It's a Living

The severed finger transfer takes place curbside in front of a funeral home. A private investigator in a black Volvo drives up. He jumps out, then reaches into the rear seat for a bag, which he hands to Vidal Herrera.

Usually, Herrera gets a whole body -on a slab. That's because he's a "death specialist," as advertised on the side of his 1994 white Chevy van, which is also emblazoned with his business phone, 1-800-AUTOPSY. In this case, Herrera is going to fingerprint and store the detached digit for a personal injury lawsuit.

The student autopsy technician is looking for a blood clot, and according to Herrera, he quickly finds it in the groin area. Wearing surgical scrubs, latex gloves, cloth cap, and shoe covers, the student is performing this autopsy under Herrera’s instruction as part of an internship program. "The apprenticeship helps them into medical school," says Herrera of his three interns "I weed out the lazy ones and work with the focused student to reach them how to carefully and accurately perform an autopsy. What we do is important. It needs to be done and it needs to be done correctly."

"He just gave me the finger," Herrera says with a devilish grin as the P.I. drives off.

The gregarious, tattooed Herrera tools around town in his post-mortem mobile, which is outfitted with enough saws and steak knives to do three autopsies on the go. Herrera is a private autopsy technician whose expanding company caters to families, mortuaries and hospitals wanting to determine causes of death or remove organs for transplant or research.

"Death," he happily notes, "is recession-resistant."

Herrera, obviously, is no stiff. He's the Cal Worthington of cadaver carvers, showman with a flair for promotion. His mail-order gift shop, "Casket of Goodies" - run out of his nice suburban home with the lily pond and the pet bunny named Benny - offers such morbid must-haves as a brain gelatin mold and ski caps advertising his 1-800 number. All are available in black coffin gift boxes. T-shirts, a plastic vertebra pen holder and knit caps bearing his telephone number show Vidal Herrera, private autopsy specialist, as an entrepreneur in his field.

Lately, he's made a push to recycle items the dearly departed leave behind. With the family's approval, Herrera removes pacemakers and hearing aids during autopsies and give the medical appliances, as well as wheelchairs and crutches, to organizations who use them in developing countries.

"I want to show the positive side of death," says the married 47-year-old father of two.

And this summer, he's going national. In Chicago, he hopes to open the first of 72 1-800-AUTOPSY outlets planned around the country and staffed by doctors and assistants he trains. It'll be franchise operations.

How Herrera became a death entrepreneur is explained before the finger turnover, as he bops down the street singing along to 1960s tune.

A skeleton key chain swings from the blue shag dash. The holder around his vanity license plate YSPOTUA (AUTOPSY backward) says "Autopsy Techs Do It With More Rigor Mortis" His Spanish nickname, "El Muerto," which means the dead one, is detailed on his driver's side door.

Hard Stare

This day, there aren't any honkers or hecklers, although a motorist gives Herrera a long, hard stare.

Herrera has been around the unliving for half a lifetime. More than two decades ago, he began volunteering at the L.A. Coroner's Office, working his way up to autopsy technician, forensic photographer and finally coroner's investigator. He assisted in a number of high-profile cases, including the autopsies of "The Fugitive" star David Janssen, O.J. Simpson's young daughter who drowned, and the "Hillside Strangler" victims. He found the fingerprint on a window ledge that became key evidence against "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez.

Then, in 1984, a 284-pound corpse did him in. The burly Herrera was lifting the body of a woman who had purposely put a bullet in her head when he ruptured three discs in his lower back. He left the coroner's office, had surgery, was in a wheelchair and ended up recuperating for four years. He says he sent out 2,000 job applications without success.

Eventually, a pathologist who Herrera knew asked him to assist on a private autopsy. That led to other cases. He thought, why not make it a business. He was working out of his home, which was then in East Los Angeles, when he remembered watching a show about "Beverly Hills 90210" and what a difference a ZIP code makes. He got a P.O. box in Brentwood, where mail drops are known as "suites." He also recalled a Forbes article about the big bucks in 1-800 numbers.

"When you watch TV, have you ever seen 1-800-DOCTOR, 1-800-LAWYER, 1-800-DENTIST? I thought why not 1-800-AUTOPSY?"

Right away, he saw the need for his company, which is officially named Autopsy/Post Services Inc. With the growth of HMO's fewer and fewer deaths are autopsied - the rate dropped from 50 percent in 1970 to the current 2 percent, he says. Besides the costs, hospitals and doctors are often reluctant to do a post-mortem over fear the results could lead to malpractice litigation.

Because he is not a M.D., Herrera performs autopsies under the direction of 11 board certified pathologists who free-lance for him. He doesn't do house calls- if needed, he has a transportation firm pick up the body - but works out of hospitals, morgues and mortuaries. He hopes to open his own laboratory in Tujunga, where autopsies, which begin at $2,000 will be videotaped for court cases and research.

With 2.4 million deaths each year in the U.S., he figures there's a built-in clientele. He just got a case from India, where a 32-year-old American on vacation died in a house fire. Shortly before the tragedy, the man's relatives took out a $2 million life insurance policy and now the insurer wants to see if the presumed victim is really the charred skeleton.

"We have to cut out his jaws to get dental impressions," Herrera says.

Sometimes, he's a ghoulish gumshoe. After an AIDs sufferer died at home, the man's doctor concluded the disease was to blame. Suspicious family members contacted Herrera for an autopsy, which revealed 800 times the normal amount of morphine in the deceased's system. The beneficiary was charged with murder.

In order to take DNA tests, Herrera recently exhumed a baby who died 36 years ago. The mother, says Herrera, has long suspected that her infant did not perish right after birth as a hospital informed her but was swapped with another child and sold on the black market.

Another passed-on soul, this one with large estate, will also be dug up for DNA test because a woman suddenly appeared and claimed the buried man was her father.

Unknown Causes

Not all cases have such drama. When Todd Knight's 87-year-old grandmother suddenly died of unknown causes, just like her sisters, his family hired Herrera's company to find out if she had hereditary diseases that were responsible for her death and that surviving relatives could take precautions against.

"It was a peace of mind," says Knight, a Los Angeles County sheriffs deputy. "They were very helpful, respectful - they seem to know the needs of the family,"

Dr. Stephen Geller, chairman of the Department of Pathology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Herrera assisted with prep and clean-up, also gives him high marks, "He's terrific," says Geller. "He's certainly serving a need for the community."

Now and then, Herrera has to reject a request. He told a Portland, Ore. woman that he would not remove her late husband's skin so she could take it to a taxidermist and make book covers.

On a recent afternoon, Herrera whips into his driveway on a tranquil, tree-lined street in La Crescenta. Honey, he's home.

Sometimes, he takes his oldest son Zack, 15, and the teen's friends to their swim meets in the van. Television consulting the traveling billboard notes, is also available. Herrera says he did a couple episodes of "Quincy" but stopped because Hollywood wants his messy job to look pristine.

No autopsy fan

Herrera's wife, Vicki, a former movie studio graphic artist, handles the books and the phone for the home-based business. He's the CEO; she's the president - and maybe a bit squeamish. He's been bugging her for years to watch an autopsy. "I'm not planning on it." she says dryly.

Zack and his brother, Max, 11, occasionally go to work with dad. "My favorite was this guy who got shot by a couple of guys and we had to find out where he was shot." says Zack. He seems like a sweet kid - right now he is waist high in the lily pond helping his mother put in plants.

The house is pretty warm and cozy, although there is that "Dead End Motel" clock and the plaster brain bookends in the office, and the skull bank on a mortician's head rack in the master bedroom. And there's that Grateful Dead cookie jar in the kitchen, which is next to an Igloo cooler that Herrera brought into the house.

"It's for guts and stuff," Max casually explains.

For fun, Herrera sponsors a softball team and a running team, both called the Stiffs. He excitedly talks about an upcoming 10K. It's in Death Valley.

Soon, duty calls. Back a Crippen Mortuary, Herrera is in a rear room used for embalming and autopsies. He is dressed head to toe in a powder blue surgical gown. A parrot's squawking can be heard in the distance. A pungent smell is in the air.

Herrera has used a luggage carrier to carry in his equipment, which includes a dissecting board and a tool box, filled with his instruments.

He is most proud of one discovery - wine cork. It comes in handy to stop the flow of bodily fluids from a hole in the left when a brain in removed. He used to stuff the hole with paper towels, but that didn't work well, and then one romantic night he was sharing a bottle of wine with his wife in a restaurant.

"It hit me - why not use a cork," he recalls. Now, an employee at the San Antonio Winery near downtown L.A. saves him buckets of the pluggers.

Herrera reaches into a plastic bag and removes a baggie, which he opens.

"One finger," he says with aplomb, as he lays the fleshy specimen on the autopsy table. It has a sickening stringy tendon or nerve sticking our from one end, and looks so real, with fingernail and cuticle, that it seems a person should be attached to it. The extremity's owner claims he was trying to scale an iron gate to get out of a locked condo complex, when he slipped and fell, catching his ring and finger on a decorative spike. His body part couldn't be reattached, so he kept it in his freezer at home. Now, the man is suing the property owner.

Herrera flops the finger around with a tweezer to examine it, then takes photos. He puts it in a small red container, where it'll stay until it defrosts. "I'll be able to lift a fingerprint on this," he says gleefully. Tomorrow, he'll get to work on the tactile tissue and whatever other cases his toll-free hotline brings. With the new dawn, he's dead sure he'll have a few more customers.