HARVARD: The morgue manager at Harvard Medical School and three others have been accused of buying and selling stolen human remains.
Cedric Lodge is accused of selling “heads, brains, skin, and bones” from cadavers supplied to Harvard University’s medical school over the internet. According to the indictment, he and his wife, Denise, allegedly sold body parts to buyers in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The scheme allegedly ran from 2018 until 2021, Reuters said.
Prosecutors claim Lodge used his position as the manager of Harvard Medical School’s “Anatomical Gifts Programme” to dismember cadavers given for medical research. Harvard students research and practice medical procedures on donated bodies.
According to the indictment, once the body has served its purpose, it is incinerated and the remains are returned to the families or buried in the university’s medical cemetery. Instead, Lodge and his wife have been accused of harvesting, selling, and transporting body parts from donated cadavers.
According to the US Attorney’s Office, Cedric Lodge sometimes allowed [others] to enter the morgue at Harvard Medical School and see cadavers in order to decide what to buy. Body parts were allegedly purchased by Katrina Maclean of Salem, Massachusetts, and Joshua Taylor of West Lawn, Pennsylvania. According to the charging statement, in October 2020, Maclean paid $600 (£473) for disfigured faces that she intended to have tanned into leather.
Maclean is the owner of Kat’s Creepy Creations. She specialized in up-cycling dolls into gothic, blood-soaked, horror novelties, according to her business’s social media pages. It’s unknown whether she used corpse parts in her products. According to the accusation, she kept and sold human remains at the store. Taylor allegedly paid Lodge more than $37,000 (£29,226) in electronic payments for stolen body parts over a four-year period. The indictment includes a bleak reference to a PayPal memo for a $1,000 (£790) purchase that allegedly read, “head number 7.”
