KSHB's Ptacek wants to know: Was Grandma used as a crash-test dummy?

There's no saying what happened to the 465 bodies that were willed to the KU Medical Center whose whereabouts the KUMC now cannot vouch for.

But given the fact that KSHB's Russ Ptacek -- who reported the stomach-turning story on Tuesday night's "NBC Action News" -- blew the lid off the government's use of human cadavers in crash-test-dummy programs since 1981 the preceding evening on "NBC Action News," and given the fact that KUMC sold hundreds of corpses to a shady body broker who is now unable to document where many of them wound up .... well, it invites one to connect the dots, does it not?

In fact, I'm now wondering if there's someone over in China right now, some entrepreneurial minded exhibitor who has started up his own knockoff of "Bodies: Revealed" ... using Caucasian cadavers from Kansas.

It's great to see Russ -- whom I've known since I got here in 1997, when he was running his own video-footage business in Lawrence -- doing solid gumshoe work here. His body stories came out of a months-long investigation and freedom of information requests. You can view the videos at the KSHB website, which is almost as hard to use as our own ... but if you'd rather just watch TV, you can bet the station will be airing followups to this repulsive story all week long.