DETROIT — For years, they worked side by side. He cut up the bodies. She dealt with the customers.
Together, the FBI says, the Rathburns of Grosse Pointe Park made big bucks renting out body parts to medical and dental researchers.
And they dismembered their relationship along the way.
In U.S. District Court Monday, Elizabeth Rathburn cut a deal in which she pleaded guilty to helping her now-estranged husband run a shady cadaver business and agreed to testify against him in a case that could send him to prison for 20 years. With Arthur Rathburn in court, Elizabeth Rathburn pleaded guilty to wire fraud, admitting that she took human remains infected with HIV and hepatitis B to an anesthesiology conference in Washington, D.C., in 2012, claiming that the body parts were disease free when she knew otherwise.
Under the terms of her plea deal, Elizabeth Rathburn faces four to 10 months in prison and has to pay $55,225 in restitution to the American Anesthesiology Association, which had rented the diseased body parts from the Rathburns' company, Detroit-based International Biological Inc.
The head of the company was Arthur Rathburn, who prosecutors allege purchased body parts from Arizona and Illinois suppliers, stored them in an old rundown warehouse in Detroit, then rented them out to medical and dental researchers with the help of his wife, who dealt with the customers. It was a lucrative business. A human body is worth from $10,000 to $100,000 if sold in parts, court records show. Brains can fetch $600; elbows and hands $850.
Elizabeth Rathburn is already proving to be forthcoming with information about her husband, if her actions in court Monday are any indication. She notified authorities that he recently sent her a birthday package with a note attached to it, when he's under a court order not to have contact with her. According to her lawyer, the birthday gesture caused her "distress."
Arthur Rathburn was taken aback. "Oh, Jesus," he mumbled under his breath in the courtroom, adding he had no idea he couldn't send his wife a birthday message.
His lawyer stressed to him: "No contact means no contact."
Meanwhile, Arthur Rathburn's case is headed toward trial, which will be full of grisly exhibits and allegations that he committed many crimes, like cutting up bodies with chainsaws, shipping blood-filled coolers of fresh heads on commercial airliners — falsely claiming the blood was Listerine — and storing more than 1,000 body parts on ice at his warehouse. The FBI raided his Detroit warehouse in 2013, seizing more than a thousand body parts — heads, hands, legs, torsos — that were then stored in a deep freezer at the Wayne County Morgue.
Arthur Rathburn is free on bond, living in a Detroit halfway house pending the outcome of his case.
Though Rathburn's name first surfaced a decade ago in a book called Body Brokers, he did not fall under the FBI's radar until years later, when federal agents started tracking what appeared to be bizarre shipments arriving for Rathburn at Metro Airport, including a bucket full of human heads that arrived from Israel one year.
Among the examples outlined in the indictment was a 2011 transaction in which the Rathburns allegedly rented a head and neck to researchers for $13,108 to be used in a course titled "Advances in Periodontology" at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge, Mass. The head and neck came from an individual who tested positive for hepatitis B, though the Rathburns hid that.
Arthur Rathburn faces charges of wire fraud, aiding and abetting and making false statements. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison.
Before getting into the body parts trade as a private dealer, Rathburn was the coordinator of the University of Michigan's anatomical donation program from 1984-90, but he got fired after he was caught selling bodies. In 1989, he started his own business supplying body parts. He called it Biological International and ran it out of an industrial warehouse on Grinnell Avenue, near the old Detroit City Airport.
"While this trade is not, in and of itself, illegal ... ," an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit, "crimes have been committed."
Follow Tresa Baldas on Twitter: @TBaldas
