The wife of a former Harvard Medical School morgue manager has pleaded guilty after shipping stolen human body parts from the motuary at the Ivy League school to buyers nationwide.
Denise Lodge, 64, pleaded guilty in the US District Court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania to a charge of interstate transportation of stolen goods on Friday, court records revealed.
Federal prosecutors said the “egregious” sprawling scheme also involved an Arkansas mortuary employee who sold body parts on Facebook for nearly $11,000 and a Massachusetts store owner who bought a human skull to create a “killer clown”-style doll she later shared on Instagram.
They announced the charges against Lodge, her husband Cedric Lodge and five others last year and claimed that the 64-year-old had negotiated online sales of human remains between 2018 and 2020.
Two dozen hands, two feet, nine spines, portions of skulls, five dissected human face and two dissected heads were among the items sold, PennLive.com reported.
Lodge’s attorney, Hope Lefeber, told WBUR in a February interview that her client’s husband was the mastermind and she merely “went along with it” adding that no money had been lost.
“[It’s] more a moral and ethical dilemma … than a criminal case,” Lefeber said.
Bodies donated to Harvard Medical School are used for education, teaching and research purposes before being cremated and returned to the donor’s family once used — but the morgue manager instead saw a business opportunity within the black market and sold body parts without families’ knowledge.
Cedric Lodge was fired on May 6, with Harvard describing his alleged actions as “an abhorrent betrayal.”
The macabre crime revealed a thriving demand for human remains in the US.
Organ and tissue donations are “heavily regulated” by the federal government, but that oversight isn’t extended to whole bodies.
Just four states — New York, Virginia, Oklahoma and Florida — closely monitor whole-body donations and sales, experts told the Post in June.
Family members of the deceased are typically approached by hospices or funeral homes who work with unregulated body brokerages in exchange for free cremation.
Meanwhile, a body broker can sell a donated corpse for roughly $5,000, although prices sometimes exceed $10,000.
Body parts can also be resold several times by non-tissue transplant banks that often target poor or elderly clients, National Funeral Directors Association officials said.
Human heads command as much as $3,000 in a market driven primarily by medical schools, research facilities, independent collectors and cosmetic surgery firms.
A spine can sell for $1,200, while a set of hands can fetch about $1,000, depending on condition.
An entire body can sell for up to $11,000.
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