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The boundary between life and death is supposed to be sacred a final curtain that provides a sense of peace and closure for the grieving but for Kim Erick the passing of her son was only the beginning of a decade long descent into a waking nightmare. In 2012 her twenty three year old son Chris Todd Erick was found deceased in his bed at his grandmothers home in Midlothian Texas. While the official police reports attributed his sudden passing to an undiagnosed heart condition that triggered two separate heart attacks Kim remained unconvinced. Her grief was immediately complicated by a series of events that felt rushed and clandestine as Chris’s father and grandmother arranged for a rapid cremation before Kim could even process the magnitude of her loss. She was handed a necklace containing what she was told were his ashes but a deep instinctual feeling told her that something was horribly wrong.
When Kim eventually acquired police scene photos from the bedroom where Chris passed away, her suspicions were ignited. To her eyes the images revealed physical traumas and troubling signs that were never mentioned in the initial medical reports. She started to believe that her son had endured 48 hours of anguish rather than passing away quietly in his sleep. Despite a 2014 homicide investigation concluding there was no evidence of foul play Kim dismissed the results as a total cover up. Haunted by the thought that the remains in her necklace were not her son at all, she spent years looking for answers. Then in a twist of fate that seems pulled from a psychological thriller she walked into a Las Vegas museum and saw a sight that made her blood turn to ice.
Displayed as part of the world renowned Real Bodies exhibition was a plastinated human specimen known as The Thinker. It was a seated figure with its skin removed designed to show the intricate muscular and skeletal structure of the human form. The moment Kim saw the figure she didn’t see an anatomical tool she saw her son. She claimed that the specimen displayed a very specific right temple skull fracture that matched Chris’s medical records. There was no denying the physical similarity in her eyes, and the realization was excruciating. She thought she was witnessing her own child’s mutilated and exhibited remains turned into a popular tourist destination.
The accusations caused a stir in the museum sector and immediately led to a contentious legal dispute. Kim launched an aggressive public campaign demanding DNA testing of the specimen to prove its identity once and for all. However the organizers of the Real Bodies exhibition and its parent company Imagine Exhibitions Inc vehemently rejected her claims. They issued a stern statement expressing sympathy for the family while insisting there was no factual basis for the accusations. According to the museum The Thinker had been legally sourced from China and had been part of their continuous display in Las Vegas since 2004 which was eight years before Chris Todd Erick had even passed away.