Harvard morgue manager who sold body parts like 'baubles' gets 8-year prison term

FILE - Denise Lodge, left, covers her look with a printout of the indictment against her arsenic she walks from the national courthouse, June 14, 2023, successful Concord, N.H., pursuing her apprehension connected charges related to an alleged strategy to bargain and merchantability donated assemblage parts. (Steven Porter/The Boston Globe via AP, File)

Steven Porter/AP

A erstwhile manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue successful Boston was sentenced to 8 years successful situation for stealing and selling assemblage parts “as if they were baubles.”

Authorities said Cedric Lodge was astatine the halfway of a ghoulish strategy successful which helium shipped brains, skin, hands and faces to buyers successful Pennsylvania and elsewhere aft cadavers donated to Harvard were nary longer needed for research.

His wife, Denise Lodge, was sentenced to conscionable implicit a twelvemonth successful situation for assisting him. They appeared Tuesday successful national tribunal successful Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

In 1 example, Cedric Lodge provided tegument to a purchaser truthful it could beryllium tanned into leather and bound into a book, a “deeply horrifying reality,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin said successful a tribunal filing.

“In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s look — possibly to beryllium kept connected a shelf, possibly to beryllium utilized for thing adjacent much disturbing,” Martin said.

She said Lodge 58, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, treated the parts of “beloved quality beings arsenic if they were baubles to beryllium sold for profit” and collected thousands of dollars, from 2018 done March 2020.

After Harvard finishes utilizing a donated assemblage for probe oregon teaching, the assemblage typically is returned to household oregon cremated. Lodge acknowledged removing assemblage parts earlier cremation.

Lodge, who was a morgue manager for 28 years, expressed regret successful court. Defense lawyer Patrick Casey said his acts were “egregious.”

“Mr. Lodge acknowledges the seriousness of his behaviour and the harm his actions person inflicted connected some the deceased persons whose bodies helium callously degraded and their grieving families,” Casey said successful a tribunal filing.

Harvard suspended the donation of bodies for 5 months successful 2023 erstwhile charges were filed.

Prosecutors said astatine slightest six different people, including an worker astatine an Arkansas crematorium, person pleaded blameworthy successful the probe of body-parts trafficking.

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This communicative has been corrected to amusement the tribunal proceeding was successful Williamsport, Pennsylvania, not Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Dec 17, 2025|Updated Dec 17, 2025 3:12 p.m.