The ultimate story of our sins coming back to bite us?

Amber Paige Laudermilk, a 34-year-old licensed embalmer from Texas, has been accused of castrating the corpse of a sex offender.

Laudermilk is behind bars at the Harris County Jail after turning herself in on Tuesday. She’s been charged with Abuse of a Corpse – a felony – and remains in jail on a $5,000 bond.

According to a press release from Harris County Constable Alan Rosen, Laudermilk worked for Memorial Mortuary & Crematory and is accused of, in January 2025, “mutilating the body of a dead sex offender.”

The 58-year-old registered sex offender, Charles Roy Rodriguez, had received 10 years of Deferred Adjudication after being charged with Sexual Assault in 2001. Rodriguez died from natural causes in January.

Laudermilk’s alleged action, according to charging documents, was brought to the attention of the funeral director by two employees who said they witnessed the crime. One witness said they saw her stab Rodriguez’s body twice in the groin with a scalpel, before cutting off his penis, after learning Rodriguez was a sex offender.

She then “stuffed it in his mouth,” and allegedly told a trainee in the cremation room, who saw it happen, that they “didn’t see anything.” The witness reported that Laudermilk’s demeanour was threatening. When other employees went to see the body, Laudermilk allegedly covered his groin area with a sheet and said he had “a lot going on with him.”

Precinct One Constable Alan Rosen said in a statement:

“This case is about two troubled people: the victim who was a registered sex offender and the defendant, who is accused of viciously attacking his dead body. No matter what one thinks of his life, the law requires that he be treated with dignity in death.”

Laudermilk’s license was suspended by the Texas Funeral Service Commission, and the Memorial Mortuary & Crematory confirmed that Laudermilk is no longer employed by them.

In their statement, they said:

“We are deeply troubled and saddened by the unlawful and horrifying actions of this individual ex-employee. Our thoughts are with the family and loved ones of the deceased.”

Now, why is this story on a cannibalism blog, I hear you ask? Well, cannibalism is not just about swallowing another person’s flesh or organs. It is also an act of dominance, and often revenge or intimidation. Gerald Linderman in his book on Americans at war in WW2 writes that the Japanese would disembowel captured Americans and leave the bodies “with their severed genitals stuffed in their mouths.” Tim Blackmore, in his book detailing modern military technology and its dehumanising effects, comments,

“Where there was a tongue, now there is a useless penis, a double castration and silencing. Putting flesh in the mouth also suggests that the enemy can be eaten. Cannibalism makes the soldier strong at the attacker’s expense.”

So this was, in a way, the embalmer expressing her opinion, her freedom of speech, using a scalpel instead of a keyboard (which would have been protected by her First Amendment rights I guess). Plenty of written opinions deny the dignity or humanity of the person being described. Does a dead sex offender deserve “dignity in death”, even though he may have had little or none in life?

The fact is that the dead human is just meat. Starving survivors of catastrophes, ship wrecks or plane crashes quickly realise this and soon eat the dead and sometimes even the living – think the Donner Party. Remember the words of a famished Chris Hemsworth saying to his dying crewmen “No right minded sailor discards what might yet save him.” Or the debate in the crashed plane as a group of young men slowly starve to death surrounded by snap-frozen corpses:

“if the soul leaves the body when we die, then the body is just a carcass… What’s there in the snow is just meat, Antonio. Food.”

There are thousands of people dying of starvation every day around the globe, and what dignity do we offer them, even in their last moments of life? As for dignifying the dead, we casually torment, kill and then mutilate the corpses of billions of other animals every year for our food, our medical experiments, our clothing or our entertainment. Yet we are expected to weep for this sex offender’s insentient corpse?