Wife shocked to learn husband’s cadaver dissected at pay-per-view event
Global News
She thought her husband's remains would be donated to science; instead, they were dissected in a hotel ballroom.
Elsie Saunders doesn’t know where her late husband’s body is.
What’s worse is that the Louisiana senior isn’t even sure what even remains of her husband, after his cadaver was used for a public autopsy that she wasn’t informed of.
Saunders, 92, thought her husband’s remains were being donated to science after he died of COVID-19 complications in August. Instead she learned, after the fact, that his body underwent a public autopsy in an Oregon hotel ballroom, and that tickets were sold to see the body dissected.
“I didn’t know he was going to be … put on display like a performing bear or something,” Saunders told NBC News of her husband, David, a Second World War army veteran who died at the age of 98.
The autopsy’s 70 spectators paid between $100 and $500 to watch the show, which was put on by the company Death Science as part of the travelling Oddities and Curiosities Expo.
Saunders learned about her late husband’s participation in the autopsy after a photojournalist from a Seattle news station attended the class.
Saunders said her husband had agreed to donate his body to Louisiana State University for medical research, but because he died of COVID-19, the school wouldn’t take it.
So, she says, his body ended up at Las Vegas-based Med Ed Labs – an organization that asks for body donations for research – which then turned around and sold the body to the autopsy event.