That’s a lot of dicks, or how to get 53 criminal charges in one day as a coroner

In what must have sounded like the opening scene from Reservoir Dogs, detectives in Bloomington, Illinois did not answer the question of how many severed dicks would be necessary to be charged with serious crimes - though I would posit the number is one, unless it's your own - but they did answer the question of whether this many pickled dicks in glass jars was sufficient to be arrested and charged. They answered it with 53 criminal charges against this guy, a man heading straight to the Funeral Parlor and Coroner Hall of Shame.   

 

This guy, not surprisingly, is the one with all the dicks

Now, it seems to me that there are certain jobs that are less likely than most to lead to criminal trouble and civil lawsuits.  The funeral/coroner trade seems to be one such trade.  I have no actual statistics for that.  I just made that up, but it would seem to be so.  You don’t have too much opportunity to commit murder, at least at work.  But even in the world of funeral homes and coroners, there are some things that society draws a line at:  It is generally frowned upon to use aggressive land conservation/reclamation strategies by re-selling grave plots and stacking bodies without disclosure to the old or new owners of said plot like occurred in Chicago. 

It is also generally frowned upon to neglect your work in what I am guessing was marijuana-induced problem solving strategy for too many inputs for a certain factory in Georgia where crematorium workers were discovered with hundreds of bodies, some dating back ten years, that had yet to be cremated.  I'm guessing that had to do with the problem with only so many hours in a day and too many bodies and taking a break to smoke some weed to calm down the nerves, and then the next day there are more bodies stacked up, requiring more weed smoking until you've got a serious problem.

It is certainly frowned upon to make overly aggressive attempts to teach lessons about fiscal responsibility.by dumping the body back on the surviving relatives porch when they don't pay the funeral bill.  

Necrophilia is obviously very frowned upon.  And then there's this: It is 53-charge arrest territory when the police, while investigating a human body part trafficking ring show up at the county coroner’s home and find jars of hundreds of pickled dicks.  Fox News Bloomington, Illinois, reports on Paul Houston whose job was to examine the dead who were involved in potential criminality.    He has been charged with 53 criminal counts. He was probably charged with at least 40 based on his mugshot, and the other 13 for all the dicks. I'm assuming he didn't wear the eye-liner to work, but who knows.  Maybe Bloomington is that kind of town.

  

Because even without the eyeliner, that whole situation is jacked up.  He is likely going to the coroner hall of shame.  This is seriously jacked up. It is so jacked up that no fiction writer could put it in a crime novel and get away with it.  Probably the best novel about a bent undertaker was William Gay’s novel Twilight.  Gay’s novel is awesome.  Read it.  But even William Gay, that master of Southern Gothic prose, wouldn’t have made up something like all those dicks. 

The previously-mentioned shenanigans got funeral homes sued, they probably had to hand out a lot of discounts to keep up business, and in the land conservation scheme, $10 million was paid out in settlements and fines, and some workers went to jail for fraud.  But no amount of discounts would have saved Paul Houston and his jars of dicks, not to mention the body-part trafficking ring.  That’s just messed up.  It begs the question of how the bodies were being disposed of after the coroner made his reports. Presumably some local funeral home or crematorium employees were part of the body-part trafficking ring.  Surely they noticed the lack of genitalia.  Surely they thought that this guy was a new kind of freak when they went to harvest the other organs to traffic them and saw junk missing hundreds of times.  It's probably pretty hard to turn in a guy for keeping cadaver junk when you are trafficking the non-junk related parts.  

The Bloomington police seemed justifiably appalled.  Fifty-three criminal counts seems like a lot. It seems like enough to keep this guy away for a long while.