THE manager of Harvard Medical School’s morgue sold off body parts to sick customers so they could bind books using human skin.
Cedric Lodge, 58, took heads, faces, brains, skin and hands from cadavers that had been donated to the Harvard Medical School for research in what has been described as a “macabre scheme spanning several years”.
Lodge has now been given an eight year prison sentence.
He took the body parts to his home in Goffstown, New Hampshire, and sold them to a number of individuals across state lines from 2018 to March 2020.
In one bizarre case, Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be turned into leather and bound into a book.
Assistant US 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.”
Prosecutors said the crimes were carried out “for the amusement of the disturbing ‘oddities’ community.”
Lodge’s wife Denise has been sentence to one year behind bars for facilitating the sale of stolen organs and body parts.
Lodge had run the morgue at the Harvard Medical School for 28 years before being arrested in 2023.
He stole the body parts once they were no longer needed for research but before they could be returned to the families for cremation.
Prosecutors said in a court filing: “He caused deep emotional harm to an untold number of family members left to wonder about the mistreatment of their loved ones’ bodies.”
Lodge’s lawyer Patrick Casey had asked the judge for leniency, adding his client acknowledge “the harm his actions have inflicted on both the deceased persons whose bodies he callously degraded and their grieving families”.
Lodge had pleaded guilty to transporting stolen goods across state lines in May and was sentenced to eight years in jail on Tuesday.
Harvard Medical School had previously called his actions “abhorrent and inconsistent with the standards and values that Harvard, our anatomical donors, and their loved ones expect and deserve”.
When charges were filed, the university paused donations of bodies for five months in 2023.
At least six others, including an employee at an Arkansas crematorium, have pleaded guilty in the investigation into the trafficking of body parts, prosecutors have said.
A court ruled in October that family members who had donated the bodies of loved ones for medical research could sue Harvard Medical School.
