willed-body program: the crematorium and the clientele base. He had just signed a contract with the county to cremate the bodies of the indigent and unclaimed. With all of the bodies coming in, he thought, “it was an ideal situation.”
What he needed were some lower-level people with resolve.
Jennifer Bittner had made her way upstairs, past Louie Terrazas’s office. She appeared now in Brown’s office doorway. Brown laid his eyes on her soft baby flesh, her long, thick hair, her slightly parted lips, and he saw that she was eager. That night, he seduced his young employee. It was his first transgression—Brown was married, after all, and Bittner was just eighteen. Perhaps he hoped that by keeping her close, he would seal the success of his plan.
A few days before the San Diego surgical course in February 1999, the frozen torsos arrived at Brown’s crematorium. As he had agreed to do, Brown left them out to defrost in the embalming room. He placed the limbless bodies out on steel gurneys, and within a few hours, the torsos began to “sweat.” Droplets gathered like dew on their icy skin and a fetid, watery, pink liquid trickled from their orifices into the gurneys’ troughs. Brown poured this bloody water down the drain.
After the torsos had softened up, Brown stored them in the walk-in refrigerator. On the appointed day, he packed them in Styrofoam containers in his van, drove to San Diego, and delivered them to a conference room at the US Grant Hotel.
Intrigued by what he might see that weekend, Brown booked a room. As night fell, he settled himself in the Grant Grill Lounge, a wood-paneled, dimly lit bar by the lobby, where he was soon joined by a tall, soft-spo
ken man in his fifties, who introduced himself as Allen Tyler, a part-time consultant to IMET.
Brown took in Tyler’s houndstooth sports jacket, his crisp pleated slacks, and his penny loafers. Tyler was articulate, almost professorial. He struck many people as a doctor.
But, in fact, Tyler was a diener. For most of his life, he’d worked at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, overseeing the school’s willed-body program. He’d never attended college. He had grown up on the sleepy island of Galveston and, like Brown, had married out of high school. Then he went to work in the medical school morgue.
The two men hit it off. As the lead corpse experts on the job, they toasted each other with a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label, then spent the evening chatting, drinking, and watching sports on the big-screen television at the bar. They didn’t know it yet, but they had a lot in common. Both enjoyed sports and the outdoors. Brown liked camping. Tyler was an avid fisherman. Both men had two sons. Tyler didn’t mention his family at all, or how much his life had changed since he had met IMET’s founder, Agostino Perna.
Before they said good night in the bar, Tyler and Brown agreed to meet again in the morning. Over the next couple of days, Brown hung around in the conference room, watching the gynecologists as they probed the vaginas of the dead women. When a torso needed adjusting, he noticed, the doctors called on Tyler to help. Tyler gingerly moved the chilly flesh into the right position, raising or lowering it so that the doctors could get a good view. When the dead ladies began to smell, Tyler spritzed them with deodorizer. At the end of the day, he packed them into Igloo coolers. The next morning he brought them out again. Brown looked on in amazement. He couldn’t believe his luck. Here he was, owner of the best and soon to be biggest crematorium in southern California in a room full of potential body-parts clients.
The second night, at a formal dinner hosted by IMET, Brown got to meet Agostino “Augie” Perna. “Augie was real quiet, and he thanked me profusely,” Brown said. Perna, he noticed, spent his money freely. “Augie was your quintessential jet-setter. He always wore a white T-shirt and cowboy boots, and he always carried $1,000 cash. I knew that if I was to advance in the field, I needed him.”
Perna must have recognized something in Brown, too, because nine months later, he called him.
“We need your help,” he said. This time Brown was needed in Las Vegas.
Early one morning in November, 1999, Brown and his pickup man, Dan Schonberger, headed north on Interstate 15 through the flat Nevada desert. They were driving a white van full of dismembered women. The torsos had been packed in Styrofoam coolers, two dead women to every box. It was a five-hour drive to Las Vegas from Lake Elsinore. The road was nearly empty, and the two men were on a straight shot through the Mojave. Except for an occasional passing truck, they were alone in the desert. The only sound was the lulling hum of their tires on the asphalt. Brown opened the window to catch a breeze off the mesa. It couldn’t have been more than sixty degrees, which was a good thing, since heat speeds decomposition.
Brown rested his left elbow on the window and massaged his goatee as he drove, pondering the weekend. Gynecologists from all over the world were coming to Las Vegas for the annual meeting of the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists. Augie Perna was their point man for torsos. Tyler would be there, too. “Allen took care of the flesh,” according to Brown. “The man knew the inside of the human body in unbelievable professional form.” This was Brown’s chance to sit down with them face-to-face. It wouldn’t be a hard sell. Brown was a natural at marketing. “Mike could sell you ice cream in New York in ten-below weather,” Louie Terrazas said. He just had to get the pitch right, make them see that they needed him.
Five hours later, just as the desert was beginning to heat up, the van descended into the valley around Las Vegas. Brown was feeling pumped. He blinked and rubbed his chin one last time and tightened his body. As soon as they pulled up in front of Bally’s Hotel and Casino, he began instructing the valets, giving orders as if he’d been hauling torsos his whole life. But Perna had already arranged for a guard to take them up to the ballroom with the coolers. Brown had worried that someone might ask questions about the boxes, but no one said a word.
It was a long trip through the hotel, but everything went smoothly. They unloaded the van, wheeled the boxes into the freight elevator, got off on the second floor, carted the boxes through the kitchen—greeting the chefs along the way—and delivered them to the Pacific Ballroom, where Perna and Tyler were waiting under sixteen glittering chandeliers.
Perna had hired a former pig farmer to come out to Bally’s and help with the corpses. There were some other husky men hanging around. They moved boxes and set up tables. By late morning, when the gynecologists arrived, the work of these corpse roadies was done.
Later that day, Jennifer Bittner and Louie Terrazas showed up. Bittner had never been to Las Vegas. Everyone assumed she was a doctor, despite her obvious youth. She didn’t correct them. She just let her conference badge speak for itself.
Bittner was eager to get out on the strip, to check out all the fancy casinos and see one of the free shows. That night, she spent some time in the bathroom fixing her hair and putting on makeup and a black dress and platform shoes. Then she joined Perna, Tyler, and Brown at the bar. The three men were telling jokes and laughing, and their confidence was infectious. Bittner hopped up on the bar stool next to Brown. She was still only nineteen, but the bartender didn’t ask for any identification when Bittner ordered a drink. That’s how it was when Brown was by her side. People treated her like a woman.
After a few cocktails, the group split up. Tyler joined Brown and Bittner, and the three of them headed across the street to the Bellagio. The people at this hotel were different, Bittner noticed; they were L.A. types with hair that cost more than her week’s rent. She could only imagine what it must cost to stay at the Bellagio.
Brown was thinking about money, too, as he made his way into the hotel and strutted up to the bar with Tyler. All around them, the music of money was playing: the hollow thud of dice on velvet, the plastic tap-tapping of chips.
For the first time, Brown talked about getting into business with Tyler. “It was a dream think-tank,” he said. The next day, they talked about it again. They talked about it on the casino floor, in elevators, but mostly in bars. “Give me the ball and let me run with it,” Brown said.
Tyler, Perna, and Brown made an ideal team. Brown was about to open his new crematorium and had easy access to corpses. At the time, Perna, who specializes in torsos, was getting most of them from Tyler’s employer, the University of Texas Medical Branch, which required a lot of paperwork and fees, and often the further hassle of getting the torsos to California, where many of his conferences took place. Perna had the capital and the connections to make it all possible. Tyler, meanwhile, had the expertise that Perna and Brown required. He knew how to cut and sew and clean up the flesh.
Brown wasted no time. Shortly after they got back from Las Vegas, he moved his employees across the street to the new crematorium. One day, he strode into the back room and tapped Louie Terrazas on the shoulder.
“What’s up?” Terrazas asked, wiping the sweat from his brow, as he turned from the oven where he was cremating a body.
“Do me a favor. Go to the liquor store and pick up some vodka and beer and stuff to make mixed drinks,” Brown said, reaching into his back pocket and handing Louie a $100 bill.
“Why?” Terrazas asked.
“Remember the people we met in Vegas? They’re coming over here, and they’re going to meet with me today.”
Terrazas hopped into his car and did what Brown had asked. Only later did he ask him what was going on.
“I’m going to start something, and we’re going to make some money and we’re going to pay some bills,” Brown replied matter-of-factly.
“What’s it going to be?”
“We’re going to be disarticulating bodies,” he s
aid.
One day, Brown stuck his head into the embalming room, where Bittner was straightening up.
“I’m starting a new company,” he told her with a smile. “And I want you to be a part of it.”
Bittner had been growing tired of being a receptionist, so she received this bit of news eagerly.
Brown closed the door.
“You may have to work some overtime,” he said gently, “but don’t worry about it. I’ll pay you for it.” He moved closer to Bittner now, fixing his sharp blue eyes on her soft face. “The reason I’m telling you this,” he said, pausing, “is there may be some gray areas that come up. I want you to know that I’ll take care of them. But, if you ever say anything to anybody, I’ll take you down with me.”
Bittner wasn’t listening. She was already lost in thought, contemplating her future: more money, more responsibility, a new life. Maybe she could buy a nice house with a backyard, she thought, or travel.
“Okay,” she said, nodding blankly.
By February 2000, the deal was done. Brown secured a $3,000 investment from Perna and incorporated his new company, Bio-Tech Anatomical. Getting started couldn’t have been easier. All he needed were a couple of meat freezers and some butcher knives and band saws.
The only thing left to do was to print up brochures. Brown took his time with this. He wanted the pitch to be perfect. Words were important to him. As a kid, he and his siblings used to practice their vocabulary at the dinner table. “Mike was a literature person,” one of his employees said.
Indeed, Brown chose his words carefully. “A willed-body gift will not only ensure the continued proliferation of health sciences,” he wrote, “but will surely give a chance to those that have lived without sight, sound, or the ability to walk, new opportunities to experience life more fully. Silent teachers, remarkable heroes, a legacy that few could boast.”
