Military Blew Up Woman’s Body After Buying It From Cadaver Broker

PHOENIX, AZ — It never occurred to Jim Stauffer when he donated his mother’s body to Phoenix’s now-shuttered Biological Resource Center in 2013 that she would be blown up by the military in blast test experiments.

Doris Stauffer had struggled with Alzheimer’s disease, and when she died in 2013, her son hoped donating her brain to medical research could help unlock some of the mysteries of the incurable disease that currently affects about 5.8 million Americans.

But as investigators have since determined, little at Biological Resource Center was as it had been presented by owner Stephen Gore, who court records show sold more than 20,000 body parts from about 5,000 human bodies over a decade. Gore was criminally charged for selling donated body parts for profit and is now being sued by Stauffer and 32 other families over his treatment of their loved ones’ corpses.

Court records in that lawsuit detail a litany of horrors at Biological Resource Center — among them, coolers full of penises, a head of a female sewn on the body of a male in a “Frankenstein” manner, and a bucket full of arms, legs and heads.

Stauffer got an alarming call from reporters from Reuters in 2016 as part of a reporting exposé on the body parts trade. Their investigation revealed Biological Resource Center sawed off one of the Arizona grandmother’s hands, cremated it and sent the ashes to Stauffer, and then sold the rest of her body to the Pentagon for thousands of dollars for use in a taxpayer-funded U.S. Army research project.

Stauffer told news station KNXV that his mother’s body “was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a detonation took place underneath her to basically kind of get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED,” or improvised explosive device.

Related: Cooler Of Male Genitalia Among Phoenix Body-Part Broker Horrors

Doris Stauffer’s body wasn’t the only one blown up by the military. The Reuters report, citing internal records from the Biological Research Center and military records, said 20 bodies were secretly sold to the Pentagon for about $6,000 each.

The civil lawsuit, set for trial in Maricopa County Superior Court on Oct. 21, states the bodies “were literally used as crash test dummies, which meant they were used in experiments involving exposures to destructive forces, e.g. impacts, crashes, ballistic injuries and blasts.”

Stauffer never agreed to that. In fact, he told KNXV, Biological Resource Center’s paperwork included a clause saying some medical tests could involve explosions.

“We checked the ‘no’ box on all that,” he said.

The Army officials who were involved in the blast-test experiments told Reuters they didn’t receive the consent forms from families, but took Gore’s word for it they had agreed to allow the corpses be used for such testing.

The FBI raided the Biological Resource Center in 2014 as part of its investigation of black-market body part businesses that included raids in Detroit and Chicago. The center closed after the raid, and a year later, Gore pleaded guilty to a state charge of conducting an illegal enterprise. He was given a 12-month suspended sentence and 48 months of probation. He was also ordered to pay $122,000 in restitution.

Michael Burg, a Colorado attorney who is representing the 33 families in their civil lawsuit against Gore, told the Phoenix New Times the distraught families blame themselves.

“The FBI told people ... your person's body parts have been sold across the country," Burg told the newspaper. "They can't stop thinking how their loved ones head is now in Florida. They were cut up like a piece of meat. It's despicable."

Stauffer told KNXV he feels foolish for trusting Gore, but that he believes “that trust is what they fed on.”

It’s been about three years since he learned what happened to his mother’s body, including that her brain was never used for Alzheimer’s research. It still haunts him.

“I don't see a pathway of ever getting past this,” he told KNXV. “Every time there’s a memory, every time there’s a photograph you look at, there’s this ugly thing that happened just right there staring right at you."