When you donate your body to science, you probably expect it to go toward some good cause, not for your skull to end up sitting on a shelf in a store somewhere.
But if you’ve had a family member donate their body to the Harvard Medical School over the past five years, there’s a chance their brain, skin, or other body parts have been sold off to the highest bidder on the black market.
That’s the information coming to light from federal prosecutors, as a grand jury is indicting 55-year-old Cedric Lodge, the manager of Harvard’s Medical School, and his wife, among others, in a scheme that involved letting people steal whatever body parts they wanted from donated cadavers.
What Does the Black Market for Body Parts Look Like?
It may or may not come as a shock to you that body parts, once stolen from a place like the Harvard Medical School, are simply being sold online and shipped through the regular mail.
In most cases, stolen body parts – including brains, skin, teeth, bones, etc. – are resold at macabre stores around the country. In this particular case, a defendant runs a store called Kat’s Creepy Creations in Peabody, Massachusetts, and has posted many times about its oddities, including human skulls with captions that read, “If you’re in the market for human bones hit me up!”
That is perhaps the most mundane outcome for these stolen body parts – just some good old-fashioned capitalism. There’s a market for human remains, and these people are more than happy to provide them. Simply supply and demand, which I certainly don’t have a problem with as long as those are my wishes and my family is aware of it.
There is an oddity store near us in Northeast Ohio that often sells human bones, skulls, taxidermied animals, and more. I wonder how they feel when they read a story like this. Do they feel compelled to get on social media and reiterate that they’re not actively going into local morgues and stealing body parts or even buying them online from other parties?
“You’re giving the oddities and curiosities industry a bad name!” they say, as they retrofit a human skull as a beer koozie (which I would totally buy, by the way).
Would I necessarily care if this is what ultimately happened to my body? Honestly, not at all, because I’d of course be dead. So what do I care if my skin is being wrapped around a lampshade like I’m a fixture inside Ed Gein’s house? I think I’d care more about what the experience would do to my surviving family members – that’s a hard notion to stomach. I’d hate for them to walk into a curiosities store somewhere around the country and think, “Hey, doesn’t that skull look a little like Steve’s?”
In one example of this case, another defendant named Jeremy Pauley was also arrested in Arkansas last year and is accused of stealing remains from another mortuary employee down there, which included two stillborn babies meant to be cremated. I don’t know how you’re not blindingly livid if that happens to your family.
Where Does the Harvard Medical School Case Go From Here?
Harvard University is understandably appalled by the shocking betrayal that took place at its medical school. The scheme itself stretched from 2018 to early 2023, and if the six defendants in the case are convicted, they face up to 15 years in prison.
Given the evidence in this case, it’s hard not to think this might be something happening at morgues all over the country. While it seems to be contained mostly to people simply reselling the body parts at a premium price, you can’t rule out a potential Re-Animator scenario. If someone’s going to one day reanimate my severed head, at least have the courtesy to put some wings on it so I can fly around.
