On Wednesday, a morgue manager at America’s prestigious Harvard Medical School allegedly took dead body parts from his workplace without permission and then sold them.
Cedric Lodge, 55, has been charged with trafficking in stolen human remains, the US attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania said in a statement.
Gerard Karam told us that “it is particularly egregious that so many of the victims here volunteered to allow their remains to be used to educate medical professionals and advance the interests of science and healing.”.
Lodge has been charged alongside his wife, 63-year-old Denise Lodge, and five other alleged co-conspirators with involvement in a “nationwide network” of buying and selling human remains.
Prosecutors say from 2018 to 2022, Cedric Lodge “stole organs and other parts of cadavers donated for medical research and education before their scheduled cremations.”
He is accused of taking the remains from the Harvard site in Boston to his home in Goffstown, New Hampshire.
This accused man and his wife sold the remains to Katrina Maclean and Joshua Taylor.
The attorney’s office shared a statement: “They allowed Maclean and Taylor to enter the morgue… and examine cadavers to choose what to purchase.”.
Prosecutors say Maclean, 44, of Salem, Massachusetts, and Taylor, 46, of West Lawn, Pennsylvania, then resold the remains with the aim of making profits.
Two other people charged allegedly bought and sold remains from each other, exchanging more than $100,000 in online payments.
The indictment alleges that Maclean shipped human skin to Taylor to have him “tan the skin to create leather,” the Boston Globe reported.
