Body theft

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Body snatching (Engl. Body snatching ) is the theft of dead from funeral homes or cemeteries . Most of the time the corpses are sold to buyers who use them for anatomical purposes. The corpse trafficking is prohibited in most countries.

history

19th century

Street vendors in the slums of London; by Gustave Doré : A Dog's Life, 1872

At the beginning of the 19th century in Great Britain the bodies of those who had been executed were only allowed to be autopsied if the verdict expressly provided for it. But while twelve murderers were executed in England and Wales in 1831, the expanding medical schools and research institutes required between five hundred and one thousand bodies annually. The situation developed into a "gray market" for corpses stolen from cemeteries . The theft of a corpse was considered an offense , not a crime potentially threatened with death or exile, so that the risk of imprisonment or a fine seemed bearable to the corpse thieves.

The practice led to the fact that permanently lockable, iron "safety coffins" were offered near the medical schools and especially in Edinburgh; Another method was to put iron bars over the graves ( Mortsafe ).

In 1827 and 1828 William Burke and William Hare sold a corpse to Edinburgh Medical College in Edinburgh and decided - surprised by the high profit - to murder more people. The acts that followed went down in history as the West Port murders .

In 1831, three quarters of the population of London were very poor and child mortality was high. Due to the poor diet - people could not get a vitamin-rich food such as B. Buying fruit - diseases like scurvy were common. The water of the Thames , in which sewage and corpses were disposed of, served the poor as drinking water; the unfiltered water led to diarrhea, especially in the slums. Corruption, robbery and prostitution were common as many of the poor saw no other way to survive. From their circles came the professional body snatchers ( Resurrection men : men who let the dead rise again). They stole or dug up recently deceased people from hospitals, from the funeral halls. Surgeons paid up to £ 20 for fresh corpses; Corpses that were no longer anatomically usable were used by dentists (dentures), wig makers and used clothing dealers as material.

Since corpse dealers were paid better for particularly "fresh" material, there were arrests in 1827 and 1828 in Edinburgh and later also in London for related crimes. Three corpse dealers later known as London Burkers (James May, John Bishop and Thomas Williams) were arrested in London, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams confessed after two days to murdering and selling two boys and a homeless woman; the two confessing murderers exonerated the co-accused James May. Thomas Williams and John Bishop were executed and their bodies released for dissection.

On May 11, 1832 an anatomy law was passed. It allowed anatomists to dissect corpses unclaimed by relatives. So that no more corpses were illegally dissected, an "Inspector for Anatomy" was appointed ( Her Majesty's Inspector of Anatomy ).

present

With the increasing progress of transplant medicine , human body parts, both from the living and the deceased, became particularly important in organ and human trafficking , as there are too few donated organs compared to the need. It is also alleged that murders for the purpose of organ removal are committed - for example on street children in the Third World and on Serb prisoners of war and civilians by the "Kosovo Liberation Army" .

At the beginning of the 1980s, corpse thefts were reported from Northern Germany that apparently had no economic background.

In 2005, an American was sentenced to two years in prison for stealing over seventy kilograms of body parts from his employer's morgue in order to “practice” dissection.

In 2006, a group led by former dentist Michael Mastromarino was arrested in New York for reselling body parts and organs without the donor's consent. Mastromarino received the body parts from the Daniel George Funeral Home in Brooklyn , a funeral home that he rented with his company BioMedical Tissue Services . He and his accomplices sold bones, tissues and other body parts from more than 1,000 corpses to listed tissue banks , making millions in profits. In some cases, the corpses from which bones and tissue had been removed were dissected with PVC pipes and the like. This was to prevent the relatives from becoming curious. Mastromarino was sentenced to between 18 and 54 years in prison on June 27, 2008. The filmmaker Toby Dye shot the documentary Body Snatcher of New York in 2010 about this case, which became known in New York as the BTS scandal .

The desecration of Friedrich Karl Flick's grave made headlines when strangers stole the stainless steel coffin and body from the family mausoleum in Velden am Wörthersee in 2008.

Criminal liability

The theft of a human corpse is a disturbance of the peace of the dead in Germany according to § 168 StGB and in Austria according to § 190 Abs 1 StGB . According to this, anyone who steals a corpse, a dead womb, parts of it or a corpse burned to ashes is liable to prosecution. In the appropriation of the dental gold after the body was burned, the Higher Regional Court of Bamberg saw the disturbance of the peace of the dead as given; the Nuremberg Higher Regional Court denied this. As a rule, the removal of the corpse is not punishable as theft, since a corpse is not a thing. This is based on a decision by the Reichsgericht that there are no property rights to the human body, and that the body therefore becomes ownerless after death. The situation is different with so-called museum or anatomical corpses, which are part of legal traffic, where theft and damage to property are possible.

Literary processing

The story of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson " Der Leichenräuber " (The Body Snatcher) from 1884 takes place against the background of the corpse trafficking, which was rampant until 1832; the work was filmed in 1945 and 1966. The story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by the American writer HP Lovecraft also deals with the theft of the deceased.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Ackroyd: London. The biography. Munich 2002, pp. 553-560.
  2. ↑ Susanne Frömel: The corpse robbers of London. In: London: History of a Cosmopolitan City 1558-1945. GEO epoch , No. 18, 2005, accessed on March 11, 2019.
  3. ↑ The Anatomy Act 1832. National Archive, accessed March 11, 2019.
  4. ↑ May 11, 1832: England punishes robbery of corpses. Bayerischer Rundfunk , May 11, 2017
  5. ↑ guardian.co.uk
  6. ↑ The wrong way round . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1981 ( online ).
  7. ↑ rp-online.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.rp-online.de  
  8. ↑ CNBC The Body Snatcher of New York  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English), accessed November 27, 2012.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.cnbc.com  
  9. ↑ Boss of body snatching ring .. New York Daily News (English), accessed on 27 November 2012 found.
  10. ↑ CNN : Mastermind of body parts scheme sentenced to prison ( Memento of December 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 27, 2012.
  11. ↑ Bodysnatcher of New York
  12. ↑ Elisalex Henckel: How the riddle about the Flick corpse was solved. Die Welt , November 30, 2009
  13. ↑ dghs.de (PDF; 88 kB), who actually belong to Grandma's gold teeth?
  14. ↑ jura.uni-freiburg.de ( Memento from November 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 522 kB) Working group in criminal law BT for beginners (p. 60)