by Annie Cheney
Soon the surgeons were calling to say, “Allen, you know how to do this. Can you get two knees ready for me?”
“No problem,” Tyler said proudly. “I’ll prepare those for you right away, Doctor.” Though he was tentative at first, Tyler gained confidence as he perfected his skills with the knife. After a few years, he was able to detach a shoulder with a few clean cuts. When he sawed off a knee, he learned to place his saw exactly twelve inches above the kneecap. He could cut up an entire body in less than half an hour.
“Allen loved doing what he did,” Rose said. “A lot of years, he never took sick days or a vacation. I used to tell him, those white doctors and everyone else takes time off—why can’t you?” But her husband was adamant.
Tyler’s hard work paid off. In 1975, UTMB promoted him to supervisor of Anatomical Services. Dressed in slacks and an Oxford shirt, a silk ascot at his neck and a derby tipped stylishly on his head, Tyler strolled each day in and out of the Romanesque redbrick building on the UTMB campus. In the lobby, he ambled past the stone sculptures of famous doctors on display—Hippocrates, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others. He liked to greet the students as he passed: “Good morning, ladies. Good morning, sir.” People who didn’t know Tyler often mistook him for a doctor. Tyler smiled but didn’t correct them.
A good diener is hard to find, and UTMB was happy to have Tyler. He was gentle with grief-stricken family members who called, attentive to the museum of specimens preserved in formaldehyde, careful to lay out the bodies each day and to keep the cadaver tanks in the basement clean.
By 1997, Allen Tyler was running the willed-body program. Over the years, it had undergone significant changes. When Tyler started in the lab, the department didn’t even have a freezer. They didn’t need one, since the school never provided fresh cadavers or body parts to outside researchers or vendors. All of the bodies stayed right there in the lab so that the students and doctors could use them.
But the demand for corpses and body parts had grown. By the 1990s, the university was providing dozens of specimens every year to outside vendors. Nearly a dozen meat freezers filled with parts now lined the lab. The school had become a well-known source of corpses, and people were calling for specimens all the time.
Tyler had a speech that he gave to buyers. He informed them that it was against the law to buy and sell bodies. The school charged a fee for each part, but it was just to recover its costs. A buyer who wanted parts would have to write to the state anatomy board for permission. Dr. Andrew Payer was the board’s secretary treasurer as well as Tyler’s boss. The board was responsible for registering every cadaver donated to the Texas university system. Payer collected the fees and reviewed every request. Tyler could only “sell” body parts with the board’s approval.
Tyler’s stern stance didn’t faze Augie Perna. In 1997, Perna called looking for some torsos. Records show that he applied for and received permission from the board. Then Tyler sent him the torsos he needed.
But by 1998, things had started to go wrong. The man who never missed work, who never called in sick, who never took a vacation, was now working as Perna’s consultant, taking time off and flying around the country to attend surgical conferences.
A taxi now arrived regularly at Tyler’s home. While it idled at the curb, Tyler kissed Rose and said, “I’m going to work with the doctors.” Rose was thrilled with Tyler’s new duties. “He said the doctors were very friendly,” she recalled. Knowing that his wife would never see the places he visited, Tyler regaled her with funny stories when he returned. He described the people in New York—how silly they looked wrapped up like mummies in hats and scarves when it was seven below. He described the sumptuous dinners he shared with the doctors, how they ate sushi in Savannah and oysters at the famous Union Oyster House in Boston and crabs in San Francisco. Tyler brought her souvenirs such as T-shirts and delicate porcelain angels for her curio collection.
In 2000, Tyler began flying out to California to cut up corpses for Michael Brown. His best friend, Kenneth Carter, assumed he’d been promoted. “I was so happy for him,” he said. Tyler sent Carter postcards highlighting the sunny climes of the West Coast. “It was cold here, but wherever he was the weather was nice.”
Tyler’s daughter, Nina, had noticed subtle changes in her father. He had started wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots. “Mama,” she said, “Daddy’s style is changing.”
“Hmm,” Rose teased her husband. “Who are you taking out?”
But her husband just smiled and teased her back.
No one but Tyler knew that when an especially choice body was donated to UTMB, he was reporting it as “damaged” in the school database, cutting it up, entering each part into his own database, and selling the parts off to Augie Perna’s companies and others. No one knew that he replaced UTMB’s invoices with his own so that vendors could pay him directly. No one knew that when he attended Perna’s conferences as a consultant, he was also supplying the bodies and getting paid for them under the guise of an honorarium.
Tyler shipped the torsos straight to the hotels so they’d be waiting for him at the front desk. Late at night, he lugged the coolers up to his room to prepare them for the next day.
Over a period of three years, Tyler sold more than a thousand body parts belonging to the university—knees, shoulders, torsos, and elbows—and earned upward of $200,000, according to the FBI. Between November 1999 and August 2001, from fingernails and toenails alone he made at least $18,210. When he started to receive checks at home, Tyler installed a new mailbox with a lock.
Like Michael Brown, Tyler was becoming the man he’d always wanted to be: admired by doctors and revered by his friends and his wife. As the money came in, Tyler told Rose that they could finally remodel the kitchen. He moved his wife into a nearby apartment so that she’d be comfortable during the construction. Then he had the roof on their bungalow replaced and the siding redone. He had a brand-new dishwasher installed in the kitchen, then new cabinets, a stainless-steel refrigerator, and a new stove. To reward himself, he bought a $40,000 Lexus SUV and a Rolex watch.
But Allen Tyler was getting careless. He was cataloguing bodies with numbers that hadn’t even been assigned yet by the anatomy board. He had stopped sending blood samples from cadavers to the lab and was commingling ashes in a fifty-gallon drum. When it was time to return ashes to a family, he scooped out a bagful and shipped them off. Tyler never suspected he’d be caught.
Then, in December 2001, just as Tyler was settling into his new life, he got a visit from Detective Rene Rodriguez. Rodriguez told Tyler that he was investigating Michael Brown’s crematorium in southern California, and he asked Tyler if he’d meet him and another detective at the Hilton Resort, a modern hotel overlooking the gray waters of the Gulf of Mexico in Galveston. That day, according to his notes, Rodriguez asked Tyler about his responsibilities at the university. Tyler replied that he taught medical students basic anatomy. When Rodriguez asked him how, with only a high school diploma and no documents certifying him as an anatomist, he had learned the skill of dissection. Tyler said he gained the experience “on the job.”
Tyler admitted dismembering corpses for Brown, but he said he didn’t know anything about Brown’s body-parts company or how Brown had decided what bodies should be disarticulated. After two hours, the interview ended and Detective Rodriguez flew back to California.
Tyler assumed he had escaped detection. But in March 2002, according to FBI documents, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office contacted UTMB to verify Tyler’s claims about his employment. The phone call spurred the university to review Tyler’s travel records, which, in turn, revealed a series of questionable invoices concerning “honoraria” that Tyler had sent Perna. Concerned, the medical school’s comptrollers passed the invoices on to UTMB police, who alerted the FBI.
One look at the documents and FBI Agent Jim Walsh knew this was a case of fraud. He requested that the university conduct an internal audit of the prog
ram. By April 2002, the audit was complete. Just as Walsh had suspected, it revealed fraudulent billing. Walsh wanted to send in an undercover agent to buy parts from Tyler. But before he could set up the sting, the university’s legal department sent Tyler a letter telling him he’d been suspended pending an investigation.
Walsh knew that as soon as Tyler read the letter, the sting would be off. Hoping to intercept the letter from the mailman, he raced to Tyler’s home with two UTMB police officers. The storm shutters on the bungalow were closed. Walsh parked around the corner and waited. By nightfall, neither the mailman nor Tyler had showed. Walsh went home and returned early the next morning. Suddenly, from his car, he saw the shutters move. Tyler had been watching him the whole time.
“The jig is up,” Walsh said. “He knows we’re outside, and we need to go talk to him.”
“Allen, I know you’re in there,” he said, sidling up to the door. “I know you can hear me. I want to talk to you.” The storm shutters opened a crack on the back door. “I know you can see me,” Walsh said, holding up his ID. “I’d like to talk to you.”
“Do you have a warrant? Are you here to arrest me?” Tyler stammered.
“I don’t have a warrant, and I’m not here to arrest you.”
“Well, go ahead. What do you want to talk about?”
“I’ve talked to some people over at UTMB and I’ve heard some things that they have to say, and I’d like to talk to you about it,” Walsh said gently. “I’m trying to find out what’s going on here.”
Tyler unlocked the door. “Who’s that with you?” he asked.
“He’s with the university police department,” Walsh said, gesturing to the man with him. “Can we come in?”
“Yeah, come on in.”
The house was dark and damp. The shutters were closed, and the lights were off. Tyler’s medications for the prostate cancer he’d been battling lay about the messy living room. In the kitchen, plastic jars of spices covered the counters. Clothes wrapped in plastic were draped over the furniture. The dining room set had been pushed into the center of the room. Around it were books and papers. Tyler had cleared a pathway through the clutter to get to and from the windows. The letter from the university lay open on the dining room table.
There was nowhere to sit, so Agent Walsh grabbed a folding chair. Tyler faced him, slumped over in a dining room chair.
“I’m trying to find out what’s going on here,” Walsh said. “Personally, I don’t think I need to be involved in this, and I want to talk to you about it and we can clear the air and I can move on to doing other things that I need to be doing. So if you can just tell me what it is that you do there at the university . . .”
Tyler talked for an hour and a half. The more he talked, the more confident he was that he could bluff his way out of trouble. He didn’t know that Walsh had already seen the invoices or that the audit had revealed his fraud. Soon, he was strutting around the house, gesturing to Walsh and describing how carefully he ran the program. He insisted there were never any deviations from the proper procedures for the cadavers.
“Let’s take a break,” Walsh said, getting up. After five minutes, he sat down again. “Okay, Allen, is there anything else that you can think of that you left out?”
Tyler shook his head.
Then Walsh took out the invoices.
The instant Tyler saw them, he shrunk back in his chair and stared at the carpet.
“Can you see these?” Walsh asked, thrusting the invoices in Tyler’s face.
“Yeah, I see ’em. I see ’em.” Tyler was now squirming in his chair.
“Get a good look. Do you recognize these? That’s your name on there.” Walsh held the papers out, forcing Tyler to take them in his hands.
“I don’t have anything to say about them,” Tyler said. But his shaking hands betrayed him.
Walsh assured him he knew everything, how Tyler had stolen bodies and sold them and that the honoraria were really sales.
Tyler began to sob. Tears poured down his face.
Walsh produced an invoice for $4,800 for a one-day conference in Pennsylvania hosted by Perna’s company, Surgical Body Forms. The description of the service listed eight “honoraria.”
“How can you get honoraria on your time off for eight days when the course was only a day and you’ve only taken one day off from work?” Walsh barked. “See where the problem is here?”
Tyler nodded.
But Walsh wasn’t after just Tyler. He was also after the middlemen. In the hopes of going ahead with the sting, Walsh told Tyler he wanted to bring him into the fold. “Here’s how it would work,” he said. “You’d operate in the business with our okay. You’d be working for us now. We need to know who your contacts are and who you’re shipping all this stuff to. It’s to your benefit. Unless you come out and help us, you’re going to take the hit for everything.”
Tyler cried harder. He told Walsh he couldn’t do it. He’d spent all night burning up the phones. Everyone in the body-parts business knew he was as good as fired and that the auditors were all over his office. Tyler told Walsh that he was afraid he’d end up like the bodies he’d been selling.
Walsh left his card. “If you ever change your mind,” he said, “just call me.”
Tyler never called. By November 2002, Walsh had turned over the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office for prosecution. But Allen Tyler was never charged with a crime. In 2003, he was called to testify, but was too ill to appear. Then, in January 2004, he succumbed to cancer. With their main witness deceased, the U.S. Attorney’s Office decided not to press its case.
The University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas Medical Branch are in no way alone in their involvement with the cadaver trade. According to internal documents and police investigations, dieners at many prestigious universities have supplied the underground body business. Dieners at the University of California–Irvine, Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California, and the University of California–Los Angeles have all been implicated in the underground cadaver trade.
Between 1998 and 2005, criminal investigations have been launched into four different medical schools. But amazingly, as of this writing, apart from the University of Pennsylvania dieners, only one medical school employee—at Western University of Health Sciences—has been indicted or served jail time.
UCLA was the first of these medical schools to have its scandal on the front page of the New York Times. In 2004, the diener at UCLA, Henry Reid, was arrested for allegedly selling body parts to a broker and pocketing the profits. Once again, the administrators appeared stunned by the news. “The allegations of criminal activity involving the Willed-Body Program are extremely troubling,” UCLA chancellor Albert Carnasale said. “Please know that we are shocked and angered by the despicable behavior of those involved.”
It was the second time that the school’s willed-body program had come under scrutiny. In 1996, donor families had filed a class-action suit against UCLA for cremating the bodies of their loved ones in piles with medical waste and sending the ashes to a landfill, after promising to bury them or scatter them in a rose garden.
After the ’96 scandal, UCLA administrators hired Henry Reid to clean up the program. Had they looked more closely, they would have found plenty of signs that he wasn’t the right man for the job. Reid went on to lie under oath in a 2002 deposition relating to a donor family’s lawsuit against the school. He claimed to have a master’s degree from Cal State Fullerton. He also claimed to have graduated summa cum laude from Cypress College. In fact, he did not have a master’s, and Cypress College does not award degrees summa cum laude. What he did have was financial trouble. Two years after he went to work for UCLA, he filed for bankruptcy. He owed creditors more than $100,000.
Not long after that, Reid went into business with a local broker named Ernest V. Nelson. Over the next four years, Reid allegedly sold hundreds of cadavers to Nelson, who cut them up into part
s and then resold them out of his garage to companies like Mitek, a Johnson & Johnson company, which used them to develop orthopedic surgical devices. Records provided to the Los Angeles Times by Nelson’s law firm showed that Nelson paid Reid three quarters of a million dollars for the body parts, which Reid then allegedly pocketed.
In March 2004, Reid and Nelson were arrested by UCLA police for grand theft and receiving stolen property. They are now free on bail and have still not been charged. As of this writing, families of donors to the school are suing UCLA. In an attempt to have the case dismissed, UCLA lawyers have argued that the school was free to do as it wished with its donated bodies, including selling them to companies, as long as the bodies were used for education and research. The judge in the case has sided with the families, and the lawsuits are proceeding.
In the case of the University of Texas Medical Branch, the university has argued that it has sovereign immunity, a constitutional right derived from the Eleventh Amendment. Sovereign immunity protects public universities from being sued. The courts upheld UTMB’s immunity. None of the half-dozen lawsuits filed by the victims’ families have moved forward. Until this book, the information obtained by the FBI was never reported.
The universities’ real strategy seems to have been to keep the American public in the dark and to whitewash any involvement that they might have with body brokers. Some schools have a lot to hide, and their dieners aren’t the only ones to blame. Cadaver money tempts even the illustrious chairmen of the anatomy departments.
