Author: Chip Jones

In May 1968 a Black labourer named Bruce Tucker reached the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond with a head injury. He was pronounced dead the next afternoon and his heart was placed in a white businessman, Joseph Klett, who lived a week. Tucker's family were neither asked nor told; his brother learned from a funeral director that the heart and both kidneys had gone. The lawyer they hired was Douglas Wilder, later the governor of Virginia. The Organ Thieves, which Jones published in 2020, sets the case against the segregated hospital that produced it and against the race between surgical teams to be first. Jones spent years reporting for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and much of the book rests on records the family had never been shown.