Ap
La Jornada Newspaper
Friday, December 19, 2025, p. 15
Boston. The former manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue was sentenced to 9 years in prison for “theft and sale of human body parts as trinkets.”
According to authorities, Cedric Lodge, 58, was a central part of a macabre scheme in which he shipped human brains, skin, hands and faces to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere after the university stopped using donated corpses.
His wife, Denise Lodge, was sentenced to just over a year in prison for helping her husband. Both appeared this Tuesday in federal court in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin said in a court document that Lodge “sold human skin to a buyer so he could tan it to bind a book, one of many deeply horrifying cases.” Martin said Lodge treated the parts of “loved human beings as if they were trinkets to be sold for profit” and collected thousands of dollars between 2018 and March 2020.
After Harvard stops using donated bodies for research or teaching, the body is usually returned to relatives or cremated.
Despite this, Lodge, who was manager of the morgue for 28 years, admitted to removing parts before the cremation. Harvard suspended body donation for five months in 2023, when the charges were filed. At least six other people, including an employee at a crematorium in Arkansas, have pleaded guilty.
