Farrah Fascold was left horrified as cops explained they’d identified her dad’s arm stuffed in a barrel with other people’s remains after she thought his body had been donated to medical science
A father’s body was found chopped up and tossed into tubs by heartless “body brokers” after being donated to medical science – a week after his heartbroken daughter was sent “his” ashes.
Harold Dillard’s severed head was found by police officers in a bin before they made the grim discovery of his arms stuffed in a barrel with other people’s remains.
Kindhearted Harold’s dying wish was for his body to be donated to science after being approached in an end-of-life hospice by a firm called Bio Care who claimed his gifted limbs would be used to practice knee replacement surgery.
They said any unused body parts would be cremated and returned to his daughter Farrah Fascold at no cost. But after his death aged just 56 on Christmas Eve 2009, she was told she would receive her dad’s ashes within four to six weeks.
She grew suspicious when she hadn’t heard a word after week six and put in countless calls to boss Paul Montano, who told her the donation process had been delayed.
Farrah was eventually sent a tan-coloured grainy substance in the post, but said “it was fairly obvious” they were not real ashes.
The truth was that Bio Care were in the “body brokering” business, a little-known morbid but legal industry where private firms acquire corpses, dissect them and flog the limbs for a profit, often to medical research centres.
Farrah, now 49, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has now told The Sun she suffered from PTSD as a result of the haunting ordeal.
She said: “I developed insomnia, I had a really hard time sleeping. Anytime I closed my eyes, I would instantly see visions of the big red medical waste tubs that they had found all the body parts in.
“I went to therapy, I got diagnosed with PTSD… it was very traumatic and affected me for years after. It traumatised me to hear how they treated my dad’s body, and the things that they did.”
Inside Bio Care’s warehouse, authorities said they found at least 127 body parts belonging to 45 people. A police detective wrote in an affidavit: “All of the bodies appeared to have been dismembered by a coarse cutting instrument, such as a chainsaw.”
But despite Bio Care owner Montano being charged with fraud, prosecutors later withdrew it as they could not prove deception or any other crime.
The district attorney told Farrah there was no law protecting the handling of deceased bodies and described Montano as simply a “bad businessman”.
She fumed: “He took my dad’s body, chopped it up, put it in a bunch of tubs with a bunch of other deceased bodies, and tried to send it to a medical waste company to be incinerated on the sly, and in the meantime, sends me a bag of dirt telling me it’s my dad’s ashes.
“That, to me, is a little bit worse than just being a bad businessman.”
The controversial network of for-profit operators who snap up fresh corpses and carve them apart before selling the pieces on for cash has been branded a “modern form of grave-robbing” by critics.
But defenders of the trade insist it serves a necessary purpose, claiming it stops unwanted or donated bodies from going to waste.
Research has shown that some private companies – who dub themselves “non-transplant tissue banks” – make millions in profit.
Journalist Brian Gow identified 25 well-established body brokering firms in the US in 2017, one of which earned an eye-watering £9.3million over three years of trading corpses.
Farrah said: “When I tell my dad’s story to people who have never heard it before, they are shocked, they cannot believe that something like this actually could happen to people.”
Bio Care no longer exists as a company and its former owners could not be reached for comment.
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