Body of Evidence

In the industrial town of Lodz in central Poland, they are known as skins. Theyre some of the hottest items on the black market. Prices are high, with buyers paying hundreds of dollars just to get one. Competition for skins is so fierce that some may have even resorted to murder to secure their supply.

The skins in question are, in fact, human corpses, and the determined buyers are Polish undertakers, who are alleged to have paid up to $450 to the countrys paramedics for timely tip-offs of imminent deaths. Alerted to a fatality, representatives from the funeral...