At some point in Cedric Lodge’s nearly three decades at the Harvard Medical School morgue, he decided to steal body parts from cadavers and sell them to customers—and got away with it for at least four years. Lodge’s case reveals an expansive network of human remains trading and trafficking, much of it legal. While the subject is undoubtedly unsettling for some readers, Ally Jarmanning reports a fascinating story on this macabre market for human body parts—and poses interesting questions about property, collecting, and preservation.
In 2018, prosecutors say, Lodge began stealing body parts from the morgue and taking them home, in his orange Subaru that bore the license plate GRIM-R, to his tidy split-level in Goffstown, New Hampshire. His wife, Denise, would take it from there, handling logistics. She’s the one who packed up the goods and took them to the post office, prosecutors allege; she communicated with the buyers and took payments through her PayPal account.
It was a lucrative business. Court records show that one buyer paid Denise Lodge more than $37,000, sending his payments with memos like “head number 7” and “braiiiiiins.”
Collectors all have their own reasons and rationales for wanting to own these unusual items. One said displaying a skull was “a flex for any goth.” Some admire human remains as medical antiques. Others treat them like fine art. One collector showed off an altar of skulls, where he left Jolly Ranchers and cigarettes as offerings.
A Delaware couple, Justin Capps and Sonya Cobb, doesn’t like using the term “collector” at all. They consider themselves “rescuers” of human remains.
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