Texas embalmer cut off dead sex offender’s penis and stuffed it in his mouth

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?

“they were cannibals, and they were going to eat him” – Texas teen arrested for killing family

A Texas teen has been arrested on murder charges, accused of slaughtering his parents and two siblings — including a 5-year-old brother — because he believed they were all “cannibals” planning to eat him.

Cesar Olalde, 18, was arrested after a standoff with police on Tuesday May 23 in suburban Texarkana and charged with capital murder — punishable by the death penalty or life in prison without parole.

Police in the town of Nash — population about 3,800 — went to Olalde’s home after getting a report that a man had harmed his family and was threatening to kill himself.

When they arrived, they found the teen holed up, while family members were inside.

An affidavit by Nash Police Officer Craig Buster, said that the teen, barricaded inside, had called police, saying “he had pulled the trigger, and shot his family.”

After persuading Olalde to end his standoff and surrender, police went inside the home and found the bodies of his parents, Reuben Olalde and Aida Garcia, older sister, Lisbet Olalde, and 5-year-old brother, Oliver Olalde — all in a bathroom.

“It appeared as if the victims had been shot at various places in the residence and [had been dragged] to the bathroom,” according to the affidavit. Multiple spent cartridge casings were found throughout the home, and “blood spatter on multiple surfaces.”

The affidavit said Joseph Flieder, a colleague of Lisbet Olalde, had gone to the house because she’d missed work that day. He knocked on the door but got no response.

Flieder, together with a family member who had also arrived to check on the family, forced his way inside, where he was confronted by Cesar Olalde. The teen allegedly pointed a gun at the man several times and brandished a knife.

Flieder told responding police officers that Cesar Olalde said,

“he had killed his family because they were cannibals, and they were going to eat him”

Olalde was jailed on a $10 million bond.

Neighbour Robert Ward described the victims as a “beautiful family” made up of “extremely nice” and “hardworking people.” He said the daughter had recently graduated from college and planned to become a teacher, and that Cesar was “such a good kid. He was going to get into an apprentice program to be a plumber.”

There is no actual cannibalism involved in this story (unless Cesar Olalde was right about his family, as suggested by several people online).

But what is interesting is the fear of cannibalism that must have been strong enough to drive him to this desperate act, killing those closest to him. There are clearly major mental problems involved, but that’s not a sufficient explanation. Why see them as cannibals – why not aliens or pirates or something else?

The terror of cannibalism relates directly to our experience as babies, when we are altricial – totally dependent on caregivers, for far longer than any other animal of similar size. We gestate as cannibals, eating from the placenta – our mother’s body. We are born and fed from a breast (usually human or bovine), which is more eating of the body. As we grow, we experience rage when our needs are not immediately recognised and satisfied, and this rage may be homicidal in nature (Freud called the first six months of a child’s life the “cannibalistic stage”). We want to eat our mother, and are terrified that, being so much larger and more powerful, she may feel like eating us first. We fear, in other words, reabsorption into the maternal body from which we emerged.

The only difference between eating human meat and that of other animals is that we fear consumption by other humans, whereas the animals we eat – cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, fish, etc, are generally herbivorous or gentle, peaceful animals. We don’t recognise this fear at a conscious level, but under stress or psychic collapse, we find ourselves back inside our mental image of Freud’s primal “cannibalistic phase”.