After 73-year-old Doris Stauffer died, her body was reportedly collected by a company that sold it to the U.S. Army to simulate the effect of explosions on the human body, against her son’s instructions.
Her son, Jim Stauffer, told ABC15 that he was duped for more than five years by Biological Resource Center, the same company whose research facility containing buckets of heads and sewn together body parts was raided by the FBI in 2014.
When his mother died of Alzheimer’s disease, Stauffer reached out to donation facilities that could potentially study her brain, but that is not what reportedly occurred.
“I feel foolish,” Stauffer said. “Because I’m not a trusting person, but in this situation you have no idea this is going on — you trust. I think that trust is what they fed on.”
Biological Resource Center picked up his mother within 45 minutes of her death. Stauffer said he signed paperwork specifying what the company could and could not do with her remains and days later received a box containing what he believed to contain his mother’s ashes. Years went by before he learned the truth of her body’s fate.
Reuters contacted him and showed him documents detailing where her body actually ended up, which was allegedly a sale to the U.S. Army for “blast testing.”
“She 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,” Stauffer said.
“There was actually wording on this paperwork about performing this stuff,” he said. “Performing these medical tests that may involve explosions, and we said no. We checked the ‘no’ box on all that.”
Stauffer is one of 35 plaintiffs named in a lawsuit against Biological Resource Center and its owner, Stephen Gore. Gore pleaded guilty to running an illegal enterprise in 2015, but never served any time in prison, instead receiving probation. The FBI raided his Arizona facility in 2014 and discovered a house of horrors.
Inside the research facility, bodies were found to have been seemingly desecrated with a chainsaw. Some body parts were displayed as a “morbid joke,” with a cooler filled with male genitalia and a bucket of human heads, legs, and arms.
The FBI discovered blood and bodily fluids coating the ground of a freezer, and in one instance a body “with the head removed and replaced with a similar head sewn together in a Frankenstein manner.”
The lawsuit against Gore and Biological Resource Center claims that the dismemberment and illegal sale of bodies and body parts dated back to 2007.
“He didn’t care about the families, he didn’t care about the people and he didn’t care about the memories,” Stauffer said. “If I can be a little small part of his personal financial destruction, I don’t care.”
