Man pleads guilty to selling body parts from Harvard morgue

FUTURISM

A member of a network of gruesome individuals has pleaded guilty to procuring and selling body parts, some sourced from the morgue at Harvard Medical School.

In a press release, the US District Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that a 41-year-old man named Jeremy Pauley had pleaded guilty for taking part in the remains-trafficking ring that included, allegedly, body parts given to the Anatomical Gifts Program at Harvard Medical School, which was where some folks’ bodies go after they decide to donate them to science.

To be clear, Pauley wasn’t the one who procured the Harvard morgue parts — that distinction goes to one Cedric Lodge, the manager of the Anatomical Gifts Program morgue and who, the press release notes, allegedly “stole organs and other parts of cadavers donated for medical research and education before their scheduled cremations.”

Lodge not only took the parts and stored them in his house in New Hampshire, but he and his wife Denise also, the district attorney’s office claims, let other co-conspirators come into the Harvard morgue to “examine cadavers” and decide what they wanted to buy.

Though he was not the ringleader, Pauley’s physical appearance — with half his face tattooed (including one of his eyes) and metal spikes implanted on his shaved head — lends a very particular aesthetic characteristic to the entire ghoulish scheme…