Vidal Herrera runs the Grim Reaper a close second when it comes to harvesting the dead. After losing his job at the Los Angeles coroner’s office through back injury he started a private autopsy service that has since made him a good living. ED LEIBOWEITZ meets a man with more brains than more.

Photographs by Anthony Hernandez 

Always, during those dark years ushered in by his back injury, long after he’d left the LA County coroner’s office and the disability money had started to run out and his wife was allocating him not more than $5 pittance per week, the song alone could soothe him. When the twin spectres of financial ruin and semi-paralysis so eroded his manhood that he would toy with suicide, threatening to become just another stiff, Vidal Herrera would cue up Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, Fleetwood Mac’s message of inevitable change fortified him as strongly as any holy scripture.

Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, Herrera marvels, ‘Every time I was dejected I’d put that on. The song had a very, very deep, special meaning for me.’ So when Fleetwood Mac reunited at President Bill Clinton’s Inaugural to shout out the redemptive lyrics anew, tears welled in his eyes. Not for Clinton, of course - Herrera had supported maverick Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot - but for his own resurrection.

For four-and-a-half years, he had endured torpor, pain and stacks of rejection letters form municipalities unwilling to burden their morgues with a ruined back. Then, in 1988, he decided to improvise. If no coroner’s office would take him on, he would create his own private-sector counterpart. Autopsy/Post Services, Herrera’s mobile organ recovery and freelance necroscopy firm, now retains eight retired or moonlighting coroners. With 1-800-AUTOPSY, a toll-free number as resonant as any psychic’s or ambulance chaser’s Herrera has secured a six-figure income and a level of independence and prestige he never knew as an LA County employee.

Tall, beefy, with a vigorous short pompadour and moustache, Herrera radiates such health that it is hard to imagine him confined to a wheelchair or hobbling along with the wooden walking stick kept stashed among his mortician’s tools. Or that the disabled badge displayed upon his dashboard does not belong to some more infirm member of his family.

Personal injury and malpractice lawyers have always provided a market for a second opinion after a medical examiner’ inquest, but Herrera established his business at a particularly auspicious time. In LA County, autopsies are performed at the discretion of the coroner and typically, for murders and industrial accidents. Otherwise, the coroner’s charges the bereaved a fee that has shot up form $1,320.33 to $2,440.34, a response to California budget slashing. Herrera’s price range - $1,800 to $2,224 - undercuts the competition. And he has found other markets. He manages the morgues at two area teaching hospitals. He collects DNA samples for paternity suits. He picks up underwear from wives intent on finding out whether their husband has slept with the ‘other woman.’

Tissue procurement has proved yet another lucrative pursuit. All sales of organs and skeletal matter are illegal in the United States. However, Herrera may charge a service and handling fee to reap these earthly remains. They will go to the research institutions and tissue banks that have already laid claim to them through the prior consent of the deceased or their next of kin. So he routinely harvests bones and eyes for transplant, and procures brains for researchers at the National Neurological Brain Bank of Brentwood. A pair of eyes will command $100. To stave off would-be competitors, the standard price Herrera charges for a brain remains a company secret.

Herrera’s white Chevy van is a study of cheerful self-promotions; his toll-free number is emblazoned upon the sides, along with a list of services ranging from tissue analysis to production and consulting for television and film. The vehicle seems to laugh in the face of his morbid profession. Its vanity plate, ‘YSPOTUA’, is a subliminal advertisement in your rear-view mirror. The frame surrounding that plate proclaims that ‘autopsy techs do it more rigor mortis.’

Then there are acknowledgments to all the friends and family who had helped Herrera through his ordeals - from the mechanically inclined Abel Figueroa (‘who did repairs on my cars whenever I need them;) to Vicki Klebanoff-Herrera, his wife and company controller. ‘And of course,’ he concludes ‘I could never do this business without the Grateful Dead.’

THE 1-800-AUTOPSY van lurches through the thickening traffic in the general direction of Disneyland. At the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Anaheim, a brain is awaiting Herrera’s scalpel. The victim had defied a chronic heart condition for a jog this brisk morning and his heart had failed him. Since he had no history of psychological disorders. Herrera’s client, the National Neurological Brain Bank, will probably use the organ as a control specimen for research into Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. By the evening, the grey matter will have been sliced, frozen and prepared for transport.

Despite the gathering rush-hour gloom, Herrera can still detect a recent disaster in the landscape. Barely turning his head from traffic, he indicates two fresh tyre tracks, beginning as black smudges in the asphalt, becoming brown ruts through the grass by the roadside before lurching over the sidewalk and halting, inexplicably, before a young, untouched tree. ‘We used to see things like that all the time at the coroner’s office,’ Herrera recalls. ‘A body would be under the car, cut in two.’

Like any coroner’s assistant in Los Angeles, he responded to some bizarre tragedies, such as the Cessna pilot who crashed into a funeral home, toppling three coffins. ‘I took him out of the cockpit.’ Herrera remembers, ‘and his head was crushed. Massive injuries.’ He also participated in the inevitable celebrity inquests - Dorothy Stratten, the murdered Playboy ‘Playmate of the Year’; David Janssen, the actor who starred in The Fugitive on television; and the drowned daughter of O.J. Simpson. (He now works on civil cases for Johnnie Cochran, one of the attornies defending Simpson for the alleged murder of his ex-wife.)

Herrera recovered hundreds of more mundane bodies-murder victims, suicides, drug abusers and traffic fatalities. Each Christmas or Valentines Day drive the depressed toward their suicides, the drunk and reckless towards their fatal collisions. Each heatwave spurred on the homicidal, swelling the contents of LA County morgue.

The central calamity of Herrera’s own life was a routine suicide call that would claim three of his vertebrae, but short his career at the coroner’s office and plunge him into a morass of depression, disability and humiliation.

It was August 28, 1984, a month after the LA summer Olympics had reached their bombastic conclusion. The coroner’s office, like all other city and county departments, was expected to guard against every conceivable calamity that might tarnish the enforce mood of civic optimism. As Herrera remembers it, no coroner’s assistant or technician was permitted a sick day or vacation time while the games droned on. So by late August, virtually the whole staff was on holiday. Herrera, found himself one of two assistants assigned to all of Los Angeles County.

In sweltering heat of August 27, he had dug up the corpse of a murder victim buried eight years before. The 28th was his day off, but the short-handed dispatcher phone him at home for overtime. Herrera explained has exhausted, but he dispatcher was asking a personal favour and promised an easy case. Just a run-of-the-mill suicide in Temple City.

Only when Herrera arrived at the scene did he discover that the suicide had barricaded herself in. A refrigerator, a washer-and-dryer combination and boxes of books blocked her front door, so Herrera had to force his broad body through a window. In a bedroom littered with vodka and tequila bottles and prescription remedies, he found the victim, a gun-shot wound to through her mouth.

Before he could remove the cadaver, Herrera had to dislodge the crush of appliances. The suicide was only 5ft 2in, but she weighed more than 20 stone. Lifting the leaden body, he felt his back rupture.

At the coroner’s office, the watch commander demanded he finish his paperwork before he could go home. To stretch his tortured spine, Herrera limped into the morgue, shackled himself by the ankles and raised himself aloft on the winch that lifts cadavers on to refrigerated shelves. Two decomposed bodies kept him company, one dead nearly a week. Flies flitted about the room, but Herrera could concentrate only on relieving the pain and mentally filling in the blank spaces in his report.

AT KAISER/ANAHEIM Hospital, Nurse Unger greets Herrera in the emergency room. He asks her for a hospital business card - for networking purposes, he confides. A security guard guides him towards an elevator, just past the Tropical Cafe, to the reinforced door of the hospital’s tiny morgue. The muffled whirring of a surgical saw suggest that Herrera may have been beaten to body. The door opens a crack, just enough to reveal the head of a technician who manages to express his impatience through a blue hairnet, surgical mask and an eyeshield. Come back in an hour, the technician snaps. This procedure requires sterile conditions. ‘They’re removing the skin’ guesses Herrera. ‘Or the bones.’

Herrera can’t wait around that long; he has a private autopsy scheduled at a funeral home back in Los Angeles. He makes sure the security guard will still be on duty to open the morgue when he returns around midnight.

OVER AT THE Mortuary Funeral Home, the contact, Velveteen Jackson, is intent on getting her clean-up fee. Her demands are being broadcast upon Herrera’s cellular car phone. The entrepreneur gently informs he that he always performs a thorough clean-up himself, but that he might still manage to award her a referral fee. Satisfied, Velveteen hangs up.

Taking to the freeways, Herrera tunes in to the traffic reports, which are soon interrupted by a commercial for the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm. ‘In this life,’ the announcer intones, ‘nothing is sure but death and taxes,’ ‘Look at that,’ he laughs, pointing a thick index finger at the radio. A few minutes later, he lends a soft harmony to Neil Diamond’s gravely delivery of Cracklin’ Rosie.

The Mortuary Funeral Home boasts a colonial architecture that may provide old-world assurance elsewhere, but clashes with the dominant Spanish stucco of Los Angeles. In the parking lot, Herrera spots the Porsche of Dr. Arthur Koehler, one of the freelance coroners he has contracted to preside over private autopsies.

Herrera makes his way to the embalming room past red curtains dull with dust and age and speakers seeping pre-recorded piano music. Dr. Koehler, eyes fixed in a Soviet squint, corpulent frame swathed in several shades of tan, has already folded away flaps of skin from the corpse of an elderly African-American. He revs up his surgical saw. Wait, Herrera yells, reaching for the long-handled shears, a silent and more splatter-free tool for cutting through the rib cage. Whether from clear preference or his inability to hear above the appliance’s whine, Dr. Koehler continues.

The family suspects that the death was caused by a negligent surgeon, and holes in the lungs might prove it. So the autopsy itself will be limited only to the removal of the deceased’s heart and respiratory tract; the digestive organs and brain will be left alone.

Beyond the initial revulsion, the agony of imagining the corpse alive and the indignity of the procedure, it is the autopsy’s contradictions that assault the first-time spectator. The peace of this old man’s face as his esophagus is lifted above his head and held up to the light. The years are etched into the skin of his cheeks and neck, the wrinkled mouth caves in where the dentures have been removed, but the yellow fat and red muscle upon the dismantled ribs seem shiny, almost youthful. The shelves of the embalming room display turn-of-the century corpse beautification products that have somehow survived the African-American - Perma Cosmetics No. 20 Brunette Finishing Powder, for instance, or the Zenith Tibet Almond Stick,

Dr.Koehler and Herrera labour together over the corpse, loosening the organs. The lungs are mottled black from a lifetime of inhaling cigarettes and LA smog, but no holes can be found, and therefore no probably basis for a malpractice suit. ‘His lungs are enlarged because he had emphysema,’ Dr. Koehler explains. ‘He had too much air in his lungs.’ The heart too has swelled up. Upon removal, it deflates with a whispered hiss.

By the autopsy’s end, both heart and lungs have been piled upon the porcelain slab, between the cadaver’s ankles. And on top of this heap rests the deceased severed tongue, precluding in the imagination even the ghost of a cry of protest.

Lony Smith, the embalmer, whips up a tankful of fluid. He will soon place the organs back into the chest cavity, stitch up the body and make it presentable for the funeral. He talks briefly with Herrera, and ponders the lucrative possibilities of this new branch of the business. ‘People ask me all the time, "How to you do that?," Smith says. ‘I tell them, "It’s a living."’ It’s a living, he repeats, singing the line.

Not 15 minutes later, the 1-800-AUTOPSY van has come to rest beside a taco stand. At a dimly lit counter, Herrera feasts upon his dinner - beef tongue and lamb’s head tacos. Between bites, he draws healthy dips of rice water.

DURING his childhood, Herrera always found himself slightly ahead of the bulldozer. He was born in Bunker Hill, one of LA’s oldest Latino enclaves, soon to be displaced by the Second Street Tunnel, The family fled to another neighbourhood, only to jettisoned again, to make way for the stadium of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. His father and mother split up, his mother contracted tuberculosis and Herrera was placed in a foster home, near the Evergreen Cemetary, ‘At Evergreen, we used to jump over the fence,’ he remembers, ‘and play hide and seek.’

He saw three dead bodies as a child, but whatever might have been his reaction then, a professional dispassion dominates his recollections. ‘An old Chinese man was leaning against a kerb,’ he says. ‘I remember the saliva coming out of his mouth.’ A dead wino he spotted a Echo Park Lake looked slightly different from all the live ones dozing on the benches.

Even a fatal car crash he witnessed while selling newspapers does not open any floodgates. ‘An acquaintance of mine died,’ he recalls. ‘I was scared and I cried. The guy was drunk and he ran a red light. I remember seeing police and ambulance, I could see there was a lot of blood around his head.’

Occasionally, when the unpredictable business keeps him in the city past three in the morning, Herrera will retire to his office at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital morgue, place a mattress pad upon a slap reserved for him alone, and rest his injured back.

After he was released from the coroner’s office, he would have nightmares about the corpses he had dissected, usually the remains of children and babies. A psychiatrist told him he was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, as had American soldiers in Vietnam. Today he still dreams - ‘all the time,’ he says - and often about work. ‘Most are about the personalities I meet.’ he says, the characters’ There are many autopsy room settings, but the body is never clear in the dream.

Herrera’s two boys - Zackary, 11, and Max, eight accompanied him on a few assignments. They enjoy dressing up in the surgical scrubs.

Zachary and Max help their father set up his instruments; Herrera allows them to hand some to him during the removal procedure. They help label the plastic wrappers to indicate different organ samples. On one procurement outing, Zackary even held out the ice cooler while his father dropped the brain inside.

The child seemed more fascinated than repelled by what he saw. Herrera had already explained death to this sons in the same reassuring terms he described the dead wino in Echo Park from his own childhood. ‘I tell them that when people die, they’re sleeping,’ he says, ‘except they never wake up.’

THE TRAFFIC has thinned out during the latenight return to Anaheim. After gaining admission to the morgue, Herrera wheels the gurney off its refrigerated shelf and unzips the bag. Two huge gashes run up the young man’s legs, from the base of the foot to the socket of the hip. The wounds have been sewn back together with wide stitches of says, ‘the femurs, everything.’

And indeed, the legs that supported the young man through his jog this lethal morning, although still rounded with strong muscle, lack the volume only bone could lend. The femurs will be used for a graft; the absent eyes, for a cornea transplant. This pillaging of the human form as thorough as any wreck in an automobile scrap yard will allow the living to walk and see.

Now, it is Herrera’s turn. He lifts the handsome head of the deceased young man and places the neck upon a wooden block. As he cuts into the scalp and traverses the crown with his small knife, blood trickles from the empty sockets. Herrera flips the front of the scalp forward; half the damp hair is pressed against the corpse’s face, as if just an ingeniously designed toupee. The other half hangs back behind the skull.

He applies his saw to the cranium, deftly separating top form bottom, frees the brain and deposits it into an ice cooler. His syringe can extract only a few drops of cerebral spinal fluid from the empty skull. When the harvesters removed the bones, Herrera speculates, they probably penetrated the vertigal column, spilling the liquid back down the body. As a precaution, though, he pulls out a wine cork and plugs up the summit of the column to prevent any spillage. ‘That’s Herrera’s original,’ he notes. The San Antonio winery open more than 40 bottles each day for its wine tasting program. They keep him supplied.

With a crooked needle, Herrera sews up the scalp. Like the bone harvesters, he fashions the widest stitches possible. The few holes he makes, the better the mortuary’s final restoration. ‘When they finish with him, they’re going to remove the tube from his mouth, the eyes are going to be closed and the hair is going to be combed, so you can’t even tell that the corpse has been touched," Herrera explains ‘That’s everyone’s perception, that we disfigure bodies, but we don’t.’

ON A QUIETER afternoon, Herrera holds court on the verandah of the California Pizza Kitchen. He explains his certification as a minority-owned, disabled-run enterprise. He also anticipates an upcoming meeting with his lawyer to discuss a national franchise of Autopsy/Post Services, a sure money-maker despite any further downturn in the economy. ‘This is a recession-proof business,’ he confides with some optimism.

By the end of the year, Herrera plans to open 1-800-AUTOPSY branches in as many as 15 cities throughout the United States, as well as outposts in Switzerland, Asia, Mexico and Argentina. The entrepreneur has already moved towards as international trade; bodies have been flown in from as far away as Italy, France, Morocco, Holland and Portugal to submit to his procedures.

Yet, dispite a princely income, the respect among colleagues and family, an ascent from poverty and illness as dramatic as any Horatio Alger hero’s, Herrera imagines a profession more mundane. ‘My dream, believe it or not,’ declares over an eviscerated calzone, ‘is to own a diner.’ It seems strange escape from a life spent cutting into human skin, organ and bone. Would the dream menu be limited to only vegetarian entrees? ‘Oh no, there’s going to be a lot of meat,’ Herrera insists. ‘A lot of meat.’