By Matt Ward

Here’s one story you won’t find in federal prison inmate #51552-056’s new book.
It’s from a 2009 letter sent to a special agent with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The author’s name is blacked out, though the letter is clearly written by an elderly, infirm woman. She is one of numerous surgery patients affected by a massive recall of donor tissue that took place in August 2006. Her letter describes the anxiety and humiliation she endured as a result of having to return to a hospital to be tested for diseases to which she never imagined she’d be exposed.
“Not only was this extremely painful, because I was recovering from surgery, but incredibly embarrassing when I had to announce to a crowded waiting room that I was there to be tested for AIDS and many other types of STDs. I am a seventy-four year old woman who has been married to the same man for 58 years and I do not take the mention of STDs lightly,” the letter reads.
This communication and others like it fill a U.S. District Court case file in the Eastern District of North Carolina and are a big reason why Philip Guyett Jr. is incarcerated at the La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution outside El Paso, Texas.
Guyett achieved a bit of brief notoriety not once, but twice, in the first part of the last decade related to his work as a body broker — someone who seeks out and solicits consent from the family members of dead people for the purposes of harvesting human tissues used in medical procedures, education and research.
Guyett is an admitted bad actor who was in it for the money and little else. His spree, operating on the fringes of an industry not well regulated and less well understood, stretched from a research university in California to the Clark County Coroner’s Office and inside funeral homes across Las Vegas and even in Pahrump. And finally, it all came crashing down with a dramatic guilty plea and a harsh eight-year sentence in a North Carolina courtroom.
Almost two years into his sentence on three counts of mail fraud — he pleaded guilty to falsifying the records of donors who it turns out were never eligible to donate tissue because of disease or their lifestyles — Guyett’s name is set to resurface, though the attention is likely to be short-lived.
From his prison cell, Guyett penned a gruesome tome, a memoir outlining his exploits in the tissue industry. Titled “Heads Shoulders Knees & Bones,” the book is a mea culpa of sorts, available for the first time last week on Amazon.com. The book paints an unflattering picture of this country’s death industry. In an interview from La Tuna, Guyett said he wrote the book for two reasons.
The first reason was to expose the money aspect of the body harvesting business.
“I wanted to point out in the book the lack of regulation and audits and how easy it was at the time to be entrusted with someone else’s body and how, just not myself, but everyone in the field is in it for the money. I’m not talking about life-saving organs; that’s a whole other creature,” he said. “Whether it’s life-saving tissue, bone or skin grafts, or education tissue, everything just becomes inventory. It’s a very money-driven industry and it still is today.”
The second reason for the book, Guyett says, is to get his side of the story out.
“The second reason is to kind of tell my own story. When you’re in the newspaper a lot, you are reading the story in the confines of your own home. You are told not to talk to the press, not to say anything. This is a way to tell my own story, the way I saw it,” he said.

First blood
Guyett started in the body business in the 1990s in California. He says he volunteered at the Riverside County Coroner and Medical Examiner’s Office first before moving to Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona. There he worked for a willed body program, collecting potential cadavers for the school’s medical curriculum. It was here that Guyett made early connections with medical research officials at schools all over California, including Loma Linda University, USC and University of California, Irvine. Needing to collect 80 cadavers a year for the WUHS program, which sometimes could only get two bodies a year, Guyett learned how to advertise for donations.
“I ran the first ad in the San Bernardino County Sun saying, ‘Donate Your Body to Science’ and ‘Free cremation.’ I immediately received phone calls weekly from next of kin wanting to donate their recently dead family members.”
He would use this tactic with much success again in Southern Nevada.
Before he moved to the Las Vegas area with wife and two boys, Guyett learned the ins and out of the industry from a medical research standpoint. He also had his first run-in with law enforcement. He writes about this in a chapter of his book entitled “The wrist bone is connected to the handcuff.”
Guyett had apparently misappropriated a cadaver from Western University in 1999, selling it to a community college for $1,100. Police served a search warrant on Guyett’s home, arresting him on charges of embezzlement, unlawful disposition of a body and unlawful removal of human remains. He pleaded to one felony, which was later dropped to a misdemeanor charge after he served 18 months probation.
He soon found himself volunteering at the Clark County Coroner’s Office; the dates he provided in the book and in interviews seem to coincide with his troubles in Pomona and his probation.
“I worked at the Clark County Coroner as a reserve (forensic tech) on weekends from late 1993 to 1998 while I was still living in CA (sic). While running my own donor program in CA, I was getting more and more donors, 1998-2002, from Las Vegas, so the timing was right with the real estate market and being able to get referrals from Vegas, to make the move,” he wrote in correspondence with the Pahrump Valley Times in November.
Apart from volunteering — where Guyett gained the autopsy skills needed to harvest tissue on his own — he decided to go into business for himself, opening Donor Referral Services, the one-man operation at the heart of that giant 2006 tissue recall.

Body double trouble
Guyett says he worked all over Southern Nevada, making deals with funeral homes from Pahrump to Boulder City and everywhere in between.
“I came in contact and recovered tissue and received referrals from Palm Mortuary, Bunkers, Sunrise, Desert Memorial, Davis and Garden. In Boulder, I recovered and got referrals from Boulder Family Funeral Home. In Pahrump I recovered tissue and received referrals from the two funeral homes, Pahrump Family and Neptune. Nothing from Nevada Donor Network,” he wrote in his November correspondence with a reporter.
He said he branched into all types of areas, including brain harvesting and other types of tissue dealing. But as his business grew, he began to encounter obstacles.
Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy is the focus of some of Guyett’s problems at this time, according to the book.
Murphy, short of calling Guyett a liar, thinks the felon is mistaken in his recollections. The county official, for instance, disputes some of Guyett’s claims, both about Guyett’s employment with the county and about some of the personal things Guyett writes about Murphy’s management of the coroner’s office in Las Vegas.
“If Philip Guyett walked through the door today, I couldn’t tell you who he was,” Murphy, who took over operations at the Clark County office in 2002. “He did not volunteer at the office while I was there. That was prior to my tenure. I know the name and have known of some of the issues surrounding Mr. Guyett. But I don’t ever recall meeting him personally. If I did it was a very brief meeting. I believe we have had some telephonic conversations.”
Guyett makes several claims about Murphy, including that he played favorites with funeral homes on the county’s rotation, that he surrounded himself with ‘yes’ men and other disparaging comments.
Murphy says he thinks he knows why — because when the county coroner streamlined tissue and organ donations though his office, he refused to do business with all but one organization.
“Prior to my arrival at the office in 2002, the office pretty much had a hand’s off policy in reference to donations. They did that because it is a very slippery slope. What I mean by that is that you have to be careful about who you deal with, because there are some unscrupulous folks in the business. And there are, in some instances in my opinion, not a lot of control … We were contacted by numerous tissue companies that wanted to do business with us. Because I felt like there was a lack of control in that part of the industry, I didn’t want to do business with any of them to be honest with you.”
Murphy admits, there was a lot of grumbling from tissue banks and other industry players, some good, some bad, after his decision.
The procurement organization Clark County uses is the Nevada Donor Network — it doesn’t escape Guyett’s harsh analysis, either. The group is both an organ bank, eye bank and tissue bank. Its executive director, Ken Richardson, says he is very familiar with Guyett and Donor Referral Services.
Richardson says that tissue donation is less regulated than organ donation and is likely the reason it often attracts unscrupulous business people like Guyett.
“Tissue recovery is a little different. That is not as tightly regulated. That falls under the FDA. Not all tissue banks are non-profit. Most are,” he said.
He said since Guyett’s case, the FDA has gotten more stringent with tissue banks.
“I think the FDA, since these incidences, they’ve really stepped up their monitoring. For example, all tissue banks now get unannounced inspections. That’s true of Medicare. They do unannounced inspections. I think the industry has done a terrific job of cleaning up and closing a lot of these loopholes. Is it perfect? No. I can’t tell you that there isn’t someone out there falsifying records and what have you. Is it better? Yes, much better,” he added.

Leaving Las Vegas
Guyett was clean when FDA agents came knocking in 2003, he says. Still, he didn’t like the attention.
In October of that year, he’d sent a FedEx package containing body parts to a processor in Missouri. The package leaked and a FedEx inspector opened it, horrified with what was inside. This incident made headlines in Missouri.
Murphy was called on that occasion to see if the parts were sent from his office.
“They were shipped from Las Vegas. We were contacted. That was one of the issues, that is one of the ways that I got to know the name of Philip Guyett. We were contacted and asked who authorized those, were they parts that came from our office. Things of that nature,” the Clark County official said.
Guyett by then was coming to the attention of another Southern Nevada medical professional in the death trade — Nye County contract medical examiner Rexene Worrell. Guyett says it is Worrell who eventually paved the way for his departure from Las Vegas.
In his book, he describes an incident at a Pahrump funeral home, the defunct Neptune Society. Guyett had carved out tissue from a man whom Worrell had made a death declaration but did not perform an autopsy. When she walked into the funeral home after Guyett had harvested the tissue, she wondered who had made the giant incisions on the dead man, particularly since she had already ruled on the cause of death.
Guyett maintains that Worrell was more angry because he’d discovered the man’s real cause of death — “The poor man’s prostate was double the size of a grapefruit,” he writes in the book.
Worrell was forwarded a copy of Guyett’s book. She says its a “bunch of lies.”
“The whole book is a joke. I read a few pages and thought ‘are you kidding me?’” she said. “What he said, none of it is true. I had nothing to do with him. He had nothing to do with my work. He was lying to people. The whole book is a joke.”
Jim Lee, owner of Lee Funeral Home and Cremation Services in Pahrump, formerly Neptune, as well as Hites Funeral Home in Henderson, says he never witnessed Guyett doing anything illegal and seemed to suggest that there was a professional spat between Guyett and Worrell.
“To my knowledge he wasn’t doing anything illegal here in Nevada. As far as we were concerned, and we had the forms that he used, if a family came in and said they were interested in organ donation,” Lee said. “I really don’t know what Dr. Worrell’s motivation was at that particular time. Everything I’ve seen with Dr. Worrell is that she’s very professional. But sometimes a professional can be offended if they see something has happened to an individual or a case that they had already made a determination on.”
After a series of threatening letters that seemed to originate from the Nye County Sheriff’s Office, as well as prying phone calls, Guyett says he decided to move on. Besides, he felt better opportunities awaited him on the East Coast.

Blowing it
Guyett moved his family to Raleigh in October 2004. Using the tried and true method he perfected in Southern Nevada — using funeral homes to access tissue donors in exchange for paying the mortuaries and families for cremation costs. He developed a relationship with one funeral home in particular and developed a number of clients in the tissue processing business, companies with names like TissueNet, Lost Mountain Tissue Bank, US Tissue & Cell and Alamo Tissue Services.
In describing how lucrative the tissue business is, Guyett says, “I was getting paid $3,500-$7,000 per transplant recovery. Processors can make $50,000-$250,000 off the tissue once the grafts have been made. There are costs to the business, but it is not over 50 percent.”
The one area most processors must be careful of is retrieving samples from qualified donors — lifestyle choices and family histories play an important role. It was in North Carolina that things unraveled for Guyett — he falsified records and failed to screen a few donors, which eventually caused the 2006 recall. More than once he said that he did it on purpose because he wanted to get out of the tissue business. He’d even closed DRS six months before the recall. But his explanation is dubious since he was on the verge of starting another tissue recovery business when it all came crashing down.
Alamo Tissue Services in San Antonio had discovered that one of the samples it received from Guyett was from a donor with a history of IV drug use. The FDA audited the tissue bank and then sought information about Guyett and DRS’ other clients. Eventually the FDA audited Guyett and discovered numerous records missing, data falsified and other problems, all leading to the government building a criminal case against Guyett that culminated in his 2009 guilty plea.
An FDA report prepared in June 2007 outlining that agency’s findings in Guyett’s case says that of the 100 donor records reviewed by special agents, “approximately half of them contained omissions, deletions, or alterations of information.” The report says that agents believe Guyett was responsible for ineligible tissue being used in as many as 2,600 implantable grafts and that at least 785 of those found their way into patients, both in the U.S. and in Europe.
Guyett pleaded guilty and his attorney, according to court records, sought a minimum sentence of eight to 14 months in prison. The judge, however, gave Guyett eight years.
The former body broker appealed that sentence as too harsh. A panel of the North Carolina Supreme Court denied his appeal in March.
Guyett is wistful about his circumstances. He admits he screwed up. His wife left him and he’s far from his kids. He gets out of La Tuna in about five years.