Elizabeth Sparagno literally shook with anger.
First was the horror of her mother's murder almost four years ago: 84-year-old Marie Lindgren was beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled, left with a finger torn off, and nearly decapitated in her Kensington home by two teenage neighbors she used to treat to homemade cookies.
Yesterday was the final indignity, as Sparagno listened to a Philadelphia prosecutor talk about how her mother might have been one of 244 Philadelphians dissected and sold as parts for surgical implants by Louis Garzone, the mortician she trusted in one of the darkest times of her life.
"It's just not right," Sparagno said, fighting tears as she stood in a hallway of the Criminal Justice Center. "Those boys already cut her head off, her pinky finger, and then later I find out that Garzone took her to the funeral home for those cutters who came down from New York."
Sparagno, who said she paid for her mother to be cremated, was among about 50 people who packed the courtroom as Louis Garzone, 66, and his brother Gerald, 48, pleaded guilty to selling cadavers at $1,000 each to a corrupt North Jersey tissue bank.
Federal health authorities believe as many as 13,000 people worldwide might have received tissue or body parts in the scam. Some of that tissue contained cancer cells or was infected with HIV or hepatitis.
Common Pleas Court Judge Glenn B. Bronson allowed the Garzones to remain free on bail pending sentencing on Oct. 22, warning both that they could wind up in prison for the rest of their lives.
The Garzones said little in court, responding quietly as Bronson explained the rights they waived by pleading guilty. Several times, Gerald Garzone turned his head to steal a glance at the angry faces watching him.
Afterward, the brothers were hurriedly escorted through a gantlet of people who cursed at and sometimes threatened them.
Some in court sobbed - a few so hard they had to leave, others comforted by court staff who handed out tissues - as Assistant District Attorney Evangelia Manos narrated a real-world horror story of the goings-on in the alley behind the Garzones' Kensington funeral home on Somerset Street.
Some corpses lay for hours, unrefrigerated, outside the rear door of Garzone's embalming room, waiting for a "cutting team" to arrive from Michael Mastromarino and his Biomedical Tissue Services Inc., of Fort Lee, N.J.
By the time Mastromarino's men finished harvesting skin, tendon and bone, Manos said, there was often little left but a flayed head and torso in a body bag full of blood.
In addition to the lurid details of the case against the Garzones, many spectators, like Sparagno, seemed tortured by the unknown. All had used the Garzone Funeral Home between February 2004 and October 2005, but only a few knew for sure whether their dead relatives were among those sold for parts.
Assistant District Attorney Peter Berson was mobbed in the hall outside court as he handed out victim-impact forms to be used in the Garzones' sentencing.
Berson said his office was able to identify only 49 of 244 corpses that went through the Garzone funeral home.
Berson apologized to those left with uncertainty, explaining that the Garzones did not identify cadavers sold to Mastromarino's cutters.
"We were unable to determine the identities of anyone other than those 49 bodies, and that was at the end of a 17-month grand-jury investigation," Berson said.
The Garzones - Louis lives in Kensington and Gerald in North Wales - pleaded guilty to charges of running a corrupt organization, criminal conspiracy, theft by unlawful taking, theft by deception, abuse of a corpse, and related crimes.
The Garzones also admitted defrauding the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare by getting reimbursed for funerals for deceased indigents who in fact were cremated.
The state would have reimbursed the Garzones only $250 for cremating an indigent person, Berson said, rather than the $750 it paid for funerals.
Manos said Gerald Garzone fraudulently obtained $51,750 in welfare reimbursements and his brother $25,250. Louis Garzone also admitted defrauding an insurance company of $18,300 in disability benefits between 2006 and this year. Manos said Garzone claimed to be disabled by extreme mental depression when he was actually running his funeral home.
The Garzones' guilty pleas came on the morning prosecutors and defense attorneys were to begin jury selection for their trial.
But the notion of a trial effectively ended after two guilty pleas last month. On Friday, Mastromarino, 44, pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the Garzones.
Earlier last month mortician James J. McCafferty Jr., 38, the Garzones' partner in a Philadelphia crematorium, also pleaded guilty and agreed to testify.
Mastromarino, the mastermind of the body-parts scheme, is already serving an 18- to 54-year prison term in New York on his guilty plea to similar charges. Officials say he earned almost $4 million selling parts from 1,077 bodies at funeral homes in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Mastromarino's "chief cutter," Lee Cruceta, 35, a former nurse from Monroe, N.Y., also pleaded guilty.
Contact staff writer Joseph A. Slobodzian at 215-854-2985 or jslobodzian@phillynews.com.