Crime
Cedric Lodge faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and up to three years of supervised release, per his plea agreement.
A former Harvard Medical School morgue manager arrested in 2023 for allegedly stealing and selling human body parts is now expected to plead guilty, federal court records show.
Cedric Lodge, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, has agreed to plead guilty to a charge of interstate transport of stolen goods, according to a copy of the agreement filed in a Pennsylvania federal court. Lodge had been scheduled to stand trial next month.
Prosecutors allege he took part in a grisly, multiyear scheme centered on cadavers donated to Harvard Medical School for educational and research purposes. They’ve accused Lodge of stealing dissected body parts — including heads, brains, skin, and bones — and bringing the remains home to New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Denise, would mail them to buyers.
The couple netted tens of thousands of dollars over several years, according to prosecutors, who cited PayPal payments with memos such as “head number 7” and “braiiiiiins.” Denise Lodge pleaded guilty last year to a charge of interstate transport of stolen goods.
“Her husband was doing this and she just kind of went along with it,” Denise Lodge’s attorney, Hope Lefeber, told WBUR in 2024.
“What happened here is wrong,” Lefeber acknowledged, though she asserted no one lost money and the matter was “more of a moral and ethical dilemma here than a criminal case.”
But the alleged thefts had resounding implications. Harvard launched an independent review of its Anatomical Gift Program, dozens of people backed out of donating their bodies to Harvard Medical School, and relatives of past donors sued the school and Cedric Lodge. A lower court judge dismissed the families’ claims against Harvard, but the state’s Supreme Judicial Court is now determining whether to reverse that decision.
In the meantime, Cedric Lodge faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and up to three years of supervised release, per his plea agreement.
Lodge’s customers allegedly included Katrina Maclean, a Salem resident accused of storing and selling stolen remains out of her Peabody shop, Kat’s Creepy Creations. Maclean filed a motion last month to dismiss the charges against her, with her lawyer describing her in court documents as a happily married mother of two who has volunteered at her local elementary school and had no prior criminal record.
“Ms. Maclean also has a somewhat unusual interest: she is part of a legal, nationwide oddities community that collects body parts,” her lawyer wrote in a March 3 brief. “While not exactly mainstream, that oddities market is extensive and not uncommon, particularly in Ms. Maclean’s home town of Salem, Massachusetts, a community with a well-known penchant for the unusual.”
One of Lodge’s other alleged buyers, Pennsylvania resident Joshua Taylor, is also expected to plead guilty to interstate transport of stolen goods, court records show. Another man charged in connection with the scheme, Pennsylvania’s Jeremy Pauley, pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2023.
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