I used to wear a face mask when dealing with the corpses. All of them, their odor, in particular, used to make me gag– their smells so rancid and disgusting. At first, we only stole a single corpse, my friends and I. We used the first corpse for the purpose of study, though we were unable to bring it into the lab to dissect it in the university.
I was located in Maryland at the time, for grad school in the medical field. I used to have colleagues that I had met at the university; two other colleagues, my very close friends, who were majoring in different medical field studies, too.
My one friend, the oldest of us, which I will call Alpha (an alias to what his actual name is), was very callous and temperamental. He was a man, for the lack of a better word, without contrition. He was well spoken and cut-throat when in regard to his competition. He was quite confident in his mannerisms and speech, the unwavering type, in that he did not step down from a conflict. He was a tall man, around six foot three and was quite skinny with his skinny face and his boney ribcage. He had a chiseled face with a chiseled jaw; he was an attractive man, and combined with his charisma, he had the world in the palm of his hand.
On the contrary, Stanley, my other friend, was an emotional man. Stanley… Stanley was his real name. He was quite squeamish, and he at first hesitated at the idea of corpse robbing in its entirety. Although with some coaxing from Alpha and I, we had convinced him to help us in our undertaking. He was quite malleable, the manipulated type; he had no backbone, and I now sometimes regret how I treated him, to be completely honest. He, Stanley, lacked many things that I can’t plainly describe. Maybe it was his confidence— or maybe it was the fact that he was overweight, with freckles and curly hair and glasses that made him look like a prepubescent… He was a small man, around the height of about five foot six, so his looks, combined with his characteristics, made him a laughing stock with his lack of charisma. Though, I envied him in many ways; he was a smart man, and he had good judgment.
He was… human.
The three of us seemed like an indescribable trio. Alpha was so charismatic and unpredictable, and Stanley lacked the drive for something more… At the time, I thought that maybe it was God’s will that we had all met— that God had planned for us to meet. But now, as I write this, I realize that it was all a part of Alpha’s master plan.
When we robbed the corpses, we wanted the cadavers new and clean. We dug up our first body at the first crack of dark, buried days before, pulling the carcass from the coffin and into our wagon of which we rolled back to my dormitory. It took us almost the entire night to unearth the coffin. And as the time passed, and the rot afflicted our first corpse, we robbed another corpse months thereafter. And then, we robbed another, and then another. Most of the corpses we took were from African American cemeteries, as people do not care so much for the desecration of their graves when compared to the white man.
It took us some time to acclimate to this sort of business. It used to take us long periods of time to dig down to the coffin. Though as our expertise grew, the time it took us to dig up a coffin was nearly cut in half. Once we were comfortable and confident enough in the processes of our pillaging, Alpha considered doing this for the long term, not just for the short term. He had posed a question for the both of us… He had a goal in mind that couldn’t be shaken. Why not do this not just for us, but also for the other people in our same fields?! People needed corpses to dissect at other universities; there was a steady need for their supply— why not act as the suppliers to the market, Alpha thought. In his eyes, we were good enough at it already!
I was quite hesitant at first, and so was Stan. Especially Stan. He seemed like he wanted to distance himself from Alpha at first, posing such a wild, yet grandiose question. We did this purely for the name of science and for ourselves, not for money! But… as I stated prior… Alpha was of the charismatic type. He claimed that our help in selling corpses would push the field of medicine further down the road of its progress, and we would be doing good by helping others in need of their supply. We would also make money on the side! It was a win win! It took me a couple of weeks to ponder this thought over, but with more convincing from Alpha (I cannot deny that the man had a silver tongue), I ultimately gave in to the idea (and so did Stan, although reluctantly and with my pushing, might I add).
Thus we searched far and wide for the perfect man to expand our connections. We therefore observed and met a professor at the university of which we attended. This professor, quite a liberal at the time— we couldn’t have done it without this professor— he was at the head of the medical department of the university. Doctor Blue is what I will call him. He was a neurosurgeon… He was quite loose with his ethical practices when compared with the other local professors (with his wacky ideas and publications), and thus we spoke with him over cups of coffee and tea.
He was a peculiar figure. He was a blonde, skinny man, skinny as a toothpick. He was a weird man… I cannot describe it well, but the vibe, the vibe of his presence… he was quite calm. It made me uneasy. He was too calm, to be honest. I once thought that he was a pacifist at heart, and only found grave robbing as a necessary evil to the production of the modernist thought. His thesis statement was about the brain and its atrophy in chimpanzees. He used to dissect chimpanzee brains after their deaths, screening them for a condition that was similar to that of Alzheimer’s. He was acclaimed for his research, but according to some, he took it too far, and he experimented on living chimpanzees in a plethora of different ways. He used to inject chemicals into their bloodstreams, attempting to figure out the cause of the specific ailments that plagued them.
At first he was quite hesitant to the whole idea, Dr. Blue, although with some coaxing (as money was of course mentioned), he agreed to take a cut out of a total sum, as he gave us the necessary contacts to conduct this whole operation in the first place. My friends and I, we took home 80% of the profits divided amongst us three, while the professor took 20%.
The professor led the business side of this whole operation; he oversaw the transactions, the shipment, and the interrelations with our various buyers. We were nothing but the people who did the illegal deed of stealing the corpses. Nothing more. In a sense, he was the patriarch, and I likely wouldn’t be the only one to admit it. Our relationship with him… It was in what some would consider a hierarchy. We were but henchmen to the man, in a sense; though this was only once he had become so tied up with the business. He was older than us, and he, which I once thought, was wiser than us. If it weren’t for him and his connections, we would have been nothing, and thus we took the role as his inferiors.
With his connections, we began to dig up corpses to sell to other universities in the local area, specifically to other professors (and sometimes with or without the acknowledgement of the universities themselves). We brought in large sums of money for the span of our activity, and we sometimes sold out of the state borders, shipping corpses in barrels of whiskey all the way to Atlanta or to St. Louis. Although I had (and still haven’t) ever met Doctor Blue’s clientele, I would assume that they came in all shapes and sizes.
The business went on for some years after we had graduated from the university. Many cemeteries were completely against the idea of stealing corpses and hired guards to patrol on random days out of the week within some of the cemeteries overnight. We used to rob from these cemeteries, picking days for which we thought the guard wouldn’t patrol. We used to get lucky, stealing the corpses undetected, most of the corpses we took unsolicited.
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There was a time where we were in a cemetery that we had been eyeing for some time (although that we had never robbed from), which changed my view of Alpha and of graverobbing in its entirety. This cemetery was lonely; it was an old cemetery that housed families and couples of marriage that had originated as a religious, African American burial ground during the development of the thirteen colonies.
That time of night the sky was pitch black and the stars in the sky were all but gone, our lanterns the only source of light that lit upon our path. It was a desolate night— we didn’t talk very much on the way there nor within the actual cemetery, nor were there people crowded among the streets.
It was empty, the cemetery, from what we could tell, and when we reached the grave of which we were to rob, a grave of which we scoped out prior to our excavation (prior to that night), we huddled around the grave, and we began to dig. Before long, the coffin was unearthed, and we then broke holes within its frontside, where we tied a rope around the corpse’s head and shoulder, pulling it out of the hole by rope. Though as we hoisted the corpse out of the coffin and onto the grass of the cemetery, a guard called out to us, a clear reminder of the night’s dreadful atmosphere.
“Hello? Who’s all there?” He said, walking towards us, only the glaring light of his lantern shining upon his hand, the rest of him but a silhouette due to the darkness of the space around us.
We then looked at each other, Stanley and I, and then we looked back at the guard, both of us in total shock.
“No one you wanna know,” Alpha called out to the guard. Though the guard didn’t stop there, and when he reached the three of us, he held his lantern out with his arm fully extended to get a better look at us. In his other hand, he brandished a revolver, though it was lowered.
“Who’s all there?” He said. I couldn’t see the man at first, until my eyes began to dilate and I realized that he was African American. He was a young man, in his twenties. It didn’t surprise me, of course. We were on an African American cemetery.
“I said, no one you wanna know.” Alpha said. And before I could think, and without provocation, Alpha pulled his gun from his trousers, held his gun up towards the man, and fired three quick shots through the guard’s chest. The guard dropped his gun, firing it in the process, though luckily not hitting any one of us, and fell upon the grass with a large thump. He then screamed out in pain, blood bursting out from his chest in pools of liquid.
“Hey– hey, wait! Please!” The guard held his left hand up to his face as Alpha approached him.
“Watch what you’re doing, we don’t wanna kill anyone, do we?” Stanley said to him. Though, without hesitation, with no further words, he fired the gun through the guard’s head, coating my shirt with brains and skull.
“What the fuck was that!” Stanley exclaimed.
“That… was business.” Alpha said. Stanley then looked at me in total shock, not really saying anything, not really knowing what to say, though I didn’t glance back at him. I was too busy looking at the blood pouring from the dead man’s skull. “Like Doctor Blue said, it’s for the greater good.” He tucked his gun back into his trousers. “Let’s get out of here with the corpse we already have.” Alpha said.
As the two took the corpse and placed it into the wheelbarrow, I grabbed the dead guard’s revolver and pushed it into my pants. It had ten bullets, I later learned. Thankfully, Alpha did not see me take the revolver, nor did Stanley.
We left with the corpse, leaving the guard’s body next to the coffin in the process.