"I'll take Notable Necrophiles for $500"

I mean what do you do when you're caught plowing a 92-year-old corpse!??!?

Police in Teaneck, New Jersey have arrested this man for having sex with a corpse.

Anthony Merino, a 24-year-old lab technician, was arrested Sunday after a security guard saw him having sex with a dead 92-year-old woman in the Holy Name Hospital morgue.

The suspect works part time at Holy Name Hospital, holds a full time job at Overlook Hospital and another part time position at Bio Reference Labs in New Jersey.

Merino is charged with desecrating human remains in the second degree. His bail has been set at $400,000. Merino is also expected to undergo a psychological evaluation and is restricted from working in a health care facility.

I'd go ahead and put him on suicide watch if I were you, too.

This is fucking awful. Like not even funny awful. Just sad and deranged and fucked.

Only in Teaneck. Now that was funny.

Naturally no research has been conducted regarding the prevalence of necrophilic attraction among humans. Klaf and Brown (1958) commented that, although rarely described, necrophilic fantasies may occur more often than is generally supposed.

Rosman and Resnick (1989) theorised that either of the following situations could be antecedents to necrophilia:

The necrophile develops poor self-esteem, perhaps due in part to a significant loss;
(a) He (usually male) is very fearful of rejection by women and he desires a sexual partner who is incapable of rejecting him; and/or
(b) He is fearful of the dead, and transforms his fear of the dead—by means of reaction formation—into a desire for the dead.

He develops an exciting fantasy of sex with a corpse, sometimes after exposure to a corpse.

The authors also reported that, of their sample of 'necrophiliacs,' 68% were motivated by a desire for an unresisting and unrejecting partner; 21% by a want for reunion with a lost partner; 15% by sexual attraction to dead people; 15% by a desire for comfort or to overcome feelings of isolation; and 12% by a desire to remedy low self-esteem by expressing power over a corpse.

This study has very many flaws, however, and is not to be taken as fact. At the end of their own report, Rosman and Resnick wrote that their study should only be used like a spring-board for further, more in depth, research. Yes, I'll get right on that, fellas. Gonna open up the Institute for the Advanced Study of Necrophilia. I'm sure we'll get heaps of gov funding.

Minor modern researches conducted in England have shown that some necrophiles tend to choose a dead mate after failing to create romantic attachments with the living. OK, so then fall in love with a coffee mug or something.

The practice of necrophilia has a long history. Necrophilia was practiced in some ancient cultures as a spiritual means of communicating with the dead, while others employed it as an attempt to revive the recently departed.

The evidence of necrophilia practices can be found in the artifacts of the Moche civilisation of South America, where pottery depicting skeletal figures engaged in coitus with living humans are among the ruins.

Even in ancient Egypt, there is record of the treatment of the bodies of young women that were set out to rot for a few days before being delivered to embalmers. This practice was born from the need to discourage the men performing the funerary customs from having sexual interest in their charges.

For psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, necrophilia is a character orientation which is not necessarily sexual. It is expressed in an attraction to that which is dead or totally controlled. At the extreme, it results in destructiveness and a hatred of life.

Unlike Freud's death instinct, it is not biologically determined but results from upbringing. Fromm believed that the lack of love in the western society and the attraction to mechanistic control leads to necrophilia. Expressions of necrophilia are modern weapon systems, idolotry of technology, and the treatment of people as things in bureaucracy.

As of May 2006, there is no federal legislation specifically barring sex with a corpse. Smoke 'em if u got 'em, boys.

Necrophilia in popular culture