The Business of Stolen Body Parts: Inside America's Black Market for Human Remains
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Somewhere in Denver, a thief cracked open the back of a parked truck expecting an easy score — cash, tools, maybe electronics. What they found instead was a cardboard box stamped “Exempt Human Specimen.” Inside were human heads. Nearly three years later, the case remains unsolved, but it cracked open a door into a business most people don’t know exists: a largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar trade in donated human remains, where a head can fetch $500 and a torso can sell for thousands. This is the story of that theft — and the trafficking ring it helped expose.
The Denver Heist
In March 2022, a thief broke into a parked medical transport truck in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood — and likely had no idea what they were stealing. The truck belonged to a freight company hauling body parts for medical research, hardly the kind of target criminals usually seek out. But someone pried it open anyway and made off with a white cardboard box, 20 by 15 by 18 inches, stamped with the logo of Science Care, a company that accepts body donations for scientific use. A second label on the box read “Exempt Human Specimen.”
Inside were human heads.
The truck had been returning the specimens to Science Care after a training event when the freight company parked it in the 7700 block of East 23rd Avenue. Along with the box, the thief also grabbed a dolly — presumably to move the weight.
An Unregulated, Multi-Billion-Dollar Trade
Attorney Michael Burg, who has handled cases involving stolen and mishandled human remains, laid out the unsettling questions the case raised: who took the heads, how did they get them, and why? “They refused to talk to you,” he said of the companies involved.
Burg pointed to a deeper problem — the donation of human remains for research is almost entirely unregulated in the United States, despite generating billions of dollars a year. He recommended that people who wish to donate their bodies to science do so through a university rather than a private company.
The motive behind the Denver theft isn’t much of a mystery once you consider the price tag. A head with an intact brain — known in the trade as a “cephalus” — sells for around $500. Add a spine, and the price climbs to $850. A torso with a head and shoulders attached can bring in about $3,500. In 2021, even a bare skull with teeth still attached carried an estimated resale value of $1,200.
According to Burg, brokers across the country buy and sell body parts piece by piece: heads, arms, legs, hips, genitalia — all with buyers waiting. “We have discovered that many of these bodies are sold to the Department of Defense and are blown up like crash-test dummies,” he said.
Whoever stole the box from that Denver truck almost certainly had a buyer lined up before they ever broke the lock.
A Break in the Case — From an Unexpected Direction
The Denver theft itself was never solved. But in April 2023, more than a year after the heads disappeared, a case out of Arkansas exposed just how organized — and how casual — this underground trade had become.
Candace Chapman Scott, 36, a former mortuary worker, was charged with selling stolen body parts for thousands of dollars. Investigators say she sold twenty boxes of human remains to a man she met through a Facebook group dedicated to “oddities.” His name was Jeremy Pauley.
Scott had worked at Arkansas Central Mortuary Services, where her duties included transporting, embalming, and cremating remains. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences routinely sent the funeral home donated cadavers for disposal — cadavers that, according to the indictment, Scott began selling instead.
Over nine months, prosecutors say, Scott sold Pauley “fetuses, brains, hearts, lungs, genitalia, large pieces of skin and other body parts.”
The transactions read like a grim inventory list. In one payment, Pauley sent Scott $1,600 through PayPal for “2 brains, one with skullcap, 3 hearts one cut, 2 fake boobies, one large belly button piece of skin, [one] arm, one huge piece of skin, and one lung.” In total, Scott received $10,975 from Pauley across sixteen separate PayPal transactions.
The Buyer: A Self-Styled “Curator” of Human Remains
Pennsylvania authorities charged Pauley with abuse of a corpse, felony receipt of stolen property, misdemeanor receipt of stolen property, and dealing in proceeds of unlawful activity. He posted bail and was released.
Pauley wasn’t hiding his interest in human remains — he’d built a public identity around it. He operates the Memento Mori museum and describes himself as “the lead preservation specialist of retired medical specimens and curator to historic remains and artifacts.”
That public persona didn’t shield him from federal prosecution. In September 2023, Pauley pleaded guilty in federal court to trafficking in human remains.
In December 2025, at age 43, he was sentenced to 72 months in prison for conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen property. The court also ordered him to pay a $2,000 fine and serve three years of supervised release once his sentence ends. Pauley reported to prison to begin serving his sentence on January 16, 2026.
An Industry Still in the Shadows
The Denver theft that started this thread of investigation remains unsolved. No one has been charged with breaking into that truck, and the identity of the buyer waiting for those stolen heads is still unknown. But the Scott-Pauley case shows how easily human remains move through informal, poorly monitored networks — from a mortuary freezer to a Facebook “oddities” group to a private museum, one PayPal transaction at a time.
As Michael Burg warned, the body-parts trade operates with little oversight and enormous sums of money changing hands. Until that changes, cases like these may be less an aberration than a preview of what’s still out there, unreported and unsolved.