The case of the man with the missing heart is closed, but the heart was never located.

The family of Brandon Clay Dotson filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year after Dotson died in an Alabama prison and his body was returned after an autopsy missing his heart.

No one said where the heart went after Dotson’s body was returned to his family, or where it is now. But on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Alabama Madeline Hughes Haikala dismissed the case after the family and the state “filed a joint stipulation of dismissal.”

Her order provided no details as to why the case was being dismissed before the mystery was solved.

Dotson was found dead at Ventress Correctional Facility on November 16. The 43-year old’s family members sued the Alabama prison system, the Department of Forensic Sciences and UAB Medical Center.

The family — including his mother, daughter and brother — claimed in the lawsuit that they spent days trying to obtain his body. Once they received his body on Nov. 21, the family “suspected foul play, in part because of the Alabama Department of Corrections’ extensive and ongoing violations of basic human and constitutional rights,” said the lawsuit.

They hired a private pathologist to do a second autopsy. That doctor, Dr. Boris Datnow, discovered during his exam that Dotson’s body was missing his heart.

During a hearing in federal court in January, several prison officials testified, along with the director of the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences.

No answers came during the three-hour hearing.

Lawyers for the prison system said that Dotson’s heart was inside his body when it left the facility. All people who die in custody have an autopsy, said multiple prison officials. Some of those autopsies are done at UAB, while the rest are conducted at the state level by the Department of Forensic Sciences.

Dotson’s autopsy was performed by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, testimony revealed.

And attorneys for UAB argued that no one from the school performed the initial autopsy, nor had Dotson’s body or organs ever been in their custody. They were dismissed from the case previously.

The director of the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, Angelo Della Manna, said he hadn’t reviewed Dotson’s particular case file and couldn’t answer any questions about Dotson specifically.

He said that in a standard autopsy, a person will have their internal organs examined and then “sectioned,” or have pieces of tissue cut off, to be sent for further testing to determine cause and manner of death. The organs will then be put in a special biohazard bag and placed inside the body.

Those tissue sections are generally the only pieces of organs that would not be returned to the body, Della Manna said. He couldn’t name a reason why a fully intact organ wouldn’t be replaced in the body.

The judge wrote in her Wednesday order that the case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning the case can be refiled if new evidence is uncovered.

Last week, the same lawyer representing the Dotson family filed multiple lawsuits in state court against the prison system and UAB, representing more families who say their loved ones bodies were returned missing organs after dying in state custody and having an autopsy done at UAB.