PHOENIX - The FBI discovered a macabre scene at a Phoenix body-donation company that included a cooler of penises, a bucket of heads and a torso sewn onto a mismatched head in a “Frankenstein manner."
The details recently emerged in an ongoing civil lawsuit against the now-defunct Phoenix-based Biological Resource Center. The company was raided by the FBI in 2014 and closed when prosecutors convicted business owner Stephen Gore of conducting an illegal enterprise.
The company collected bodies of people who died under the guise the bodies would be used for disease research. But instead, the company is accused of carelessly dismembering and storing bodies and selling many body parts to for-profit to entities around the world.
Thirty-three plaintiffs are suing Gore in a case that goes to trial in October.
As part of that case, former FBI Assistant Special Agent Mark Cwynar recently submitted sworn testimony about the 2014 crime scene inside the facility.
According to Cwynar’s testimony, he observed “various unsettling scenes” while assessing the lab, including unlabeled body parts in a freezer and “body parts piled on top of each other throughout the facility with no apparent identification to indicate what bodies they came from or to whom they belonged.”
“I observed many large male torsos with limbs and genitalia removed,” Cwynar stated. “I observed a cooler filled with male genitalia inside.”
Cwynar also described a large torso with a head removed and replaced with “a smaller head sewn together in a ‘Frankenstein’ manner.”
Gore is accused of lying to family members of the deceased and assuring them the corpses would be used for nonprofit research.
One woman told investigators she had donated her son to the company without the knowledge his body would be cut up and sold. Agents recovered his head, legs and left shoulder when they raided a facility in Detroit.
The FBI said the company also sold body parts that were contaminated by disease. Medical schools and biomedical companies often purchase body parts for research.
