Stephen Douglas Gore is an American fraudster who was convicted of fraud after forging documents of consent from the next of kin to sell cadavers to US Army research centers testing the impacts of explosions on the human body. His business, the now out-of-business Biological Resource Center formerly located in Phoenix Arizona, was found to "Frankenstein" corpses together, intentionally manipulate and coerce grief-striken next of kin, withhold information about sold bodies containing infectious diseases to universities, among other things.
The actions of Stephen Gore were the subject of a seven part investigative research story by Reuters titled "Cashing in on the donated dead: The Body Trade".
FBI agents raided a BRC warehouse in January 2014, as part of a nationwide criminal investigation, containing a refrigerator filled with penises, buckets of limbs, pools of blood, and a human head sewn onto another body “in a ‘Frankenstein’ manner.” BRC first caught the attention of the federal authorities in 2011. That year, a Detroit body broker from a company called International Biological Inc was stopped by U.S. customs agents as he crossed the border from Ontario. He had 10 human heads with him. According to an FBI affidavit, agents traced one of the heads to BRC.
His mugshot was taken by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.
Stephen Gore pleaded guilty to illegal control of an enterprise. He was sentenced to one year of differed jail time and four years probation.
BRC was forced to pay $58 million after a civil jury awarded some of the families of the deceased.
References
American fraudsters
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people