A Las Vegas museum has issued a response after a mother made shocking accusations that her deceased son’s body was being displayed in one of their exhibits.Kim Erick has long insisted that the remains of her son, Chris Todd Erick, were plastinated and used in an exhibition called Real Bodies.
Chris died in 2012 at the age of 23. He was found dead in bed at his grandmother’s home in Midlothian, Texas—about 30 miles south of Dallas—where he had been living.
According to CBS News, police informed Kim that her son had died in his sleep after suffering two heart attacks caused by what they believed to be an undiagnosed heart condition.
During the earliest days of her grief, Chris’s father and grandmother arranged for a quick cremation. They later gave Kim a necklace they said contained some of his ashes.
But Kim’s doubts never entirely faded—especially after she received police scene photographs that, she claimed, revealed troubling physical details that she said had never been addressed in the initial report.
Something very bad happened in that room!” she wrote on Facebook.
“They had Chris in there for two days before he died. The medical examiner who did the autopsy said Chris suffered two separate heart attacks. In my opinion, Christopher was tortured for the two days he was held in his grandmother’s house in Midlothian, Texas. That is where Christopher died.”
A 2014 homicide investigation ultimately concluded there was no evidence of foul play, but Kim rejected that finding.
“It’s not over. There are too many unanswered questions. It’s a cover-up,” she insisted.
In 2018, after years of conducting her own investigation, Kim visited Real Bodies, a traveling anatomy exhibition known for its plastinated human cadavers.
There she encountered a skinned, seated figure referred to as “The Thinker”—a moment that she says instantly convinced her she was looking at her son.
“I knew it was him,” she told The Sun.
“It was unbelievably painful. My words cannot describe how this shook me and my family to its core. I was looking at pictures of my son’s skinned, butchered body. It is gut-wrenching.”
She noted what appeared to be the same right-temple skull fracture recorded in Chris’s medical files. She also claimed the shoulder area—where Chris had a tattoo—had been carefully removed, which she believed might have been intended to hide identifying features. The resemblance, she said, was far too precise to be coincidence.
I knew it was him. It was so unbelievably painful to look at… I was actually looking at pictures of my son’s skinned, butchered body. It is gut-wrenching,” she added, according to the Express.
Following this discovery, Kim launched a public effort demanding DNA testing on the displayed specimen. The Real Bodies organizers rejected the request, saying the body had been lawfully obtained from China and had been on exhibit for more than two decades—well before Chris passed away.
Imagine Exhibitions, Inc., which owns the show, was eventually compelled to issue a statement to Lead Stories firmly denying Kim’s claims.
“We extend our sympathy to the family, but there is no factual basis for these allegations. The referenced specimen has been on continuous display in Las Vegas since 2004 and cannot be associated with the individual named in these claims,” they stated.
“All specimens are ethically sourced and biologically unidentifiable.
We remain committed to ensuring all exhibits meet the highest ethical and legal standards.”
Lead Stories also published archived images of the figure from years before 2012, supporting the museum’s timeline. They further pointed out that plastination can take up to a year—making it impossible for Chris’s body to have been processed into the exhibit so soon after his death.
Not long after Kim’s claims became public, “The Thinker” was quietly removed from the Las Vegas display. Kim said she later tracked it to Union City, Tennessee—after which she lost all ability to follow its whereabouts.
“Chris was never abandoned in life, and I don’t want him abandoned in death either,” she said.
In July 2023, authorities discovered more than 300 piles of unidentified cremated human remains in the Nevada desert. Kim is now urging forensic experts to test those remains for plastination chemicals that could potentially connect them to her son.
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