by Annie Cheney
“We’ll start an anatomical business,” Brown said.
“But I don’t know anything about that,” Schultz replied.
Brown patted his new buddy on the back. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll pay for everything.”
In September 2000, with Brown’s help, Schultz incorporated California Bio-Science. Brown found a storefront office for the new company in Temecula, twenty minutes away, and suggested that Schultz write up a newspaper ad. “Here’s what you’ve got to say,” he explained. “You could spend thousands of dollars for a funeral, hundreds of dollars on a cremation, or you could donate your body for free.”
Even with the ad, California Bio-Science got just six legitimate bodies in five months. During the same time, Brown deposited $156,638.14 from his dubious business into the account.
Things were going well for Bio-Tech. Brown was becoming the sort of man he always knew himself to be. He bought himself a new Ford F350 truck. He tinted the windows and had the chassis lifted so that he could drive high up off the ground. The modest house where he lived with his family in a quiet cul-de-sac wasn’t right for the new life he had fashioned. So he rented it out and bought a plot of land near a horse farm. He planned to build a ranch for himself and his wife and their boys. In the meantime, they lived in a tract home on their new property.
The better things went, the more reckless Brown became. By midfall, no body was safe. As soon as Daniel Schonberger unloaded a new delivery of corpses to be cremated from the van, Brown told Terrazas and Schultz to go through their papers. He said, “Pull all the ones under fifty-five.”
If there weren’t enough, Brown became angry.
“Forget fifty-five and under,” he yelled. “Take anybody.”
With these instructions, Terrazas hauled any corpse entrusted to Brown’s crematorium into the embalming room and Tyler dismembered it. Many arrived from funeral homes that had hired Brown to perform their cremations. Among these bodies was the corpse of AIDs victim, Jim Farrelly. Though skeletal and diseased, he, too, was chosen for the cutting table as were countless others who were supposed to be cremated and returned to their families.
Terrazas burned what remained of the bodies in a box in the oven. When it was time to send urns to the families, Brown said, “Go make up some ashes.” Terrazas divvied up the ashes from the oven, bagged them, and didn’t ask questions.
Toward the end of the summer, Jennifer Bittner had gone on maternity leave. Her gynecologist had ordered bed rest. Brown gave her money for maternity clothes, paid her disability, and advanced her cash. A new office manager had taken her place, a divorcée named Kathie Ross, who either didn’t notice what was going on or just never bothered to say anything.
Other people came and went during 2000, including the state crematorium inspector, Dan Redmond. Redmond didn’t notice anything unusual. The crematorium was still spotless. The files appeared to be in order. Redmond knew about Bio-Tech, but he didn’t see it as a problem. When Brown mentioned that he planned to offer free cremations in poor Hispanic neighborhoods in exchange for body donations, it seemed like further evidence of his caring nature. While most guys were inflating their prices, Mike Brown was helping out his families.
Brown might have gone on indefinitely had it not been for the suspicions of a neighboring businessman, Doug Lada. Lada owned a storefront funeral home in the nearby town of Rancho Cucamonga. He didn’t have a lot of space besides an office, so Brown let him use his embalming room to prepare bodies. In exchange, Lada lent Brown an embalming machine and gave him all of his cremation business.
In early December 2000, Lada dropped in at the crematorium to prepare a body for an upcoming funeral. As usual, Brown’s embalming room was shiny and clean. Lada laid the cardboard box carrying the corpse on one of the gurneys. He removed the wax paper covering the top of the body and dropped it into a red plastic bag used for biohazard waste. Since the bag was full, Lada tied it up.
“Hey, Louie, what should I do with this thing?” he called out, holding up the bag.
Terrazas pointed to a cardboard box beside the oven. “Just put it in there,” he said, and went back to work.
At first, Lada wasn’t sure what he was looking at. There was a body inside the box, but something was odd about it. He lifted the lid a little farther and saw that it contained the body of a man. But the body was missing its shoulders, and a pair of arms rested between its legs.
Lada glanced at Louie, who was in the process of incinerating a body, and closed the box. He noted the name of the funeral home written on the side as Caring Cremation. There was only one reason that a funeral home like Caring Cremation sent a body to Brown, and that was to have it cremated. Lada wondered why this man had been dismembered. But he didn’t say anything. He simply wrote a note to himself and left.
Brown, meanwhile, was getting ready for the annual holiday party for funeral directors. He’d already reserved a table at a country club in San Diego. All of his funeral-home clients would be there, including the people from Caring Cremation. Brown left his wife at home with the kids and joined his employees.
He arrived at the club feeling smug, dressed in a turtleneck and an olive-green suit. If anyone belonged at a country club, surely it was he. Brown had just bought a new boat and a BMW. That evening, he worked the room, Scotch in hand, boasting and bluffing his way though the crowd of current and potential clients.
Jennifer Bittner tagged along beside him. After giving birth to a baby boy, she was svelte again. Brown gazed at her shapely body. After the party, Kathie Ross invited Brown and the others back to her house for more merriment. There, Brown and Bittner had sex.
Christmas passed without incident. Brown helped his son decorate their new house with $600 worth of lights. New Year’s came and went.
On the evening of January 8, 2001, Doug Lada stopped by Brown’s crematorium again. This time, he had come to pick up some ashes. The lights were on inside when Lada pulled up in the parking lot. When he opened the door, he saw an open cardboard coffin lying on the cement floor. The bottom was stained and the cardboard was torn, as if the body inside had been too heavy to lift and someone had dragged it out onto the floor. Lada looked around but saw no one. Then he headed for the embalming room.
He wasn’t prepared for what he found. There, on the metal gurneys, were two bloody, dismembered bodies, one belonging to a young woman. Her head, which still had all of her brown hair, had been cut from its socket, and it lay beside her torso. A toe tag lay on the table, and Lada noticed that the name on it matched the name written on the outside of the box in the other room.
“Hey, Doug. How you doing?”
Lada turned. There was Brown standing by the door, dressed in pale blue scrubs and smiling. His shoes were splattered with blood.
“Fine, fine,” Lada replied. He grabbed the urn of ashes that he had come for and left. Again, he wrote a note to himself.
Several weeks passed. Jennifer Bittner was now back at work, helping Kathie Ross with the growing amount of paperwork, but she’d started to feel guilty. Things were supposed to be different now that she had a son, and she wished she hadn’t cheated. It bothered her so much, in fact, that she confessed the drunken affair with Brown to Steve McCarty, her son’s father.
He was not sympathetic.
“What kind of shit are you pulling?” he yelled. “I don’t have time for playing games like this.” Within minutes, he was on the phone to Brown. The two men argued. Later, McCarty told Bittner that if she didn’t quit her job, he would leave her and take their son.
He said, “You committed adultery, and they’ll give that kid to me.”
Terrified, Bittner turned in her final time sheet and didn’t return to work. Hoping to find a new job, she called Doug Lada.
“Hey, Doug,” she said. “Do you know anyone who’s hiring?”
Lada said he did not. He paused for a moment and started to say something about his suspicions concerning Brown, but Bittner interrupted hi
m.
“You don’t need to go any further,” she said. “I already know what you’re talking about.”
Lada would later tell Bittner that if she ever decided to go forward about Brown, he’d back her 100 percent. Bittner thought about it and then, a week after she quit, Brown sent her a threatening letter. Not only did he refuse to release her final paycheck, but he demanded she pay back the $1,350 he had advanced her during her pregnancy.
“Simple math,” he wrote. “You owe this company.”
Bittner was twenty years old, unmarried, with little money and a new baby. She was confused and desperate. When she confided in her friends about Brown, they told her to blackmail him, but she was reluctant. She knew Brown well, and she suspected he had been careful to cover his tracks.
One day, on her way home from her new job at a funeral home, Bittner found herself driving in the direction of the Riverside County Coroner’s Office, where her friend Carol Gallagher worked transcribing medical records. As she drove, she debated whether to tell her friend everything.
As soon as she sat down, she turned to Gallagher and said, “Are you in a sworn position where if I tell you something you have to tell one of the deputy sheriffs here?”
Gallagher looked worried.
“It’s not murder. It’s not anything like that.”
Detective Rene Rodriguez took notes on a pad while his boss briefed him. Rodriguez is a short, compact Texan. He has shiny black hair, a mustache, and the stolid expression of a TV detective. Around headquarters, he’s known for his persistence on tough cases and his obsession with the Old West. The other detectives used to tease him about his office, where framed paintings of cowboys, Indians, and horses lined the walls. Hanging near Rodriguez’s desk was a poster of the country singer Terri Clark.
In his twenty-year career, Detective Rodriguez had worked every kind of case—pimps, homicides, crooked cops, serial killers; he’d seen them all. So far, this case was unlike anything he’d ever heard of. Rodriguez leaned back in his chair and twirled his pen. “Go on,” he said to Sergeant Mullins.
“The informant is a young woman, a former employee. Possibly disgruntled,” Mullins said, reading from the manila folder on his lap. “She says this guy is cutting up body parts in the back of his crematorium.” Mullins added that Brown had a contract with the county coroner to cremate the bodies of indigents. This was something they needed to move on fast.
Rodriguez dialed his partner, Dave Fernandez. Then he called Dan Redmond, the state crematorium inspector. Redmond had already been briefed about the story by someone at the coroner’s office. He wasn’t buying it. Mike Brown? Selling body parts? Not a chance in hell. Rodriguez didn’t tell Redmond much, just that they needed to meet and talk to this woman, a former employee at a crematorium.
The next night, Redmond met Rodriguez and Fernandez, and followed Rodriguez’s unmarked, dark green Chevy Impala through a rainstorm to the small town of Temecula, where Bittner lived with her aunt and her baby in a small apartment.
After twenty years on the job, Rodriguez could suss out a person in minutes—by the cadence of their voice, if they blanched or blushed, and so on. Bittner, he noticed, was matter-of-fact, even calm, when she came to the door. She invited them into her tidy living room, and she looked right at Rodriguez. Rodriguez thought: Let’s see what she’s got. He turned on his tape recorder.
“This is Investigator Rene Rodriguez,” he announced into the machine. “I’m with the Riverside Sheriff’s Department. Today’s date is the twenty-seventh of February, the year 2001. . . . We’re currently at Jennifer Bittner’s residence. . . . We’re in the process of interviewing her to obtain additional information concerning an individual by the name of Michael Brown.”
Bittner told them everything.
Inspector Redmond sat on the couch, staring in disbelief. Bittner described how Tyler had dismembered the bodies. She told them about her affair with Brown. Redmond wondered how this could have happened. Mike Brown wasn’t the kind of guy to do anything like this. But the more Bittner talked, the more detail she provided, the more Redmond thought maybe he’d been wrong about Brown.
“Why do you think he was doing this?” he asked her.
“He got greedy,” Bittner replied matter-of-factly. “He saw the money that could be made. I mean, when you guys find the invoices, you’ll see why.”
“If you knew all this was occurring . . . why hadn’t you reported [it] . . . earlier?” Rodriguez asked her.
“I was scared to ruin people’s lives,” she said.
Bittner said there was a “witness” who could corroborate her story, and she gave Rodriguez the phone number and address of Doug Lada. After two hours with Lada, Rodriguez was ready to apply for a search warrant. Two days later, a caravan of police cars and refrigerated trucks descended on the crematorium.
Brown was out at his ranch digging a new well when Rodriguez burst through the door of the crematorium. Within minutes, Rodriguez and his partners were upstairs in the attic.
What they found resembled a butcher shop. A corpse, destined for Augie Perna, lay on the wood floor in a puddle of blood. Lined up along the wall were seven meat freezers. One of the freezers contained shoulders. Another held elbows, another torsos, another spines, and yet another knees, among which were the knees of Jim Farrelly. Each cut of flesh had been wrapped and labeled. The detectives were startled when they lifted the door of one freezer and found sets of eyes staring back at them through plastic wrap. The heads still had all of their hair and teeth.
Stuffed inside two of the freezers were two whole bodies, their legs bent slightly at the knees. When detectives laid the bodies on the plywood floor, they rocked back and forth like wooden horses.
In October 2003, Michael Brown, who pocketed more than four hundred thousand dollars from sales of body parts, pleaded guilty to sixty-six counts of mutilation of human remains and embezzlement. On October 3, the families of his victims gathered in a sandstone courthouse in Murrieta, California, a dusty desert town sixty-five miles northeast of San Diego.
Almost a year had passed since Jim Farrelly’s mother, Joyce, received the phone call from the victim’s advocate. It had taken months for the news to set in. Then, the nightmares started. In one recurring dream, Jim’s head appeared and spoke to her. “Please make this stop,” he pleaded.
Since then, Joyce had learned that the funeral home, where Jim had made his arrangements, used Michael Brown to do their cremations. In her grief, Joyce hadn’t read the cremation forms closely. But even if she had, Pacific Crematorium would have meant nothing to her. “It could have said Joe Blow Fireworks,” she said, “The question never came into my mind as to how the details worked. Jim had given his wishes, and I thought that the funeral home would see to it that it was done.”
In the courtroom, one by one, the families rose. Brown sat just a few feet away, but he didn’t turn to look at Joyce when she got up to speak.
“After all Jim did to protect us from any further grief, Mr. Brown, you took it all away,” Joyce cried. “You destroyed that for us.”
Brown stared ahead, his eyes fixed coldly on the judge.
“Jim had AIDS. Was he concerned about that when he butchered . . . his body parts?” Joyce asked the judge. “Does he even care?”
Jim’s sister, Joy, had also prepared a speech. But she was too distraught to speak. Others rose to take their places.
“Even with the horrible pain of losing my mom,” one woman said, “I was comforted knowing I kept my promises to her. You took my promise of dignity and grace, and in the final moments you made me a liar.”
It wasn’t simply that loved ones had been brutally dismembered, or that the families hadn’t given Brown permission to use the bodies. It was more than that. Michael Brown had violated their memory, and there was no way to get that back.
“The last time I saw my mother, she was in the viewing room,” said one woman named Ruth Storr. “She looked so peaceful, like she was aslee
p. She had no pain on her face. Her skin was soft as a baby’s bottom. . . . I told her I loved her and thanked her for being my mother.”
No matter that her mother’s spirit had long since departed. Lois Storr’s corpse retained its beloved features; the limber typist’s hands with which she held her daughter, the slender arms that she used to comfort and hug her, the lips with which she kissed her. In Ruth’s imagination, her mother’s body was inseparable from her memory.
She said of Brown in disbelief: “He carved her up like a side of beef.”
Judge Rodney Walker sentenced Brown to twenty years in prison.
Shortly after Brown’s sentencing, I wrote to him requesting an interview. Brown responded immediately and, against the advice of his lawyers, invited me to come to California so that we could meet, as he put it, “facie ad faciem.”
It was dark on the day that I visited Brown. A heavy fog hovered over the low concrete buildings of North Kern State Prison in Delano, a farm town two hours north of Los Angeles. From a distance, the soaring streetlamps placed at intervals around the barren landscape made the prison look almost cheerful, like an amusement park, its bright lights blaring through the mist on the outskirts of town.
At the entrance to the prison, I waited with a group of hungry-looking women for the warden to open the doors. When we finally got inside, a short, beefy guard sent me through to a visiting area where inmates sat holding hands with their girlfriends, and ushered me to a chair in the back beside a telephone. Unlike the other prisoners at North Kern, Brown was being held in what’s known as “reception,” a kind of quarantine, before being placed in a permanent prison. He wasn’t allowed to have physical contact with any visitors, and I had to speak to him by phone through a glass partition.
After about ten minutes, the door to the cubicle behind the partition opened and a tall, muscular man in an orange jumpsuit appeared. Michael Brown has short, sandy blond hair shaved in a buzz cut, a narrow face, and a prominent nose. He stared straight at me through the glass, locking his blue eyes into mine, and reached for the receiver on the phone. There was a lean aggression about him that instantly set me on edge. He pressed his face close to the glass, so close that I could see the colony of tiny capillaries where the blood had burst through on the tip of his nose.
