(Thanks to Asmo and to Furpo for links.)

Several commenters on an article about Mr Patton at the Houston Press claim to have found him “creepy” when working with him. “This guy is the creepiest dude ever. He handled my mother’s funeral and if they find pics of her he won’t have to worry about the law.” Here is a picture of the perp himself. There is something lopsided about his face. One ear sticks out. His lips droop to the side. His nose looks like it was broken. As if to reaffirm the lack of symmetry, the police photo casts a sharp light on one side of his face and leaves the other in shadow. Perhaps all this symbolizes Mr Patton’s dual nature. Clearly he is a man with a dark side.

He posed with his penis against the feet of a female cadaver. According to another article, he also took images “of a female corpse with the legs spread open.” The local District Attorney stated that “the defendant’s male sexual organ was seen in various poses with those of dead bodies.” The wording isn’t clear. The images show his genitalia with “those of dead bodies,” ie in proximity to the genitalia of cadavers? Or just in proximity to the cadavers? Of course, you can’t help but wonder if all this posing led to the next logical step in the abuse of a corpse…

When you consider that these necro photos were found on Mr Patton’s computer during the investigation of an unrelated matter, you realize that there must literally be millions of such photos and videos lurking out there on the hard drives of random deviants and freaks. Just imagine the astonishing exhibition you could curate, presuming you and your photographers weren’t bound by obscenity laws, of every perversion known to man. The internet, with its proliferating pornography and true underground of sites catering to illegal activities, already forms a rough draft of this exhibit. What do you think the gallery would look like if it were completed with the pictures that no one but the freaks and the law ever see?

Here are the categories proposed by Dr Anil Aggrawal, a well-known professor of forensic medicine in India:

Class I — Role Players — “They do not have sex with a dead body, but get intense arousal from having sex with a living person pretending to be dead.”

Class II — Romantic Necrophiles — “These are the normal bereaved people, who cannot bear separation from their loved ones.”

Class III — Necrophilic Fantasizers — This type is “content simply with fantasizing sexual intercourse with the dead.”

Class IV — Tactile Necrophiles — These necros “need to touch a dead body in some erotic way in order to get an orgasm.”

Class V — Fetishistic Necrophiles — This type “would cut up some portion of the body — perhaps a breast — for later fetishistic activities.”

Class VI — Necromutilomaniacs — For this category of necrophile, “pleasure comes from mutilating the dead body and masturbating simultaneously.” Evidently fetishistic necrophiles fixate on the result of an act of mutilation, whereas simultaneously enjoy the process of mutilation itself.

Class VII — Opportunistic Necrophiles — These necrophiles are basically scavengers. “Normally they are quite content having intercourse with the living and would not think of engaging in sexual intercourse with the dead. However if an opportunity arose, they would.”

Class VII — Regular Necrophiles — “They would not enjoy sexual intercourse with the living, even if this choice were available to them. Instead they would seek out a dead body to have sexual intercourse with, because they get more pleasure in having sex with a dead body.”

Class IX — Homicidal Necrophiles — These necros have such a dire need for cadavers “that they resort to killing.”

Class X — Exclusive Necrophiles — “These offenders need only dead bodies for intercourse.”

Certainly experts in sexual pathology will debate the merits of these classifications and point out some of the underlying judgements inherent in them. For example, Dr Aggrawal begins his paper with the assertion that necrophilia is “one of the most weird, bizarre and revolting practices of abnormal and perverse sensuality.” Is that a diagnostic criterion or a moral judgement? By and large, however, this classification is a reasonable effort. There is a clear difference between the couple who engages in role play, the mortician who gropes a boob, and the killer who assaults the cadaver of his victim. It is only right and proper to recognize that these constitute different forms or perhaps intensities of necrophilia.

Taking a broader view of the matter, it is difficult not to remark that necrophilia has become increasingly visible in society. It used to be that necrophilia was a subject reserved for obscure medical journals and the occasional novel. Before the advent of the internet, PervScan had gathered a small collection of necrophilia cases from medical journals, scholarly works of psychiatry such as Erich Fromm’s Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, and counter-culture publications such as Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture. Material was difficult to find. Nowadays the situation is the opposite. Necrophilia is on tv. Necrophilia is on the internet. Necrophilia is the subject of one of Supervert’s own books. Necrophilia is, in short, coming out of the closet.

Dr Aggrawal’s effort to classify the varieties of necrophilia is one expression of this. There is now enough freely available case material to create a taxonomy of necrophiles. Another expression of the increasing visibility of necrophilia lies in the fact that states are only recently starting to outlaw it. Previously it was too obscure or hidden even to warrant legislation. Taken together, all these point to a process comparable to the “invention” of homosexuality in the 19th century. People have always had same-sex relationships, but it was only a century or so ago that homosexuality became a term, an existential category, a medical condition, and a legal status. Something similar is at work with necrophilia. In classifications, laws, necro-porn sites, novels, and tv shows, you can literally witness the invention of a sexual perversion. In the near future, there may well be such a sophisticated notion of necrophilia that everything before will have been just sex with corpses.

For those who haven’t yet been exposed to the marvelous, provocative work of Gunther von Hagens, here is a picture of the man with a bare-breasted cadaver. You can learn more about “Dr Death” and his plastination process at his website, bodyworlds.com. Astonishingly, PervScan was unable to come up with an image of the copulating corpses. Here is an image of two other dead bodies in a similarly intimate posture. This 2006 work is titled The Juxtaposed Couple. Isn’t it strange to speak of it as having a date and a title, like a sculpture? It’s made of dead bodies. But then, that’s what it is — a sculpture.

Even when it hasn’t involved sex, the work of Gunther von Hagens has stirred up plenty of controversy in the past. Critics consider his exhibitions lurid and exploitative. Von Hagens argues that they educate and demystify — that he does not show anything a medical student doesn’t see in an anatomy lab. Of course, one presumes that the cadavers in a gross lab don’t copulate… Anyway, all the controversy is silly. The plastinated cadavers are both lurid and educational, and that is precisely whey they are so compelling. Meanwhile, the thing that really ought to scandalize is not when dead bodies assume the postures of living ones, but when living ones go through the motions of life with all the enthusiasm of cadavers.

PervScan has already written about Mr Douglas’ necrophiliac activities, but new information about his post-mortem sex parties makes him worthy of reconsideration. For starters, he has now been linked by physical evidence to two additional “victims.” (It always seems oxymoronic to consider a cadaver a victim…) One, six months pregnant, was strangled to death by her boyfriend. Another, 24 at the time of death, was pushed from a window. You can imagine that neither cadaver exactly looked like a babe while lying on the slab. It would be tough to view the first without being aware of the fetus dead inside, and it would be tough to view the second at all. Jumpers don’t tend to make for pretty corpses. All this makes you wonder — was Mr Douglas indifferent to the bodily integrity of his cadaver lovers? Or did he find a weird joy in their injuries and mutilations?

Evidently Mr Douglas had built up an impressive resume of necrophiliac experience. He worked at the morgue for sixteen years and worked for a time in a funeral home too. Admitting the obvious, Mr Douglas has confessed to prosecutors that his diddling wasn’t restricted to a mere few cadavers. “Frankly, it’s frightening,” said the prosecutor. “His numbers when he’s (talked to authorities) go from one to three or four to ‘a lot’ to maybe over a hundred… it’s fair to speculate that he’s been doing this all the time.” Perhaps Mr Douglas can find a silver lining in his incarceration by applying to the folks over at Guinness World Records for the Most Cadavers Fucked title. Seriously, somebody has splattered semen over more corpses than anyone else in the history of the world. Surely Mr Douglas must be in the running for World’s Greatest Necrophile?

With Valentine’s Day coming along this weekend, it can be inspiring to contemplate how other people engage in romance. For example, somewhere in a hotel down south, a loving couple made a suicide pact. The woman, probably wearing pink lingerie from Victoria’s Secret and chewing heart-shaped chocolates, declared that she wanted her beau to live at least a little longer than her, so she could experience the sweet pleasure of submitting to anal intercourse in the moments after being suffocated by the man she adores. Then he would join her in eternity by swallowing pills… Or at least that’s the story that Mr. Williams is asking the jury in his trial to believe.

If you understand anything about sexual perversion, you know that an act that seems improbable to you is often highly desirable to someone else. Remember the notorious German cannibal, for example? His “victim” wanted to be — and was — eaten. That would have been hard to believe, but there was copious video evidence documenting the victim’s desire. It’s not impossible, therefore, that Mr. Williams is telling the truth. Maybe his mistress dreamt of nothing more than post-mortem sodomy. But somehow the story isn’t very convincing, is it? The German cannibal had a video of his victim talking about his desire to be eaten. This Southern necrophile has an audio tape not of his victim but of himself projecting motives onto the deceased. It sounds like a bad, desperate excuse for a murder committed by a guy who was, according to his own admission, “messed up on pills.”

Meanwhile, somewhere up in the ether, there is the sound of retching. What’s that? Why, it’s Cupid, vomiting at the thought of what some people claim to do in the name of love.

Time to get out your film camera and put on your director’s cap. Here’s the scene. The time — Christmas. The place — a mortuary in Namibia. The camera travels through a dark room showing the debris from a holiday party: the remains of a festive meal, plastic cups, empty bottles, scraps of red wrapping paper on the floor, mistletoe tacked to the top of a door frame. The camera comes to rest on a lone worker, wrapped in a white lab coat, hoisting a stiff body onto a slab. The job done, he steps away from the slab and sits down at a desk to fill out some paperwork. A bottle of scotch, abandoned by a departing reveler, sits on the desk. With a shrug that says “I’m bored, I’m alone, why not,” the man in the lab coat pours some scotch into a cup festooned with a candy cane. He takes a sip, makes a face as though to say “whew, that’s strong stuff,” and continues with his paperwork.

Cut. An AM radio plays “Jingle Bell Rock.” The man has removed his lab coat. He stumbles, still sloshing a drink in his hand, back to the body on the slab. He picks up a scalpel. He is about to make an incision. Cut to point-of-view shot. The camera moves slowly from the abdomen up to the chest — the female chest — and holds there for an uncomfortably long time. Cut back to the morgue attendant. He wipes his face with the back of his hand. He appears to be considering something. He finishes the scotch in his cup, sets it carelessly on the slab, and ignores it as it falls to the floor. He reaches out a hand, tentative at first, and cups the breast. It’s clear what he’s thinking, or it’s clear that he’s not thinking at all. Cut to a shot of the mistletoe and fade out…

You can carry it on from there. You know what happens. It’s the scenario for a film titled “The Necrophile’s Christmas.” Good luck getting it into theaters.

… upon patching up their own DNA, the bdelloids simultaneously incorporate random scraps of DNA from other organisms. This so-called horizontal gene transfer is extremely rare among animals, and in the bdelloids’ case can include DNA from almost anything that was in their soupy habitat at the time things dried up, including whatever they just ate. In only 1 percent of the bdelloid genome, Meselson found dozens of foreign genes from bacteria, plants, and fungi inserted among the native nucleotides.

You read that correctly. The organisms can absorb DNA from their own food products. That would be like going to a fast-food restaurant and picking up some DNA from a hamburger. Or would it be more like going to a fast-food restaurant and picking up some DNA from the toilet? The article isn’t quite clear on this point, but if the creature is vacuuming up DNA from anything in its soupy environment, this would seem to include waste products.

Even more astonishingly, the rotifers also pick up DNA from the corpses of fellow rotifers.

It’s likely, he says, that during recovery from dessication, bdelloids pick up genes from members of their own species, too — dead members, that is, whose genes spill out of ruptured cell membranes. That process would provide the kind of genetic reshuffling that other animals achieve through sexual reproduction. “It may be their form of sex,” Meselson says. “But their partner is essentially dead. So you’d have to call it necrophilia. Actually, since they’re all females, lesbian necrophilia.”

What makes this especially interesting is that perversion is customarily defined by its sterility. An act is considered perverse, according to this view, when leads to spilled seed rather than to baby-making. That’s why traditionally masturbation and homosexuality were considered perverse. They occurred outside the baby-making context of man and wife. In the case of these rotifers, however, it is precisely a “sterile” act — necrophilia — which has become a means of perpetuating the species. It practically makes you fantasize about some post-apocalyptic scenario such as a sci-fi novel might present. If a nuclear bomb killed all the men in the world, would women find a way to vary their DNA by rubbing up against the cadavers?

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

Here is a picture of the victim, a young lady still wearing braces when she was brutally murdered by a “door-to-door soap salesman,” which must be one of the dumbest of dumb jobs a man can have. (Knock knock. “Hi, my name’s Dave. Do you scrub your crotch in the tub? Well, I have just the soap for you…” Cue sound of a door being slammed in somebody’s face.) And here is a picture of the perp. Maybe it’s just the mugshot, but he looks cadaverous himself. At least he’s not a Goth kid. The media will spare us all the hysterical crap about Marilyn Manson music transforming local teens into necrophiliac monsters.

To the casual observer, humping murder victims may sound like the extremest form of sloppy seconds, but evidently once you get started on this kick, it’s hard to turn away from the fresh supply of young meat. Mr. Douglas was a morgue attendant for about sixteen years, and authorities suspect there may be another half dozen bodies he spattered with his DNA sample. The local prosecutor intends to investigate. “There’s people who had loved ones in this county who deserve to know,” the prosecutor told the news. You have to wonder about that assumption, though. Suppose you buried a loved one a decade ago. You’ve come to terms with the death. You’ve accepted it and carried on with your life. Do you really want to know that some necro freak wiped his man-goo on your loved one’s body? Or would you prefer to carry on in blissful ignorance? It doesn’t seem like a tough choice. What does the knowledge do for you other than upset you and give you grounds for a spurious lawsuit?

Meanwhile the mother of the young victim — who had the tragic misfortune to discover her daughter’s murdered body — was reported to be “ecstatic at the news.” She told a reporter, “I am jumping for joy. I’m going out dancing tonight.” The reaction is hard to fathom. What’s she ecstatic about? Apparently there was some question about whether her daughter was a virgin when she died. Perhaps there were insinuations that she seduced her killer or something. All the same, the fact that a morgue attendant sexed up the girl’s cadaver doesn’t prove the daughter was virginal. And even if she was the Virgin Mary incarnate, how would the news that her body was defiled make you jump for joy? Maybe you’d have to live through what the mother endured to understand, but of course no one should have to undergo that. Let’s just pass over it in confused silence.

Finally, you always have to wonder what gets whispered in the hallways at gatherings of morgue attendants. In their drunkest moments, they must gaze knowingly at each other, shake their heads, and say, “Oh man, there was some trippy shit back at the morgue, trippy shit… You know what I’m talking about, right?” Or as the talkative mother of the young victim said to reporters, “Who’s going to rape a dead body? Well. A morgue attendant…”

This story first surfaced in the news about six months ago when Mr. Merino was caught red-handed (er, dead-handed). Here is a picture of the handsome necrophile. Encyclopedia Dramatica took the time to archive some snippets from his now-gone MySpace page, thus setting up the always fun game in which you either (a) look for clues to his fetish in his “About Me” profile; or (b) laugh at the stark contrast between the dirty deed and the way he presents himself (”I’m laid back, easy going and pretty cool to hang out”). Yeah, pretty cool, corpse fucker.

There is also news footage on YouTube showing a journalist trying to extract quotes from Mr. Merino’s flustered father. It’s hard to watch without thinking that the reportage is more contemptible than the corpse abuse: the corpse never knew it was molested, whereas Mr. Merino’s father is clearly unsettled by the presence of a reporter sticking a microphone in his face and saying with heavy innuendo, “But doesn’t your son have a girlfriend?”

Unfortunately, none of this coverage gives you the one detail that you really want to know. What exactly did he do to the cadaver? The media utilize terms such as desecration and violation alongside sex — but for all the “factual” and “objective” reporting that newspapers are supposed to do, these terms give you no idea what he was doing to the dead body. Was he sticking a Sharpie in its cunt? Were his pants down? Was he jerking off on its face? Was he trying to put his penis into an orifice? Or perhaps more importantly, what did Mr. Merino say when caught by a security guard? Was he embarrassed (”Uh, it’s not what it looks like!”) Was he unrepentant (”Can you wait till I’m finished?”) Was he friendly (”Hey, this is more fun that you’d imagine. Want sloppy seconds?”)

In the mugshot of Mr. Hernandez you can see the visible effects of the “physical confrontation” that occurred after the, uh, uncouth incident. His shirt is torn. He has a cut on his forehead. He looks scuffed up. His eyes are bloodshot. It’s astonishing that none of the news reports mentioned alcohol. If the guy was drunk, you can pretty much imagine how it all happened. He crashed a party. Memorial service? It was in a private residence. It was after midnight. How was he to know? He probably just thought it was a subdued party that needed some livening up. And there’s nothing to inject life into a party like, say, groping a teenager or passing around some mobile porn on a cellphone. “Mamacita, I have 2 Girls 1 Cup on my RAZR. Life is short. Want to see?”

That explanation seems pretty likely, especially if alcohol was involved. And if it wasn’t? Well, perhaps Mr Hernandez was aroused by the morbid atmosphere. Some guys get stiff at the sight of women crying. Or maybe he recalled that old maxim about there being “only one way to cure a widow” and failed miserably at his efforts to provide a little of that kind of solace to sister and mother. Or maybe he was entirely aware of how uncouth his behavior was and simply thought it hysterical. After all, a story like this divides the world into two sorts of people. One sort will identify with the aggrieved and say, “Oh, how terrible, how thoughtless, how insensitive…” The other sort will see the black humor in it. Typically the conjunction of sex and death is considered perverse — but it can also be very funny too.