A former manager of a morgue has been jailed for eight years after he stole body parts from corpses and sold them off’as if they were baubles’.
Cedric Lodge, 58, took heads, faces, brains, skin and hands from cadavers donated to Harvard Medical School for medical research in a ‘macabre scheme spanning several years’.
After taking the body parts to his home in Goffstown, New Hampshire, he sold them to several individuals across state lines from 2018 through March 2020.
In one case, Mr Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin added 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.’
The crimes were carried out ‘for the amusement of the disturbing “oddities’” community, prosecutors said.
His wife, Denise, was also sentenced to one year in prison for her role in facilitating the sale of stolen organs and body parts.
Mr Lodge managed the morgue at the historic Harvard Medical School for 28 years before being arrested in 2023.
He would steal the body parts once they were no longer needed for research but before they were returned to families for cremation.
‘He caused deep emotional harm to an untold number of family members left to wonder about the mistreatment of their loved ones’ bodies,’ prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
They asked District Judge Matthew Brann for a 10 year prison sentence.
Patrick Casey, a lawyer for Lodge, asked the judge for leniency, while saying his client acknowledged ‘the harm his actions have inflicted on both the deceased persons whose bodies he callously degraded and their grieving families’.
Mr Lodge was sentenced to 8 years in jail on Tuesday after he pleaded guilty to transporting stolen goods across state lines in May.
Harvard Medical School has previously called his actions ‘abhorrent and inconsistent with the standards and values that Harvard, our anatomical donors, and their loved ones expect and deserve’.
The University paused donations of bodies for five months in 2023 when charged were filed.
At least six others, including an employee at an Arkansas crematorium, have pleaded guilty in the investigation of body-parts trafficking, prosecutors said.
In October, a US court ruled that family members who had donated the bodies of loved ones for medical research could sue Harvard Medical School.
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