Harvard morgue manager who sold body parts like ‘baubles’ gets 8-year prison term

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A former manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue in Boston was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling body parts “as if they were baubles.”

Authorities said Cedric Lodge was at the center of a ghoulish scheme in which he shipped brains, skin, hands and faces to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere after cadavers donated to Harvard were no longer needed for research.

His wife, Denise Lodge, was sentenced to just over a year in prison for assisting him. They appeared Tuesday in federal court in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

In one example, Cedric Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book, a “deeply horrifying reality,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin said in a court filing.

“In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s face — perhaps to be kept on a shelf, perhaps to be used for something even more disturbing,” Martin said.

She said Lodge 58, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, treated the parts of “beloved human beings as if they were baubles to be sold for profit” and collected thousands of dollars, from 2018 through March 2020.

After Harvard finishes using a donated body for research or teaching, the body typically is returned to family or cremated. Lodge acknowledged removing body parts before cremation.

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Lodge, who was a morgue manager for 28 years, expressed regret in court. Defense attorney Patrick Casey said his acts were “egregious.”

“Mr. Lodge acknowledges the seriousness of his conduct and the harm his actions have inflicted on both the deceased persons whose bodies he callously degraded and their grieving families,” Casey said in a court filing.

Harvard suspended the donation of bodies for five months in 2023 when charges were filed.

Prosecutors said at least six other people, including an employee at an Arkansas crematorium, have pleaded guilty in the investigation of body-parts trafficking.

This story has been corrected to show the court hearing was in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, not Scranton, Pennsylvania.