This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: The market for human body parts
This could have been a topic I covered for Halloween, but a particularly strange legal story appeared just last week in the news. And so here we are, at Christmas, discussing the market for human body parts. Of course, not everybody celebrates Christmas as warm, bright, or celebratory. Some people are tired, and some people are grieving. This week I’m doing something slightly counterintuitive and talking about death and things in packages despite it being Christmas.
Birth and death are not strange. They are the most banal human experiences because this happens to every one of us. What is unusual is to die and have your body parts become inventory, a good to be traded. This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays, we’re going to look at three recent and connected cases where the law had to step in because people were selling body parts.
The Harvard Morgue Side Hustle
Earlier this year, Cedric Lodge, the former morgue manager at the Harvard Medical School, was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling human body parts taken from cadavers that had been donated for medical education. Families had consented to the donation so future doctors could learn. But that’s not what ended up happening to their loved ones. Lodge removed heads, brains, skin, hands, faces from bodies after they were no longer needed for teaching. He sold them to buyers in the oddities market. His wife assisted him. It became a more serious offence because he transported these parts across state lines and sold them to buyers in many other locations, which, in the US, makes the offence punishable by a much longer jail sentence.
U.S. Postal Inspection Service was involved in the investigation, which tells me that he was mailing these body parts. Seems to me that this would not be a difficult case to crack, but somehow he managed to do this for years. Last week, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison.
The Facebook Body Parts Dealer
Several other people were involved in this scheme, including Jeremy Pauley, a Pennsylvania man who ran an online oddities business. He was buying from Cedric Lodge. Pauley was sentenced to six years in prison for buying and reselling stolen human remains using Facebook groups and private messages. I always found the word “Facebook” to be somewhat disturbing in itself. This puts a new turn on it. Mr. Pauley sold faces on Facebook.
Fetuses for sale in America’s South
Back in January, a woman named Candace Chapman Scott pled guilty to several offences connected to stealing and selling human remains, including fetal remains and stillborn babies. She shipped skulls, brains, organs, and two full bodies to a buyer she met online. In one case, a mother learned that the ashes of her child that she had been given after her child was stillborn were not in fact the child’s remains.
Scott was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In the U.S. federal prison system, there is no opportunity for parole, so she will serve that entire time unless Trump pardons her.
Offended by death
There are people in our society who have to deal with death every day. Doctors may work hard to save someone’s life, yet five minutes after the patient passes, they’re having coffee and not even thinking about it. It’s part of my job that I have to deal with death cases from time to time. I can’t change the fact that someone died, but it’s part of my professional responsibility to be respectful for the sake of the families and the dignity of the deceased.
That someone was out selling body parts surprises even me. I guess I’d never turned my mind to it until I heard of the Harvard morgue case as it has been rolling through the courts. But somehow it does make sense. Some people will do anything for a buck. Others have morbid obsessions. A case such as this would inevitably lead to an investigation, an arrest, charges, and a conviction. It’s weird, it’s wacky, and it’s unusual.
