Okay, I realise that like 90% of missing-corpse mysteries are really just a case of “unscrupulous funeral director cut the body up and sold it for parts, then buried an empty casket” and have nothing to do with vampires, but imagine if both of those things happened at once? Some poor med students being terrorised by a disembodied spleen, all hopping around and out for blood.
I think my favourite thing about this post is all the folks in the notes who until this moment had no idea that burial fraud is a thing.
I think Tumblr might be generally too young to remember Alistair Cooke, the British journalist who presented Masterpiece Theater on PBS. That’s what Cookie Monster (as Alistair Cookie) was parodying with Monsterpiece Theater on Sesame Street, if this looks familiar:
Anyway, when Alistair Cooke died of cancer in 2004, aged 95, his remains were a victim of burial fraud! His bones were stolen and sold!! His elderly, cancer-affected bones! Which is awful because:
grave-robbing is generally frowned upon, and
NOBODY WANTS A CANCER-RIDDLED BONE IMPLANT.
That part was particularly upsetting for his family – Cooke would have been completely ineligible for donation. They had to live with the knowledge that the tissue of their elderly, sick father had been stolen, but then, worse, sold for use in patients who really needed it, and who were presumably paying for clean, healthy, young-ish, consensual tissue. (But, Cooke’s daughter said, “at the same time, he would have appreciated the Dickensian nature of it.”)
Michael Mastromarino was the “Body-Snatcher” convicted of this and over 1,000 other counts of burial fraud, corpse-robbing, and other hideously medieval-sounding naughty behaviors.
Mastromarino died in 2013 at the age of 49.
Of liver and bone cancer.
Obviously the trade continues to this day but without such a bizarre narrative shape (that we know of. Yet.)
The reason I know this is because my husband was commenting on the cricketing career of one Alastair Cook, spelled differently, and I was like “Oh, like Monsterpiece Theatre!” and … well, one Wikipedia journey later I knew far too much about burial fraud.
They replace the stolen leg bones with bits of PVC for the viewing/burial, apparently!
Well this went to a lot of places relevant to my interests.
suchasinistergame 