This goes way beyond your kidney is missing. It is on corpses, but the gruesome travisties are of monumental proportions. This is something that makes Ed Gein’s work pale in comparison. Capitalism at it’s worst, since it all was done for the money.
This is the gruesome article.
Uh, as much as I think they should have garnered consent, how can you compare murdering, eating, and making household items of people ala Ed Gein with dissecting already-dead people to sell for potentially life-saving medical procedures?
The only danger these criminals posed to living people was that they forged medical histories to conceal diseases or drug use. Mind you, that’s a big deal, but it’s not on the level you’re trying to make it out to be. On the scale of Badness, I’d think it would have to be Ed Gein > normal murderers > some unknown number of steps > these guys.
Yes, consent should be given before body parts are harvested after death, I agree. I think we as a society would be a lot better off with an opt-out rather than an opt-in model, though. It would give far more living people better lives.
I read the article about this in Maxim last month (I still don’t know how I got a subscription to that mag, but I have never given them a cent). Anyways, it’s not good what they’ve done, but I’m sure I’m in the minority by saying that I don’t think it’s completely horrible. The skin that was harvested from the corpses that would just rot underground going to burn victims? The kidneys going to people who can use them to live? It’s hard to get the torches and pitchforks when the net result is that the selfish folk who have this burial superstition can’t have the complete body when it’s going to help an unfortunate living person who can use the products. There is the ethical part where they took money for it and definitely weren’t altruistic about it, but the grosser ethical violation would be letting the organs go to waste. YMMV>
I fail to see this as a big deal. Some guys cut up some already dead bodies, and sold the parts to people who needed them. Sounds like a messy way to earn a living, but I’m not seeing the relationship to Mr. Gein. No one was eaten or worn, let alone killed.
Heck, what they did is what I want to happen to my body; waste not.
It isn’t as morally repugnant as Gein, but it’s very, very gross to think about. 
Try the fact that the cadaveres of up to 10,000 persons were stripped of organs including the skin being removed in sheets and saved for future endeavors without the consent of family members. How many families had this done to their departed family? I had a friend that came from Ed Gein’s home town, and their family didn’t dig up reletives to see if preditations had been done. I agreed with that action. They felt it better to not know if family had been dug up, then know they had. Her family and reletives didn’t care so much about details that he ate some or made furniture from skin. They cared that the mutilation occured to the burried members. The murder of the lady in the end was not the main cause of horror and repulsion, with the rightous anger they felt. I see the same type of crime here that tops anything he did in it’s magnatude. They aren’t exactly the same occurrance, but the result is the same for all those people wondering if their family had this done to them.
In witch case you have aranged to have your organs donated I hope. You consent and it’s fine and dandy. You don’t and it’s criminal and offensive for the family this is done to.
The family members still had concerns, when my friend died about the possible abuse of the body then and in the future. Gein still affects people’s lives and thoughts from that long ago. It’s a shame that now thousands of others will be thinking about the same thing, when funerals need to be arranged.
Yeah, that’s bad and all, but it does not compare AT ALL with a serial murderer kidnapping people, torturing them, murdering them, and using their skins for lampshades. There is simply no comparison here. The ghouls in the article were harvesting from people that were ALREADY DEAD. While deplorable, their actions were child’s play compared to any given serial killer, much less Ed Gein.
While I agree that it doesn’t compare with Gein’s kidnap, torture, etc., the fact that:
Some people don’t donate their organs because of religious or other personal reasons. When you give the body of a loved one to a mortician/funeral home, you are trusting them to do right by you: proper preparation of the body, the remains treated with some dignity and decorum. These guys violated that trust.
If a company sold an untested medical device (artificial joint or membrane) with falsified documentation saying it was OK, people would be outraged and disgusted. These people sold unverified material and 10,000 people now are wondering just what they received.
By the way, Alistair Cooke, from Masterpiece Theater fame, was one of the bodies caught up in similar case. So if it could happen to a celebrity…
Pardon the nitpickery, but your uses of “it” in these sentences:
imply equivalency, and there is absolutely none here. The “its” refer to two completely different acts that aren’t even in the same galaxy of evil with each other.
They are different forms of evil. Gein committed his atrocities because he was crazy. The people who dismembered people for a buck are money-grubbing whores. Which is worse? Someone who kills, tortures and mutilates because he is a loon or someone who is sane and should know better but doesn’t give a damn about the bodies that are entrusted to him?
I don’t want to be killed and eaten but I also don’t some POS making a buck because he decided to skin me like a rabbit, replace my femurs with PVC pipes and sell off my organs.
At least they didn’t resort to the level of these guys to make a buck off bodies: http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/caseclosed/burkeandhare.shtml
I think the focus should be on the people who might die because these clowns sold un-tested material as safe. Like someone getting skin or bones from someone with AIDS? Or bones from someone with osteomylitis? This seems to me to be the real crime.
I really wished to have the current case discussed here, so can we please discuss current events. Thank You.
I must agree that the use of unidentified human parts has left many people in danger of illness from a deseased cadavre. The families of the dead relative are affected. The transplant patients are affected. The families of the transplant patients are affected. This should be of great concern to the public of this nation.
The first one. By a very, very, very, very long shot.