Woman told dad’s body was sent to medical facility before discovering sinister truth

A woman who had been told her dad's body was going to be donated to medical science learned the sinister truth behind what had actually happened to it when police called her to say they'd found her father's head.

It was 2009 when American woman Farrah Fasold's dad, Harold Dillard, had been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 56, and within weeks, he was receiving end-of-life care before dying on Christmas Eve of that year.

The BBC reports that shortly before he died, Dillard was approached by a company called Bio Care asking if he'd donate his remains to doctors who could practice knee replacement surgery, with the rest of him cremated and the ashes returned to his family.

Farrah said that her dad's 'eyes lit up' after being asked as he thought it would be a selfless final act, and within hours of his death, his body was being loaded into a Bio Care vehicle to be driven away.

Several months later, the police called Farrah to say they'd found her dad's head, along with around 100 other body parts from around 45 people, at a company warehouse.

Body parts are used for all sorts of things such as training surgeons for procedures and testing treatments like pacemakers and hip replacements (Getty Images)

A detective explained that the bodies there appeared to have been 'dismembered by a coarse cutting instrument, such as a chainsaw', a far cry from Farrah's expectation that her dad's body would be treated with respect.

Her experience with how her dad's body was treated is one of many cases in the US where companies that acquire bodies will use what they want and sell the rest on, rather than cremating the parts they don't use.

This is known as 'body brokering', though the companies doing it prefer to call themselves 'non-transplant tissue banks'.

There are many places which accept human remains for the purpose of medical science, but these companies act as middlemen which sign a deal with a person to take the remains and then, once they have them, sell them on.

In the US, it is technically illegal to sell human tissue, but a 'reasonable amount' can be charged for 'processing' body parts.

Farrah Fasold and her dad Harold Dillard (Farrah Fasold)

The Price of Life author Jenny Kleeman warned that the US was effectively exporting body parts from people who had donated their cadavers to over 50 countries, including the UK.

She explained: "In many countries, there is a shortfall of donations. And where they can get bodies is from America."

When Farrah tried to go after Bio Care with legal action, she was told they had not broken laws, and a case of fraud against Bio Care, which no longer exists, fell apart as prosecutors couldn't prove they intended to deceive her.

It's a grisly scene, though Kleeman said that if it were shut down, there would also be a shortage of bodies for medical purposes, and there would need to be an effort to get more people to donate their remains.