After a mislabeled shipping crate bound for a medical research firm was discovered to be mislabeled, a suspicious Southwest Airlines employee decided it might be worth looking into. What they found was as gruesome as it was perplexing. No less than forty, and possibly as much as 60 human heads were discovered inside the container. No one knows exactly if the shipping was legitimate or not, but investigators are certainly raising questions about the possibility of something sinister going on.
The heads were on their way to a Fort Worth, Texas medical research company. In the wake of the massive human body fat harvesting hoax months ago, authorities are careful before they officially declare the heads as part of a black market operation for human body parts. Still, Garland Camper the county coroner in Little Rock Arkansas is under the firm assertion that such a market does exist for the purpose of supplying bodies and/or body parts to assist in research. What exactly the black market body parts are being sold for is unknown at this time. Many of those who have heard of the claimed trade are saying it’s like something out of a horror movie. What shadowy organization would need to resort to buying dead bodies from shady vendors as opposed to simply going through the official channels for their research?
The company the body parts were heading toward was known as Medtronic that specializes in medical treatment for pain management research. The company insists the transaction itself was perfectly legitimate, but a spokesman for Medtronic did tell reporters when they inquired that the seizure was strange, insisting, “We expect our suppliers to follow procedures.” JLS Consulting, the supplier that initially shipped the heads lost its license almost a year ago for reasons we have not been able to track down yet. JLS Consulting says the fault lies with a hired shipping firm which may have messed up the order. Is it all just a matter of a simple shipping error? Currently there are several laws prohibiting the sale of human body parts for profit for obvious reasons. The moment the trade becomes more profitable than gruesome, there are fears that a new and horrifying trade will overtake the streets where urban legends of people waking up with their kidneys missing come true. If this is the case, and this market truly has opened up as Little Rock’s county coroner has concluded, then we may be looking at a new breed of crime that victimizes the dead as well as the living. But if not, and it simply is a shipping concern, then we may be looking at stiffer regulations for the legitimate shipping of body parts, which is hard to argue against when the alternative is discovering almost 60 heads in a shipping container.
But the real question in the black market trade scenario is, what would a research firm need with so many human heads that couldn’t be acquired through the official channels? What is this nightmare scenario some investigators are considering here? What sort of research would require resorting to these measures? As this case develops new details are coming out all the time.
