LITTLE ROCK — More than two months after they were seized at Little Rock National Airport, Adams Field, four human heads and dozens of skull pieces remain at the Pulaski County morgue while the coroner investigates whether they were legally obtained and were being used for a lawful purpose.
The heads and bones were brought to the airport on June 9 to be delivered to Fort Worth. An airline employee opened the containers and called police, leading Pulaski County Coroner Garland Camper to take possession of the heads.
Camper said the subsequent inquiry has been “one of the most exhausting investigations that we’ve had here in this office.”
“We’ve put more hours into this one than we’ve done in quite some time,” Camper said. “One of the things that hurts us is that this is something so new to everyone we’ve encountered.”
The investigation has also shone a spotlight on companies that handle human bodies donated for research and education.
Unlike agencies that deal with organs and tissues meant for transplant, companies that receive donations of bodies for research or education are not regulated by any federal agency. Arkansas, like most states, also doesn’t license or inspect such companies.
The heads’ journey began at the Phoenix offices of the Biological Resource Center, a company that accepts donations of bodies for use in medical research and education.
They were en route to a Fort Worth facility operated by Fridley, Minn.-based Medtronic Inc., which makes medical devices and planned to use the specimens in training courses for surgeons.
In between, the heads made a stop in Wynne, where Janice Hepler prepared them for delivery to Medtronic. Since 2005, her company, JLS Consulting Group LLC, has supplied bodies and body parts to businesses, schools and medical conferences around the country.
Hepler also started her own program to receive donated bodies. It received its first - and so far only - donation in 2008 when a 75-year-old Wynne resident who had signed up as a donor died of cancer.
Camper said last week that he wants to be certain that the heads stopped at the airport were donated properly, and that the donors or their relatives had full knowledge of how the heads would be used. Hepler and Biological Resource Center have provided Camper with information, but he said there are “discrepancies” in the number and description of the heads and bones.
Camper declined to elaborate, but Hepler said the only discrepancy she knows of concerns the race of one of the people whose head was in the shipment. On donor forms and on the person’s death certificate, the person is listed as a Caucasian. Hepler said Camper contends that the head appears to be that of a black person. She said she doesn’t know the reason for the discrepancy.
“You can only go by what the family tells you, and for whatever reason the family said they’re Caucasian,” Hepler said.
HEADS IN A TRUCK
Often accompanied by her husband, Hepler picks up bodies and body parts from companies and nonprofits where they are donated and stores them at a warehouse in Wynne before delivering them. Usually, the parts are already separated from bodies. If a customer has a special request, Hepler will do the work herself, using a scalpel and other surgical tools.
While most body parts are kept frozen until they are used, heads are embalmed to better preserve the brain. Hepler also injects brains with colored latex to show the location of veins and arteries.
Hepler said the shipment stopped at the airport included 50 temporal bones, which are on the sides of the skull, and four complete heads. A spokesman for Medtronic, the company that was to use the specimens in training, said the bones were to be used to train ear, nose and throat surgeons, and the heads were to be used for neurosurgeon training.
On June 9, Hepler brought the heads, packaged in plastic containers, from Wynne to her home in Conway, where she dropped them off with a courier, a subcontractor of a shipping company hired by Medtronic. At the same time, the deliveryman left with Hepler a dozen heads, used in a previous educational course, that Hepler brought back to Wynne.
Police said the containers brought to the airport were not labeled as to their contents. The deliveryman told an employee of Southwest Airlines Air Cargo that he did not know what was in them, so the employee opened them.
It wasn’t the first time a shipment of Hepler’s heads had been delayed by authorities. In 2007, a truck driver hauling about two dozen heads from a neurosurgery course in Fort Worth to Arkansas was stopped in Royse City, Texas, for speeding. Police found the heads in the truck.
Royse City police Lt. Jeff Stapleton said the truck driver didn’t have records showing why he was hauling the heads, so officers contacted a medical-device company involved with the course. The company faxed the records to police, and the truck and driver were released.
FEW REGULATIONS
In Arkansas, donated bodies have traditionally gone to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which uses most of them for anatomy courses.
Patrick Tank, director of the UAMS Anatomical Gift Program, said he did not know of any other entities in the state that receive donations of bodies.
Under Arkansas Code 20-17-1211, however, a body can be donated to any “hospital, accredited medical school, dental school, college, or university, organ procurement organization or other appropriate person, for research or education.”
On a consent form provided on its website, potential donors to the Biological Resource Center must acknowledge that the company may “dissect and/or disarticulate” their bodies to “maximize” their use. The form says the companies or institutions receiving the bodies are “screened for educational or scientific merit,” and their “‘for profit’ or ‘non-profit’ corporate status has no bearing” on whether they are eligible.
Companies that receive donations of bodies generally maintain that they do not sell them, but they charge fees, representing the costs of transporting, freezing and storing the bodies, testing them for diseases and cremating them after they are used.
Hepler said the fees can range from several thousand dollars for an entire body to several hundred dollars for a part such as a head or leg.
On top of that, Hepler, who handles 50 to 60 jobs a year, adds her own consulting fees ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 depending on the size of the educational course and the services needed.
In addition to providing bodies or body parts, she often turns conference center or hotel ballrooms into mock operating rooms, supplying surgical gowns, drapes and gloves and coordinating loans of surgical equipment from suppliers. After the courses, she supervises the cleanup.
Todd Olson, president of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists, said the lack of oversight of the industry in Arkansas and elsewhere is troubling, especially in light of scandals in recent years involving illicit sales of body parts.
“There should never be heads that appear anywhere that cannot immediately be accounted for and traced, both as to where they’re coming from, where they’re going and the companies that are involved in the process,” said Olson, who is a professor of anatomy and structural biology at the Yeshiva University medical school in New York City.
Hepler she said would welcome regulation, in part because it would help “dispel all the myths about anatomical donations.”
“It’s a very wonderful thing to have anatomical donors or to be an anatomical donor,” Hepler said. “The lives they touch are just phenomenal.”
THE ‘BEST HEADS’
Hepler started working with donated human bodies more than 15 years ago, when, while working as an operating-room nurse in Memphis, she was tapped to help put on training courses for surgeons. For 10 years, she was director of the nonprofit Medical Education and Research Institute, which provides surgeons and other medical professionals with laboratory space and donated bodies.
She said she left the group in 2005 in part because it had grown into a “big business” and needed someone with a business background to run it. She planned to go back to the operating room full time. Then she got a call from a medical society that wanted her to provide heads for training courses in plastic surgery. She took the job.
“Things just snowballed,” Hepler said. “All of a sudden I was just working all the time.”
At an educational conference for medical residents at the Big Cedar Lodge, south of Branson, earlier this month, Hepler brought three heads, with necks attached, and three limbless torsos.
In a conference center ballroom, the specimens lay on tables, mostly covered by paper drapes, as doctors in surgical gowns took turns implanting artificial discs and fusing vertebrae with rods and screws. The day before, they had operated on the brains, practicing techniques for clipping aneurysms.
Hepler wore an orange T-shirt with her company’s name on the front. On the back, along with a picture of skeleton on a dolly, wasa bumper-sticker slogan: “Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.”
The conference was sponsored by the Springfield Neurological and Spine Institute in Missouri. Jessica Ratcliff, the neurosurgery group’s clinical research coordinator, said the group first hired Hepler for the annual conference two years ago, acting on the recommendation of an anatomy professor at the University of Cincinnati.
The professor said Hepler “had the best heads,” Ratcliff said. “So that’s when we started working with her, and it worked really well.”
Hepler named her own donation program the Harmon Life Sciences Foundation, in honor of her mother, Amy Jo Harmon, who died a few months before Hepler started her company. About eight people, all acquaintances or friends, have registered as donors, Hepler said.
On April 30, 2008, Peggy Jo Hagler died from cancer and became Hepler’s first donor. She had learned about the program after Hepler made a presentation to her daughter’s Sunday School class.
“She just thought it was a great idea to help science,” Mary Mays said of her mother. “My mother was a very smart woman, and she thought education was the best thing anybody could do for themselves.”
When Hagler died at her home, Hepler hired a funeral home to bring her the body.
The body was not taken apart, and it “never left my sight,” Hepler said. She said it was used for courses in spine surgery, hip and ankle implants and a procedure on the head behind the ear.
No one voiced any objections to the donation, she said.
Hagler “was a very respected lady in Cross County,” said Hepler, who graduated from high school with Hagler’s son, Stephen. “People knew that I had her, and people would stop me and say things, you know, Are you taking good care of Peggy ?’”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/23/2010