July, 1986, a grocery store co-founder from Mount Vernon, New York, named Anthony Parisi,
bit the dust.
Nothing was suspicious about the death.
The man was 83, he’d had what you call a good run.
But Mr. Parisi’s family and friends were about to be hit with a second wave of grief.
His body was taken to Yannantuono Funeral Home in Mount Vernon to be stored while funeral
preparations were underway.
Only, when staff opened the casket so they could prepare the body for the big day, Parisi
looked rather under the weather even for a dead man.
His head was missing.
The police were called of course, but they were pretty much stumped as to where the head
had gone.
The County Assistant District Attorney said the case was too grizzly to speculate, but
his first thoughts were that the crime was the work of a cult or perhaps your everyday
madman.
The Deputy Medical Examiner said it looked like it had been performed by professionals
since the head had been cut clean off with what he thought were surgical tools.
He also said other parts of poor old Parisi’s body had been mutilated, although he didn’t
expand on that.
Police were absolutely flummoxed.
They’d never heard anything like it and when they tried to find similar cases of it
happening in the US, they came up empty-handed.
″I have never seen or heard anything like it in all my years as a policeman,″ one
of them said.
It was a mystery, and it remains a mystery today.
What would someone want with the head of a dead man?
Well, after you’ve heard the demented stories in today’s show we’re sure you’ll have
your own theory as to what happened to that old man’s noggin.
3.
The harvester
Ok, so you all know that organs from dead people can be transplanted, but did you know
that body tissue is also very useful?
For instance, there are people in this world that need skin.
Others require bones, and some people might need ligaments or valves from the heart.
Nothing needs to go to waste when it comes to the human body.
We are all transferable to some degree.
While organs often get the spotlight when it comes to donations, tissue donation is
also very important.
A person named Michael Mastromarino understood this very well, and he was also aware that
there was a lot of money to be made selling body tissue.
He’d been a dentist in the past, but after getting addicted to drugs and using those
drugs while working on people’s teeth, he lost his license.
He had ideas, though, and that was to become what you might call a harvester.
First, you need to know the rules about this lucrative business.
Obviously, you can’t just start clipping bits off dead people if you don’t have permission
from the family or the person’s closest friends.
Even if permission is given, the harvesting has to take place within 15 hours after the
person has died.
Two more things, the person can’t have died at a too old age and the big thing, the biggest
thing, the dead person can’t have any diseases he or she could pass on.
As we said, this is big business, but there just aren’t enough donors to meet the needs
of people who require some help.
So, what did Mastromarino do?
He started what looked like a legit company called “The Biomedical Tissue Services.”
He also got in touch with scores of funeral homes in New York and Pennsylvania.
He paid them each $1,000 for access to the bodies, and he hired people to go do the harvesting
when new bodies came in.
As for the rules, he forged consent forms from families as well as forged the age of
death and the cause of death if the bodies weren’t safe to use.
His staff also sometimes waited too long so they were harvesting from bodies that were
in a too-advanced state of decomposition.
Worse than that, they sometimes knowingly took body parts and tissue from cadavers that
were riddled with disease.
This would have disastrous consequences.
For a few years, things were going well for the body snatchers and Mr. Mastromarino made
a few million bucks.
He was so rich he bought a mansion in New Jersey and even installed heaters under the
driveway because shoveling snow was a poor person’s thing.
You might now be thinking, what could possibly go wrong when diseased tissue is transplanted
to healthy people?
Some of the dead that were used in the business were carrying HIV, others various cancers.
In fact, one of the bodies that was harvested was that of British journalist Alistair Cooke.
For $1,000 Mastromarino’s company took his arms and legs, even though Cooke had died
of cancer.
They didn’t have the permission of course, so it was bone theft.
They also changed the age of death from 95 to 85.
For some people, their transplant changed their life, but not in a good way.
One woman experienced septic shock and became paralyzed after receiving tissue from this
terrible company.
Another person developed Hepatitis C as well as HIV and another contracted syphilis.
In 2008, aged 44, Mastromarino was sentenced to 18 to 54 years in prison.
Five years later he died in prison from bone cancer.
And if you think that’s bad, well, stranger things have happened.
2.
The bad funeral director
You’d like to think that all funeral directors are salt of the Earth types, after all, they
soften the grief of mourning families and they make it their objective to always ensure
bodies look good for their big day in the casket.
We guess a fitting proverb here is there’s always a bad apple on every tree.
Ok, so the date was August 1, 1999, and a man named Mark Villella heard something that
put him into a rage.
His wife, Exelee, told him she was going to leave him and take their 18-month-old son
with her.
Mark, being a trusted funeral director, you might assume would have been reasonable, but
this man was far from reasonable.
Before we tell you what happened after that, you need to know that the couple had been
in a stormy relationship for many years.
Mark was an obsessive and jealous man, and his insecurities led to him being abusive
on many occasions.
He was so distrusting in fact that at times he would stake out his wife while sitting
in his car.
Once while watching her from a distance he saw her walking to work with another man,
merely chatting with the guy.
For that, when his wife got home, Mark stripped off her clothes and pushed her outside the
house.
Another time, he kept her hostage in the house, even when police demanded he open the door.
Not surprisingly, Exelee left him not long after that, but as always, she took him back.
This was her fatal mistake.
Two years later, after putting up with his violence and childish ways for too long, she
said she was leaving him for good.
A few days later, her family reported her missing.
Soon the cops turned up at Mark’s funeral home in Orange City, Florida.
He pretended to be busy with his embalming but said he was also feeling distraught since
his wife had walked out and hadn’t called.
The cops seemed suspicious, looking around at all the fridges and caskets.
Something didn’t ring true here.
One of the cops would later say, “It was a very convenient setup.”
That’s because Exelee was literally chilling inside one of the fridges.
That night when she said she was going to leave him for good, Mark waited until she
fell asleep and then stabbed her through the heart with a steak knife.
He took her body to work with him the next morning.
The question is, how did he get rid of the body?
Mark’s story was that he’d taken some over-the-counter sleep medication the night
his wife went missing and when he woke up she was gone.
Cops started investigating and heard from Exelee’s friends about how Mark called her
constantly to check up on her and even followed her around secretly.
One of Exelee’s best friends told investigators that Mark even made her give him ticket stubs
and receipts to prove she’d been out with her friends and not another man.
The cop put two and two together and got four.
Here was a jealous maniac with a history of violence, and hey, it’s almost always family
and friends that are behind the murder.
Then, Mark added to the story, saying the two had fought over her wanting another kid
and that she sometimes came home drunk.
He told the cops they’d agreed to go to counseling at a local church.
He said after that, she cooked meatloaf and he went out to buy her some roses.
Then he took a nap and woke up later that night to meatloaf in the fridge and a missing
lover.
Hmm, her car was in the driveway.
Her keys were in the house, as was her beloved son.
The cops wasted no time in going to the funeral home, but there was no evidence that Exelee
had died there or was being stored there.
The cops looked at what funerals had been performed over the last week or so.
They wondered if two bodies could be put inside one casket, which would usually be impossible.
But then they discovered that a tiny 89-year old woman had recently been buried.
On top of that, the funeral wasn’t the open-casket kind.
The police confronted Mark about this and told him they were going to exhume that little
old lady.
Mark then cracked and told them his wife was in the casket, too, underneath the old woman
and separated with a white sheet of plastic.
He said he killed his wife in a fit of anger and then went to work in the morning to get
his van.
He returned home, collected her body, and took it to the funeral home.
He said he didn’t want to pay for a divorce or give her custody of the child.
His crime got him 30 years in prison.
Ok, this last one is utterly crazy, yet strangely heart-warming at the same time.
Good deeds and dead babies
Robert B. Winston Jr. was described as a pillar of the community by those that knew him.
He once said this, “I spent my life trying to do what's right.”
This is a man who a local pastor said helped everyone in town.
If you had no money, food, Winston was always there to help.
“He made my car payment so I wouldn't lose it.
He'd help you, but wouldn't let you help him,” said that Pastor.
So then, how did Mr. Winston’s life become a veritable American horror story?
First, you should know that this man was a war veteran.
After quitting the army, he went to work at U.S. Steel's Clairton Coke Works as an electrician.
So far, so good, but during that time at the steelworks, he developed asbestosis, a debilitating
lung disease that can happen after being exposed to asbestos.
The good news was a few years later he settled a lawsuit with the company and received a
handsome check for $305,000.
With that cash, he decided to get into the funeral home business.
He studied and later got all the required licenses and was good to go.
According to Odell Robinson Funeral Home where he did his internship, he was totally dedicated
to the job at hand.
He was reliable and loved the work, not to mention, just as everyone else said, he was
a really nice fella.
Soon after the internship, Winston used the rest of his windfall to buy Gowaty Funeral
Home in a city in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The trouble was this man with a good heart was surrounded by people who were down on
their luck and facing hard times.
Almost 40 percent of them couldn’t pay for their family member’s funerals, although
good old Winston put their debt on a tab.
They didn’t pay him back, though, and soon Winston was over $300,000 in debt himself.
The creditors were after him, and he wasn’t sure what to do.
By the year 2000, he was in financial dire straits.
As for those people he’d helped, they crossed the street when they saw him.
Here we will invoke another proverb: “No good deed goes unpunished.”
The backfiring of Winston’s good deeds led to a catastrophe of the darkest kind.
He figured out that one way he could get a bit of cash was by cremating the bodies of
deceased newborns and fetuses.
He had a deal with a local hospital, so when the time came, he went to the hospital, picked
up the body or fetus, and cremated it back at his funeral home.
The trouble was, all the cash he got from that went to other expenses and paying off
debts.
At one point, he just stopped cremating the bodies and stored them at the funeral home.
That saved him a ton of cash, but in his own words, “I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Then the worst happened.
It turned out that he had broken a state regulation regarding selling pre-arranged funerals.
He didn’t even know about this, but red tape being what it is, he was fined 3,000
bucks and had his license suspended.
Now he had a huge problem.
He wasn’t allowed to operate the crematorium.
He wasn’t allowed to work at all, but he had dead babies and fetuses all over the place
at the funeral home.
We aren’t talking about a handful here, either, we are talking about hundreds.
He soon lost the funeral home and was faced with the unlikely problem of having a massive
stash of very small, dead humans.
He decided to take those bodies home, which in hindsight was a really bad move.
In his mind, he thought one day he could get his license back and then cremate the bodies.
But how does one hide over 300 dead babies and fetuses without a large refrigeration
unit?
Those things start to smell bad after a while.
Well, he stacked them up in the garage.
Not long after, his ex-wife became suspicious and told the police she thought he was hiding
the dead.
When the police opened up that garage the smell of putrefaction almost knocked them
over.
They also found boxes with labels saying, “fetal remains.”
In others parts of the garage were tiny little caps and diapers that the newborns had once
worn.
This is what the cops found in total.
19 remains of babies that had been born but hadn’t lived very long.
They also discovered 179 remains of fetuses that had passed 16 weeks of gestation, and
another 154 fetuses got past 16 weeks.
On top of all that, they found 253 containers holding fetal autopsy remains.
When Winston stood in court the jury heard how this was an exemplary citizen who’d
just messed up.
He was a man who’d served on the city’s Civil Service Commission, and who was a member
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Here was a guy that helped everyone, but just came unstuck in the worst kind of way.
For 19 counts of abuse of a corpse he was given four years’ probation.
While this story is one of the most macabre things you’ll ever hear, you can’t help
but feel sorry for Winston.
This is how he explained his actions:
“When you try to do your very best, sometimes things befall you that you can't control.
You reach a point where you just have to make the best deal you can.”
Amen.
Now you need to watch, “What Actually Happens During an Autopsy.”
Or, have a look at ...