(NewsReady.com) – People sell a lot of weird stuff on Facebook. You can find almost anything if you are willing to travel. However, not all of the offerings are legal. What one woman was selling landed her in jail.
On April 5, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Arkansas indicted Candace Chapman Scott on multiple charges related to a body parts selling scheme. According to the unsealed indictment, the 36-year-old was a mortuary services worker who was employed by a company offering commercial cremation services. One of its clients was the University of Arkansas. The school used donated cadavers for education and research purposes, and when it was done, the company Scott worked for would cremate the remains.
One day, Scott posted a message in a private Facebook group called “Named Oddities” and said that she picked up corpses for her job. She talked about how she got them and asked the owner of the page, identified as 40-year-old Jeremy Lee Pauley, if he knew anyone who was “in the market for a fully in tact [sic], embalmed brain.” She sent him pictures of a heart and two brains. He responded that he would pay her $1,200 through PayPal for the organs and told Scott how to mail them through the US Post Office.
She was hired to cremate medical cadavers. But first, she harvested organs, skin and genitalia and sold them to a man she met through a Facebook group called Oddities, according to court documents. https://t.co/PiaGRAwQWK
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The interaction began a business relationship that lasted months. Scott went on to sell Pauley livers, an arm, lungs, hands, kidneys, an ear, penises, breasts, skin, fetuses, a whole human head, and skulls. In total, the man sent her 16 different payments totaling $10,975.
The grand jury charged Scott with 12 counts, including interstate transportation of stolen property, conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
According to NPR, Pauley is being charged in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, with four counts of intending to participate in unlawful activity, receiving stolen property, and abusing a corpse.
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