Americans who produced 'Bumfights' videos wanted for shipping baby body parts from Thailand

By RYAN GORMAN

Two American filmmakers previously vilified for promoting the "Bumfights" video series are wanted by Thai police on suspicion of trying to ship baby body parts to the U.S.

Ryan (Ryen) McPherson and Daniel Tanner, both from California, fled Thailand Sunday after attempting to ship the packages to a Las Vegas production company owned by McPherson, police said during a press briefing, according to Coconuts Bangkok.

Both men, in their early 30s, fled to Cambodia when multiple boxes filled with a baby's head and right foot, sheets of human skin and a human heart were found at a DHL facility outside the capital, police announced.

"Judging from how the body parts were preserved in formaldehyde and cut, this must have been done in a suitable facility," Asst. Prof. Udomsak Hoonwijit, head of Department of Forensic Medicine at Chulalongkorn University, told the website.

"As of now, we do not know which hospitals or education institutes they came from."

The horrifying contents were packed into acrylic boxes and uncovered by X-rays, police said. The boxes were declared on customs forms as "toys."

"X-rays showed there were contents similar to human body parts. From our investigation of three parcels we found human body parts in five plastic containers," Lieutenant General Ruangsak Jaritake, assistant to the national police commissioner, said, according to the Guardian.

The foot was sliced into three sections and the heart had multiple stab wounds, police said, according to the Globe and Mail.

McPherson told investigators he was given a ride aboard one of Bangkok's ubiquitous tuk-tuks (three-wheeled motorcycle) and taken to a night market where he bought them, according to the Bangkok Post.

The filmmaker insisted he was sending them to people in the U.S. "just to spook them for fun," police said, according to the Straits Times, which also reported they cost a total of about $100.

The body parts were stolen last month from a museum, according to one official, and that McPherson's explanation is "highly unlikely," but that both he and Johnson were released late Sunday night due to a lack of evidence.

"We can confirm that they were stolen from Siriraj," Udom Kachintorn, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, told reporters, according to the Globe and Mail.

Both McPherson and Tanner visited that museum last month, Kachintorn added.

The duo then promptly left the country for Cambodia. Thai authorities have since contacted the FBI for help tracking them down.

McPherson, who also goes by Ryen, rose to infamy a decade ago on the backs of filmed fights pitting homeless men against each other for money.

He settled multiple lawsuits by agreeing not to film and/or promote the divisive videos in the future.

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