Hey, there! Log in / Register

Harvard mortuary manager and owner of creepy Peabody store charged with stealing and selling heads, faces and other parts from bodies in the morgue

Kat and her creepy creations

Kat and some of her creepy creations.

The mortuary manager at Harvard Medical School and his wife, along with the owner of Kat's Creepy Creations in Peabody and a Pennsylvania man were indicted yesterday on charges they ran a ring that stole and sold parts from bodies donated to the school for use by doctors in training - with at least some skin getting tanned into leather.

Mortuary manager Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise, who live in Goffstown, NH, brought body parts back home with them between 2018 and March 7 of this year, and sold them to Katrina MacLean of Salem and Joshua Taylor of West Lawn, PA, the feds say. Maclean, the feds say, in turn sold the parts to buyers in "multiple states."

The four were charged in Pennsylvania Middle District federal court with conspiracy and aiding and abetting interstate transport of stolen goods. Additional people were charged in separate "informations" filed in federal court today that also included charges that parts were stolen from bodies at a medical school in Arkansas as well as at Harvard.

Stolen human remains sold and shipped in interstate commerce by the co-conspirators included bones, skulls, skin, dissected faces and heads, internal organs (often referred to by various co-conspirators as "wets" or "wet specimens"), including brains, lungs, and others, and whole stillborn corpses.

Among some of the other specific organs offered for sale: At least one penis and attached testicles, although the feds say those came from Arkansas, not the Longwood Medical Area - as did the body of a stillborn baby boy named Lux, diverted to one of the alleged conspirators by a worker at an Arkansas crematory at a price of $300.

Although the indictment goes into some detail on just what the Lodges allegedly stole the parts out of the Harvard mortuary - rather than sending them for cremation at a mortuary in Roslindale as required by Harvard - and some of the ways Taylor then preserved them, it does not specify what most of the buyers did with them.

However, Maclean's business specializes in just the sorts of things you might expect would bring a premium price for actual human parts, such as particularly creepy, blood-stained figurines and dolls. In fact, the indictment charges, she stored and sold actual human parts at her store, for people with a Rocky Horror taste in art.

The indictment alleges that Lodge - acting, of course, without authority of the medical school - sometimes held open houses so that his wife, MacLean and Taylor could pick out just the parts they wanted. In at least one of these sessions, at 1 p.m. on Oct. 28, 2020 - a Wednesday - Maclean showed up at Harvard Medical School with $600 for two dissected faces. The indictment continues:

In or about June and July 2021, KATRINA MACLEAN, in Massachusetts, shipped human skin to Jeremy Pauley [one of the people charged separately today] in Pennsylvania, and engaged his services to tan the skin to create leather. On or about July 31, 2021, Pauley sent a photograph of the leather and Maclean agreed to provide Pauley with human skin in lieu of monetary payment. ...

On May 19, 2019, Taylor sent DENISE LODGE $1,000 with a memo that read, "head number 7." On November 20, 2020, Taylor sent DENISE LODGE $200 with a memo that read "braiiiiiins."

Harvard Medical School deans are, of course, appalled, in a message to the medical-school community titled: "An abhorrent betrayal:"

We have been working with information supplied by federal authorities and examining our own records, particularly the logs showing when donor remains were sent to be cremated and when Lodge was on campus, to try to determine which anatomical donors may have been impacted. Federal authorities continue to investigate, and additional information may emerge.

We are appalled to learn that something so disturbing could happen on our campus — a community dedicated to healing and serving others. The reported incidents are a betrayal of HMS and, most importantly, each of the individuals who altruistically chose to will their bodies to HMS through the Anatomical Gift Program to advance medical education and research.

We are so very sorry for the pain this news will cause for our anatomical donors’ families and loved ones, and HMS pledges to engage with them during this deeply distressing time.

They add:

An important and meaningful part of how all first-year medical and dental students learn human anatomy is through the dissection and examination of donor cadavers. As HMS students ourselves in the 1980s and early 1990s, we both learned anatomy in the same dissection laboratory used today. The enormous respect and gratitude we felt toward the donors and the deep reverence we held for the process of dissection remain present with us today. Learning anatomy transforms students from pre-meds to physician-healers; it is an experience that changes your heart and soul, forever. Those values are passed down every fall to our new students who, each year, at the conclusion of their studies, hold a poignant, private memorial service to honor the donors.

Innocent, etc.

Neighborhoods: 
Topics: 


Ad:


Like the job UHub is doing? Consider a contribution. Thanks!

Comments

oh dear this makes it sound far worse than other articles I read elsewhere (because it really is)

omg the creepy doll store may have used actual human parts. omg

This is horrifying on so many different levels.

up
Voting closed 0

I want to get off.

OK, not really, but man, what a depressing story.

up
Voting closed 1

Blame Harvard University for lax security, you think yesterday’s $25 million dollar law suit win against Starbucks will rival this, think again .
Harvard University’s billions of dollars of endowments and still they couldn’t get this situation stopped. The goth girl from Salem Mass needs to have her head checked by a neurologist.

up
Voting closed 0

When is the movie coming out?

up
Voting closed 0

As one who is planning on donating my brain to Harvard for neurological research, and the rest of my body to UMass, this whole entire situation, disturbs me greatly. It seems even in death there is no peace…..

Sick, disgusting people…..

up
Voting closed 1

Take heart that this seems to be a rare enough occurrence that the feds have come down extremely hard and the med school is freaking out. Would not be surprised if there are a bunch of changes coming down the line for how this manager position is hired for and what kind of checks happen.

up
Voting closed 0

It really shouldn't be too challenging to regularly verify disposition of the body parts. I have to wonder whether the school simply didn't bother to have any documented controls, or whether they were just lax in monitoring them. Either way, it's not simply that they made a bad hiring choice. They should have had some systems in place to prevent malicious re-use of the cadavers.

up
Voting closed 1

Donate your head or your other organs. I doubt many legacies donate their brains to science.

up
Voting closed 0

Cedric Lodge is a perfect mortuary villain name

up
Voting closed 1

OMG -- that PA indictment is horrifying.

up
Voting closed 0

"It rubs the lotion on its skin"

up
Voting closed 0

AI is channeling Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe

up
Voting closed 0

Feels more like our homegrown boy Lovecraft, honestly. A bunch of low life grifters taking base financial advantage and committing horrors? Except in a Lovecraft story the guilty parties would find themselves selling to the wrong buyer and end up as part of the traded goods as well.

up
Voting closed 0

Could cost them an arm and a leg!

up
Voting closed 0

I smell a lawsuit. So much for donating one's body for the medical field. Families who thought they were honoring their loved ones' wishes when they all followed their loved ones' instructions in their will in these cases should be ready to form their army.

up
Voting closed 0

I have some experience with body donation. The donor arranges in advance for their body to be picked up and transported to a medical school. That's what my parents did so their bodies went to Tufts Medical School. I have made the same arrangement. Written wills do not affect these bequeaths, nor are the families required to take any actions..

This news about Harvard is gruesome and appalling, and I can not imagine what the donors' families must be going through.

up
Voting closed 0

Oversight matters. In the early 90's, the department of anatomy at Harvard Medical School was eliminated. If the faculty in this department, who historically taught gross anatomy to first year medical students, did not find an academic home in a newer Harvard department --and many of them did not -their jobs became insecure and their status and influence declined massively. Administrative deans and deanlets shrugged their shoulders and busied themselves with curriculum rebranding, and competing with the powerful heads of the basic science departments for the Big Dean's attention. The anatomical resources program became unmoored and ignored. Unlikely that in recent years any mid-level dean was asked to attend to the opportunities and risks to be found within the middle or lower tiers of the org chart. This news is greatly distressing and unfortunately not at all surprising.

up
Voting closed 1

is Kat?

up
Voting closed 1

I can't seem to find out how they got caught. Low life's.

up
Voting closed 0

Revelations from an employee of the Anatomical Gift Association:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-mistreatment-donated-bod...

up
Voting closed 0

I wonder if that partially explains the lack of oversight.

up
Voting closed 0

More likely, it was people's implicit trust in their own judgment--we hired this person, therefore we think they're going to do a good job--combined with this being the sort of crime that wouldn't occur to most of us.

Many people can imagine themselves (for example) stealing something valuable, so they lock their doors and buy insurance. This isn't even something that we might consider and reject for ethical reasons, it's something most of us don't need to decide not to do, like "do not eat the president's limousine."

There was a somewhat similar case of stolen body parts in 2005, which made national news partly because one of the people whose bones were stolen was Alistair Cooke. (That wasn't quite as weird, because the gang was stealing bones to use in transplants, which is wrong but at least comprehensible.)

up
Voting closed 0

Harvard Peabody, reanimator.

up
Voting closed 0

I have to go make breakfast now? yikes

up
Voting closed 1

I'm confused by the prices. How is a dead person's brain worth $200 and a dead person's face $300? Meanwhile, the federal government is still handing out $9,000 to dispose of dead bodies that pass a COVID test.

up
Voting closed 0

John Henry Williams doesn't look so awful for freezing himself and Dad.

It saddens me that my two favorite famous people, Ted Williams and Casey Kasem, both faced controversy in the treatment of their remains.

up
Voting closed 0

And some people have to work with these creeps. This Chicago donor mortuary should have sold because rhey couldn't manage their inventory and someone got fed up and squealed.

up
Voting closed 0

I am here in MA6/15/23 - 8:23PM
Believe it or not this has been happening for a long time in history.

If you read about the Holocaust you will not appreciate what the scientists were doing with deceased people.

Doctors that needed body parts or fully intact bodies would usually pay the Grave Digger or the Undertaker
so they could do their "experiments' in secret, not wanting anyone to steal their ideas and progress in the medical field.

You can probably find some articles if you look for the information.

It would really knock your socks off to see what has been done in the name of medical science. Most of it cannot be printed in this type of newspaper

I hope I'm wrong but I believe some people buy the body parts for art, conversation pieces.
There are some strange cults of people that are passionate about the ungodly acts that take place

up
Voting closed 0