Death is his Fast-Growing Business

Mobile L.A. autopsy vendor looks to franchise concept

In the back seat are enough bone saws and industrial steak knives to do three autopsies on the go. At the wheel is the pompadoured, mustachioed Vidal Herrera, bopping and singing along to a 1960s ditty as a skeleton key chain swings from his blue shag dash.

This being La-La Land, few motorists bat an eye at the head-turning ad on the side of Herrera's 1994 white Chevy van. It boldly announces his talents - including "death specialist"- and his business phone - 1-800-AUTOPSY.

Herrera is a private autopsy technician whose expanding company caters to families, mortuaries and hospitals wanting to find out causes of death or to remove organs for transplant or research. He cruises from corpse to corpse in the post-mortem mobile, which carries his tools of the trade and functions as a rolling office (the dissecting board is near the fax).

"Death," Herrera cheerily notes, "is recession-resistant."

By summer's end, he hopes to go national. In Chicago, Herrera intends to open the first of 72 1-800-AUTOPSY outlets planned around the country and staffed by doctors and assistants he'll train. It will be a franchise operation.

"It's going to be just like McDonald's," he says.

Herrera is the Cal Worthington of cadaver carvers, a showman with promotion pizazz. His mail-order gift shop, Casket of Goodies - runs out of his 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.

Lately the gregarious, tattooed entrepreneur has 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 gives 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. He's meandering through traffic in the Chevy Astro necro-van, which has a vanity plate that reads YSPOTUA - that's AUTOPSY spelled backward - and a license plate frame that gloats: "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.

Herrera has spent half his life around the lifeless. Since there is no formal schooling for autopsy assistants, Herrera - who attended vocational classes to become an orderly - got his training on the job. 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. As an investigator, he found the fingerprint on a window ledge that became key evidence against "Night Stalker" killer Richard Ramirez.

Then, in 1984, a 284-pound corpse did him in. The burly Herrera was lifting the body of a woman who had killed herself when he ruptured three discs in his lower back. He left the coroner's office, had surgery, and recuperated for four years. He says he sent out 2,000 job applications but not even a fast-food joint would hire him.

Eventually, a pathologist asked Herrera to help out on a private autopsy. That led to other cases. He thought, why not make it a business, and remembered a Forbes article about the big bucks in 1-800 numbers.

"When you watch TV, have you even 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 HMOs, 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's not a medical doctor, Herrera assists with autopsies under the direction of 11 board-certified pathologists who free-lance for him. He doesn't do house calls - if needed, a transportation firm picks up the body-but works out of hospitals, morgues and mortuaries. He soon hopes to open a 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 United States, he figures there's a built-in clientele. He just finished a case from India, where a 32-year old American died in a house fire on vacation. Shortly before the tragedy, the man's relatives took out a $2 million life insurance policy. The insurer wanted to know if the presumed victim was really the charred skeleton. It was.

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 new lover, who was also the beneficiary of the dead patient, was charged with murder.

Another passed-on soul, this one with a large estate, is being exhumed for DNA tests because a woman suddenly appeared and claimed the buried man was her father.

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

Todd Knight, a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, is another supporter. When Knight's 87-year-old grandmother died, his family hired Herrera's company to find out if genetic diseases played a role. "They were very helpful, very respectful - they seen to know the needs of the family," Knight said.

Now and then, Herrera has to reject a request. He told a Portland, Ore. woman that no, he would not remove her late husband's skin so she would take it to the taxidermist and make book covers.

Herrera recalls that grim story as he whips his weird wheels into his driveway on a tranquil, tree-lined street in La Crescenta. Sometimes, he takes oldest son Zack, 15 and the teens friends to their swim meets in the van. (Consulting for television shows, the traveling billboard notes, is also available. Herrera says he did a couple of episodes of "Qunicy" but stopped because Hollywood wants his messy job to look pristine.)

Inside the house, there's the "Dead End Motel" clock and plaster brain bookends in the office. The master bedroom has a skull bank atop a mortician's head rack. There's a Grateful Dead cookie jar in the kitchen.