Jeffrey Jarrett's Last Night Out: Too Bad He Was Dead

     In the 1989 comedy "Weekend at Bernie's," a couple of low-level insurance agency employees are invited to spend the weekend at a beach house owned by their boss--Bernie. They show up at the summer house and find Bernie dead, and for the next two days carry on as though he were alive. In one scene these guys drive around in Bernie's convertible with the dead man propped up in the back seat. When people wave at Bernie, the guy sitting next to him grabs the dead man's arm and waves back. It's that kind of movie, kind of funny in spots but really stupid because in real life no one would do something like this. That is until a couple of bar-hopping men in Glendale, Colorado were accompanied by a dead man who picked up the tab.

     Jeffrey Jarrett, a 43-year-old real estate agent, had a problem with drugs and alcohol. In the summer of 2011 he called a friend from his days at Colorado State University. Jarrett asked his old buddy to room with him until he got his life straightened out. Shortly after his cry for help, 43-year-old Robert J. Young moved into his friend's house.

     On August 27, 2011 when Mr. Young came home from work he found Jeffrey Jarrett sprawled on the floor, obviously dead. The look of the death scene suggested a drug overdose. (A toxicology report confirmed this. According to the medical examiner, Mr. Jarrett overdosed on Xanax and Subutex--a drug addicted people take to get off opiates). Robert Young, instead of calling 911 phoned a 25-year-old drinking buddy named Mark Rubinson.

     That evening, a Saturday, Young and Rubinson stuffed Jeffrey Jarrett's lifeless body into the backseat of Rubinson's Lincoln Navigator and took off for a night on the town. They started off with drinks at a joint called Teddy T's Bar and Grill. The corpse remained in the SUV as Young and his friend used Jarrett's credit card to pay for their booze. From Teddy T's the pair visited Sam's No. 3 where they continued to imbibe on the dead man's dime.

     Perhaps realizing that for Jarrett's credit card to work his body didn't have to be sitting outside in Rubinson's SUV, they decided to take him home. After lugging the corpse back into the house Robert Young and Mark Rubinson enjoyed a meal, at Jarrett's expense, at an eatery called Viva Burrito.

     The party animals finished off the night at a strip club called Shotgun Willie's where Robert Young used the dead man's credit card to withdraw $400 from the ATM. After the joint closed at four in the morning Mr. Young contacted the Glendale Police Department to report his housemate's death.

     The local prosecutor charged Young and Rubinson with abuse of corpse, identify theft, and criminal impersonation. After first denying any wrongdoing both suspects agreed to plead guilty to all charges.

     On March 6, 2012 a judge sentenced Robert J. Young to two years probation and ordered that he undergo "mental health evaluation and treatment; substance abuse assessment and treatment; and cognitive behavioral therapy." ( "Cognitive behavioral therapy"? I guess that meant that some therapist or shrink would explain to Mr. Young that hauling a corpse from bar to bar while using the dead man's credit card constituted inappropriate behavior.)  Pursuant to his sentence, if Mr. Young behaved himself for two years, his record of shameless behavior would be expunged.

     Mr. Rubinson got off with a couple of years of probation as well. For some reason the judge didn't think he needed any cognitive behavioral therapy. He had just helped Young carry the corpse to and from the car, then drove his two companions, one dead and one alive, around town. The man drove a Lincoln Navigator yet had to mooch drinks off a dead man.

The Johnson Family Mortuary: The Funeral Home Horror Show

      On July 15, 2014, James Labenz, the owner of the building in east Fort Worth, Texas that housed the Johnson Family Mortuary, went to the funeral home to evict the tenants. Dondre Johnson, 39, and his 35-year-old wife Rachel Hardy-Johnson owed the landlord $15,000 in back rent. The place looked vacant so Mr. Labenz entered the building. What he saw and smelled caused him to quickly exit the premises and call 911.

     In his report, the police officer who responded to the 911 call noted that he detected, from the funeral home's parking lot, the odor of decaying flesh. Inside the building he found the unrefrigerated remains of several corpses in various states of decomposition. The officer called the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office.

     Police detectives accompanied by a medical examiner's office crime scene technician encountered a scene right out of a horror movie. But unlike its fictional counterpart, the funeral home tableau featured insects, maggots, leaking body fluids and the overpowering stench of death.

     That day, the medical examiner's office took possession of the remains of two stillborn children and five adults. The partially mummified corpse of an adult lay in a casket inhabited by swarms of flies and other bugs. In a small container the crime scene technician discovered a tiny skeleton. The funeral home's flooring was wet with draining bodily fluids.

     A Tarrant County prosecutor charged the mortuary owners with seven counts of abuse of a corpse. If convicted and sentenced on each count the couple faced up to seven years behind bars. On July 18, 2014, police officers arrested Rachel Hardy-Johnson at the couple's home in Arlington, Texas. The next day Dondre turned himself in at police headquarters in Fort Worth. After putting up their $10,500 bonds the suspects were released from custody.

     The day after he walked out of the Tarrant County Jail, Dondre Johnson said this to a reporter: "This is a funeral home, you can expect to find bodies." 

     Rachel Hardy-Johnson told reporters that she had been absent from the funeral home due to the birth of her child. Dondre, who wasn't good at keeping up with the paperwork associated with either burying or cremating bodies, had been in charge of that aspect of the business. She said that Dondre was all about the pomp and circumstance and show associated with the funeral service.

     Dondre Johnson's lack of administrative skills cost his landlord $8,000 in cleanup fees. Moreover, the macabre publicity associated with the building had significantly lowered the property's real estate value.

     Following the gruesome discovery of the results of Dondre Johnson's gross mismanagement and callous disregard for the postmortem dignity of the deceased in his care, the Texas Funeral Service Commission revoked the Johnson family funeral license. Angered by the revocation, the couple petitioned the state to have their license returned.

     Dondre and Rachel Hardy-Johnson, already in trouble with the law, were indicted on four counts of fraud by a federal grand jury in September 2014. The couple stood accused of obtaining food stamps, a housing subsidy, federal education funding and Medicare benefits without revealing their income and other personal assets. The alleged government fraud took place between April 2010 and July 2012. If convicted on each count the former funeral home owners faced up to 20 years in prison.

     Federal fraud investigators determined that Hardy-Johnson had in 2011 received government benefits while claiming to be an unemployed single mother living alone with her children. During that period she purchased a 2006 Hummer H2 for $26,000 and a 2008 Mercedes-Benz CL S500 for $41,700. The next year, while still representing herself as an unemployed single mother, she bought an expensive Land Rover.

     On January 20, 2015 a Tarrant County grand jury indicted Dondre Johnson and his wife for stealing up to $20,000 from families who had paid for and did not receive funeral services in 2014. If convicted they faced maximum sentences of 20 years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

     Rachel Hardy-Johnson, on January 27, 2015, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of food stamp benefit fraud involving $6,000 in payments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Stamp program and its successor, SNAP. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

     In February 2015, reporters with the CBS television affiliate in Fort Worth discovered that Dondre Johnson and his twin brother Derrick were conducting funerals in Sherman, Texas. Travis Mitchell, the owner of Serenity Chapel Funeral Services told the reporters that he handled the business aspects of the operation while Dondre and Derrick performed the funerals.

     On September 24, 2015 a jury in Fort Worth found Dondre Johnson guilty of two counts of felony theft. The judge sentenced Johnson to two years in prison and a $20,000 fine. He still faced possible prosecution on seven misdemeanor counts of abuse of corpse. 

     In September 2018 Dondre Johnson pleaded guilty in a Fort Worth courtroom to nine counts of abuse of corpse. The judge sentenced him to two years in prison.

Abortion Doctor Ulrich George Klopfer And His Dead Fetuses

     Ulrich Klopfer was born in 1940 in Dresden, Germany. He came to the United States in 1952 with his family. Klopfer attended high school in Bloomfield, Michigan and upon graduation became a naturalized U.S. citizen. 

     In 1963, Ulrich Klopfer, now going by his middle name George, graduated from Wayne State College in Detroit with a degree in organic chemistry. He graduated from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1971.

     In 1974 Dr. Klopfer opened an abortion clinic in South Bend, Indiana. In June 2014, a prosecutor in St. Joseph County, Indiana charged him with the misdemeanor offense of failing to file a timely report with the state regarding an abortion he had performed on a 13-year-old girl in South Bend. (Indiana state law required doctors to report every abortion within six months of the procedure.) After Dr. Klopfer agreed to complete a re-education program the prosecution dropped the charge.

     Also in 2014 Dr. Klopfer performed an abortion on a 10-year-old girl who had been raped by her uncle. After the procedure she went home with her parents who obviously knew she had been sexually assaulted. Neither Dr. Klopfer nor the girl's parents reported the rape to the police.

     The Indiana State Department of Health, in 2015, revoked the abortion clinic's license for violating the state's regulation regarding the registry of patients, and for failing to provide documentation that the clinic provided patients with state-mandated patient counseling at least 18 hours before an abortion.

     In November 2016 the Indiana Medical Licensing Board revoked Dr. Klopfer's medical license for failing to ensure that qualified staff was present when patients received or recovered from medications given before and during abortion procedures. By then Dr. Klopfer was no longer practicing. He informed the medical licensing panel that during his 43 years of performing abortions he had terminated 30,000 pregnancies without losing a patient.

     On September 3, 2019 Dr. Ulrich Klopfer died at the age of 75. Members of his family, on September 12, called the local authorities after finding, in his Crete Township, Illinois garage, 2,246 medically preserved fetal remains. The dead fetuses were turned over to the Will County, Illinois Coroner's Office for proper handling.  There was no evidence that Dr. Klopfer had performed abortions at his home.

     In May 2016, Indiana enacted a law that required the burial or cremation of fetal remains produced by abortions. Prior to that law abortion clinics in Indiana turned the dead fetuses over to processors who disposed of human tissues and other medical byproducts.

     The Will County Sheriff's Office, on September 14, 2019, opened an investigation into Dr. Klopfer's possession of the fetal remains. 

     In December 2020 investigators reported that they had no clue as to why Dr. Klopfer's kept all those remains in his garage. The bodies were kept in moldy boxes and Styrofoam coolers and were preserved with formalin, a derivative of formaldehyde. According to the investigation, Dr. Klopfer had acted alone.

Dead Dictators On Display

     The Venezuelan authorities, following Hugo Chavez's death from cancer in 2013, had planned to put his corpse on permanent display in a glass casket in the Museum of the Revolution not far from the Presidential Palace where he had ruled for fourteen years. In the United States, turning a dead person into a roadside attraction is against the law. It's a crime appropriately called abuse of corpse.

     As noted by the columnist Dale McFeatters, other Marxist rulers have been subjected to this macabre form of post-mortem exhibitionism. The Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin has been under glass and on display in Moscow's Red Square since his death in January 1924. One can visit Ho Chi Minh, dead since 1975, in Vietnam. Kim Il Sung, the dead North Korean dictator, and his successor son, Kim Jong Il, also dead, can be seen at the former North Korean Presidential Palace.

     As it turns out, Mr. Chavez's corpse was not permanently housed above ground for all to see and admire. The Russian morticians in charge of embalming the dead dictator for posterity couldn't do the job because by the time they got their hands on Chavez, he had gotten a little ripe. 

Abuse of Corpse in San Juan

     Even in death, Christopher Rivera Amaro almost looked ready to box, leaning against the corner of a simulated ring. Mourners who came to the wake in San Juan on Friday, February 1, 2014 found him posed afoot, a yellow hood on his head, sunglasses over his eyes and blue boxing gloves on his hands.

     The vice president of the Marin Funeral Home, said the Amaro family wanted to stress his boxing. The funeral home suggested posing him in a ring…The funeral home has staged similar wakes for others. One featured a deceased man riding his motorcycle. The 23-year-old Amaro had a 5-15 record in the 130-pound weight class. Police said he was shot dead on January 26, 2014 in the city of Santurce. No one has been arrested.

"Family Props Up, Poses with Dead Boxer in Ring," Associated Press, February 1, 2014 

Living Off a Corpse

     In November 2012, 72-year-old Ann Marquis died of natural causes in the trailer house she rented in Long's Mobile Home Court in Redford Township just west of Detroit. At the time of her death Marquis resided with Dennis McCauley. The 64-year-old had been living with Marquis for two and a half years.

     Mr. McCauley, instead of notifying the appropriate authorities of Ann Marquis' death, told her friends and neighbors that she had moved out of the trailer park. In reality, the dead woman, laid out on a living room sofa bed, hadn't gone anywhere.

     Over the next six months, as Dennis McCauley cashed Marquis' social security checks and used her credit cards, she decomposed on the sofa bed. 

     Mr. McCauley should have used some of his dead roommate's money to pay the monthly trailer rent. On April 22, 2013, Redford Township police officers, accompanied by the landlord, showed up at the trailer with an eviction notice. When the landlord opened the front door, she and the officers were assaulted by the smell of death. The gruesome discovery terminated McCauley's six-month postmortem relationship with Ann Marquis.

     A Wayne County prosecutor charged Dennis McCauley with nine felony offenses related to his macabre relationship with a dead woman. These crimes include larceny, social security fraud, illegal possession of a credit card, failure to report a death, and mutilation of corpse. The latter charge related to the discovery that the dead woman's right arm was separated from her body. (The arm may have come off when McCauley, months after Marquis' death, moved the body.)

     Dennis McCauley was held in the Wayne County Jail under $250,000 bond. If a judge threw the book at him, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. Had he ripped-off a woman who was alive, he'd be looking at probation. Theft and fraud were crimes against property. Living six months with a dead woman was a crime against nature.

     In December 2014, Dennis McCauley pleaded no contest to mutilation of a corpse in return for probation and community service. Under the circumstances, he got off light.

Body Snatching

     The dark practice of body snatching is directly tied to the advancements in the study of anatomy and medicine. The term was coined to describe the act of secretly removing corpses from graves for sale, primarily to medical schools where they were used for dissection and anatomy lessons.

     The first known case of body snatching was committed by four medical students in Bologna in 1319. In the 17th and 18th centuries body snatching reached epic proportions around the world. There was a reduction in executions, the traditional source of cadavers. There was also, simultaneously, a proliferation of medical schools and the study of anatomy. Poor refrigeration methods meant a deficit of fresh bodies for medical study. Furthermore, the punishment was minimal--the convicted were either fined or given light prison sentences.

     Body snatching was condoned by many medical practitioners and institutions who believed it was a necessary evil, one that was offset by the benefits anatomical study of the bodies would produce.

     The increasing demand for fresh cadavers gave rise to "ressurectionists," men paid to dig up and deliver bodies. Ressurectionists would work in teams, mainly targeting new graves because it was easier to dig the unsettled earth. They would send spies to funerals--mostly women--to scout the grave and plan for the removal of the body.

     A particular target for ressurectionists were the mass graves that the poor were often buried in. These graves were left uncovered until they were full of coffins. Single graves were far more troublesome to break into--a tunnel would have to be dug, sometimes four feet down, the coffin broken into and the body carried to the surface.

Oregon Public Broadcasting, 2003

Abusing Hugo Chavez's Corpse

     Shortly after Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, died of cancer, officials of that country made a startling announcement. The dead president's embalmed corpse would be on permanent display in a glass casket in the Museum of the Revolution not far from the Presidential Palace where Chavez ruled for fourteen years.

     While Americans Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson mourned the death of the dictator, my thoughts about Chavez's death concerned what they did to his corpse. In Venezuela, abuse of corpse is a crime. In the United States it is, and putting a dead person on permanent display would violate the law.

     I like living in a country where you're not allowed to abuse dead bodies. However, I imagine that Mr. Penn and Mr. Jackson both approved of the display. It would allow them to continue visiting the dictator. Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, had his horse Trigger stuffed. That must have made Trigger's fans so happy. I found it disgusting.