When Steve Hansen passed away in 2012, his wife Jill believed donating his body to science would give some meaning to an otherwise painful loss.
Steve had suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and had wanted to be an organ donor, but doctors determined that his organs were not healthy enough for transplantation. His body, however, could still help medicine through research.
Jill hoped her late husband could help doctors advance treatment for drinking dependence.
“What I envisioned was him being in some medical facility,” she later told local media.
Instead, Steve’s remains were transferred to a private Arizona body broker, sold to the Department of Defense without Jill’s consent, and blown to pieces.
The realization broke her heart.
“They told me specifically that my husband had been used as a crash test dummy,” Jill recalled.
A wife donated her late husband’s body to science, only to learn it was used as a test dummy by the military
Steve’s passing left Jill with a decision she had never expected to make.
Because organ donation was no longer possible, whole-body donation appeared to offer an alternative consistent with his desire to help others.
In December 2012, Steve’s body was sent to the Phoenix-based Biological Resource Center (BRC), which was operated by a man known as Stephen Gore and presented itself as a service connecting donated bodies with medical education and scientific research.
Jill’s authorization did not, according to later reporting, include military testing.
Sometime before 2014, BRC sold Steve’s remains to the Department of Defense. The exact technical record of which portions of his body were used, where the test occurred and the precise date has not been made publicly available.
What Jill was eventually told was far removed from the medical research she had imagined.
Steve had been used, without consent, as a human surrogate in research designed to understand what happens to soldiers inside military vehicles struck by explosive devices.
The Army had been studying underbody blasts because conventional automotive crash-test dummies did not accurately reproduce all of the injuries produced when an explosion travels upward through a military vehicle.
A real body, on the other hand…
“I was devastated,” Jill said. “I would’ve never done it if I had known. I just kept telling him I was sorry.”
An FBI investigation was already closing in on the controversial body-broker industry
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While Jill remained unaware of what had happened to Steve, federal investigators were examining a largely hidden trade in human remains.
Jill was not alone in her suffering.
The investigation that eventually reached BRC had roots going back to 2011, when authorities encountered body broker Arthur Rathburn, who operated International Biological Inc. in the Detroit area.
Federal agents repeatedly found him transporting human heads across borders, and investigators eventually traced remains moving through a network of brokers that included BRC.
However, the lack of regulation made those businesses difficult to police.
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Organ transplantation is closely controlled under federal law, but whole bodies and body parts used for education and non-transplant research historically fell into a different system.
Brokers could receive donated cadavers, dissect them and distribute individual parts to universities, device manufacturers, training programs, private companies and government researchers.
According to CBS, approximately 20,000 Americans donate their bodies to science each year, yet the commercial market handling many non-transplant remains has operated with comparatively little federal oversight.
FBI Special Agent Paul Micah Johnson described it as a “vast gray and black market of human bodies”
The language presented to the families of donors was seen as intentionally broad.
“Medical research and education, particularly education, is a vague term and it is not clearly defined even in the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act,” Johnson explained. “The misleading of families across the industry is quite common.”
BRC grew into one of the businesses operating inside that environment.
Over roughly a decade, the company handled around 5,000 donated bodies and distributed more than 20,000 body parts.
Its documents showed how easily a donated person could acquire a commercial value. In 2013, a whole body could be priced at $5,893, while individual listings included around $1,900 for a spine, $1,300 for a leg and $3,500 for a torso.
The Army discovered dozens of donors had been sent for testing without proper permission
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Steve was far from the only person whose remains entered military research without the authorization their families believed was required.
Reuters examined BRC and military records involving 34 donors whose bodies or body parts were shipped for military use despite problems with consent.
In 18 cases, the forms signed by donors or relatives did not mention military experiments or destructive testing at all.
Another 16 forms specifically addressed military or violent experiments. Twelve families had explicitly selected “No,” while four left the option unanswered.
All 16 were nevertheless shipped to the Army.
Army officials said they had not knowingly disregarded donor wishes. The military relied on BRC to certify that the necessary permission existed rather than reviewing the authorizations themselves.
When officials later compared the paperwork provided to the Army with BRC’s own records, they discovered that forms did not match in at least 34 cases.
“The Army was a victim of BRC business practices,” Army project official Randy Coates said.
The Army halted the relevant blast experiments after the problems became apparent. Military policy itself required explicit consent for such research.
Other families discovered their loved ones had also entered military experiments
The records eventually revealed stories similar to Jill’s.
For instance, Doris Stauffer passed away in 2013 after living with dementia. Much like Jill, her son Jim donated her body because he hoped her brain could contribute to Alzheimer’s research.
He specifically rejected military and other destructive experiments on the authorization paperwork.
Ten days later, the family received what they believed were Doris’ cremated remains.
Reuters later discovered that BRC had cremated only her hand while sending the rest of her body into an Army project studying injuries caused by roadside bombs.
Her brain never went to the Alzheimer’s research her family had expected.
Jim ended up learning the truth from a reporter.
“I feel foolish,” he 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.”
Most families donated the bodies hoping the passing of their loved ones could save lives
Nancy Culver donated the body of her son, Timothy Smith, after he lost his battle with depression. When a reporter told her that his right arm had been detached and used in a military experiment, her immediate response was simply, “Oh, no. Oh, no.”
Similarly, Marla Yale learned that her grandfather, Kurt Hollstein, had gone to the Department of Defense despite specifically rejecting military experiments on his donor form.
“This is almost beyond belief that his entire body went somewhere else without his permission, and especially to a place that he absolutely did not want to be,” she said. “To go to the Department of Defense is absolutely mind-boggling.”
Other cases showed how consent could be altered during the most vulnerable days of a family’s life.
After Conrad Patrick passed away, BRC contacted his widow Dona even though Conrad himself had rejected explosive military testing. During a recorded phone call, she agreed to amend the authorization.
She later told Reuters she did not understand the full implications.
The call came less than 48 hours after her loss, “at a time when you are susceptible to anything just to get it out of your mind,” she said.
“Probably now if they would have called me, I would have said ‘no.’ But then, I didn’t know what to do.”
FBI agents ended up traumatized after finding out what truly happened to the bodies at BRC
In January 2014, federal authorities raided BRC’s Phoenix facility.
Agents found dismembered human remains stored throughout the facility, including severed heads and limbs inside containers and coolers.
Evidence later presented in litigation described extensive commingling, poor identification practices and storage conditions that made it difficult to determine which remains belonged to which donor.
According to reports, the scene was so graphic that some FBI personnel required trauma therapy afterward.
The investigation also uncovered dangerous practices involving infectious remains.
Arizona records showed that BRC distributed tissue infected with hepatitis B and C. In one instance, a brain was removed from a 76-year-old donor and shipped to Harvard’s brain-tissue bank before laboratory results showed that the donor had tested positive for hepatitis C.
BRC informed the family but did not inform the Harvard researchers handling the specimen. They reportedly learned about the infection almost two years later.
The same investigation exposed another warehouse filled with human remains
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Federal investigators were simultaneously closing in on International Biological, Arthur Rathburn’s Detroit-area company.
In 2012, two picnic-style coolers containing eight human heads arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Authorities said the heads were sitting in red liquid that Arthur Rathburn claimed was Listerine being used as a preservative. Testing later identified the liquid as blood.
Investigators eventually described Rathburn’s warehouse as containing thousands of human remains stored in appalling conditions.
“He cut up bodies with a chainsaw. He cut up bodies with a bandsaw,” FBI agent Johnson later told CBS.
“He had trash cans filled with human heads,” he added. “Just the disrespectful way of treating the remains. And yet we prosecuted him for fraud.”
Arthur was arrested in 2016. He was later convicted in 2018 for offenses involving the distribution of infected human remains and received a nine-year prison sentence.
The cases illustrated one of investigators’ central frustrations. Conduct that appeared deeply disturbing was often difficult to prosecute because federal law did not broadly prohibit the buying, selling or dismemberment of non-transplant cadavers.
The problem was hardly new.
In 2004, Tulane University disclosed that bodies donated for education had passed through a broker and ultimately been used by the Army in landmine research without proper donor authorization.
Federal advisers called for stronger national protections that year, but comprehensive regulation never followed.
Families like Jill’s ended up paying the price.
Stephen Gore pleaded guilty as families took BRC to court
The BRC investigation eventually resulted in criminal consequences for Stephen Gore.
In 2015, he pleaded guilty to illegally conducting an enterprise after acknowledging that his company distributed contaminated tissue and used donated remains in ways that conflicted with donor wishes.
He received 48 months of probation and a suspended 12-month jail sentence, along with approximately $122,000 in restitution.
For many families, the criminal case did not address the full extent of what they believed had been done to their relatives.
Civil litigation followed.
Twenty-one plaintiffs went to trial in Maricopa County in 2019, accusing BRC of deceiving families about how bodies would be used, selling remains for profit, failing to treat them respectfully and providing incomplete or misleading information.
Jurors found for 10 of those plaintiffs and awarded roughly $58 million, including tens of millions in punitive damages. An Arizona appellate court later reversed a reduction of the punitive award and ordered the original judgment restored, with later reporting placing the total at approximately $58.9 million.
That verdict covered only a fraction of the families touched by BRC’s operations.
The scandal changed Arizona law, but the national loophole remains
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Arizona responded to the scandal by tightening state oversight.
Legislation adopted in 2016 created licensing and operational requirements for procurement organizations, including standards governing donor consent, identification of bodies and body parts, screening of end users, disease disclosure and recordkeeping.
The reforms did not completely prohibit commercial body brokering, and certain academic or hospital-affiliated organizations remain treated differently under state rules.
At the federal level, the regulatory gap remains much larger.
The Consensual Donation and Research Integrity Act of 2025 was introduced in both the House and Senate in April 2025. The proposed legislation seeks national requirements covering registration, tracking, recordkeeping and respectful handling of human bodies donated for research and education.
As of August 2026, both versions remain at the committee stage and have not become law.
That leaves an unsettling legacy behind cases like Steve Hansen’s.
Whole-body donation remains essential to medical training, surgical research, safety testing and scientific progress. But the scandals surrounding BRC showed what could happen when an industry built around an extraordinary act of trust operated without a consistent chain of custody or clear national standards.
Jill had agreed to donate Steve because she thought doctors might learn from the disease that took his life.
Instead, years after saying goodbye, she learned that his remains had been sold.
“I would’ve never done it if I had known,” she said behind tears.
“I just kept telling him I was sorry.”
“Most donors don’t know this ugly truth,” a reader wrote
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