The Cutprice Guignol

In early 2020, Kat MacLean, an artist and small business owner from Salem, Massachusetts, posted a picture of one of her creations to Instagram. In the three years that followed, this picture would serve as the first public hint to a near-unbelievable story of a body-snatching, bone-selling, corpse-trafficking conspiracy – and the ineffective laws governing the protection of human remains in the USA.

The picture, at first glance, seems pretty innocuous, at least in the grand scheme of Kat MacLean’s work. MacLean’s art mostly focused on creepy dolls – babydoll heads served on a platter, dolls with bloodied hands and wild smiles, the usual, run-of-the-mill small-scale horror art. She ran Freaks, Antiques, and Uniques, a pop-up market for similar oddities in Salem, Massachusetts, as well as selling her creations through various platforms online.

And it was one of these creations that she posted on Instagram, on February 9th, 2020, that kicked off this bizarre story.

The doll falls very much in line with the work MacLean had shared to her modest audience up until this point – in fact, it might have slid right under the radar as another gory curiosity, had it not been for the caption MacLean attached to it: “the doll has been sold and yes that is a real human skull. If you’re in the market for humans bones hit me up!”.

Which, of course, begs the question: where the hell did MacLean get her hands on a real human skull to sell as part of her art, and why was she so confidently offering to hook others up with her supplier?

That supplier, as it turned out, was likely Cedric Lodge. Lodge had begun working at Harvard Medical School, New Hampshire, managing the Anatomical Gift Program at the university’s morgue, a job he began in 1995 in his mid-twenties. Through the Anatomical Gift Program, volunteers could donate their bodies after death to be used for medical and dental research and education; Lodge was responsible for the oversight of storage, embalming, and movement of these cadavers once they came under the care of Harvard Medical School. Lodge lived with his wife, Denise Lodge, in the nearby Goffstown, during his near thirty-year tenure at the morgue.

And, while the first two decades of his time working at the HSM morgue were relatively uneventful, according to a recent indictment from a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania, that changed in 2018. While the specifics of what sparked this change are unclear, the case brought against the Lodges, along with several other defendants, depicts a gruesome underground trade in the business of corpse-selling.

Cedric Lodge would, according to the indictment, acquire various parts of the cadavers under his care to sell to buyers across the USA, with Denise Lodge handling the monetary side of the business. Head, brains, skin, and bones were amongst the parts specified as part of his gory product line, with buyers paying for the body parts through sites like PayPal. Some buyers would visit the morgue to peruse the cadavers Lodge had made available for purchase, before selecting the pieces they wanted, whereupon Lodge would remove them and transport them back to his New Hampshire home for packaging.

The business proved to be a pretty lucrative one for Cedric and Denise Lodge, with one buyer, Joshua Taylor, spending more than $37,000 on cadaver parts (one particularly memorable payment came with the attached memo “braiiiins”).

Amongst these buyers was Kat MacLean. Lodge and MacLean met at the morgue just before Halloween in 2020, after allegedly agreeing to exchange two dissected faces for $600 – though this was far from the only purchase MacLean would make from Lodge. Several of the pieces she purchased from him were used in art she later sold, much like the piece depicted in her now-infamous Instagram post.

A few months after the purchase of the dissected faces, MacLean would make contact with Jeremy Pauley. Pauley, on his website, describes himself as a “lead preservation specialist of retired medical specimens”, the founder of the Pauley Institute of Preservation, and curator of the Memento Mori museum, a travelling exhibit intended to display some of the “worlds most incredible pieces of history from life into death”. Of most interest to MacLean, though, would seem to be his interest in the tanning of human skin – essentially, the process through which skin is turned into leather. According to the indictment, MacLean shipped several pieces of the human skin she had acquired from her interactions with Lodge to Pauley for the purpose of tanning them, and later repaid him for his services with human skin obtained via Lodge; she double-checked it had arrived in one piece, confirming the skin had arrived because she “wanted to make sure it had got to you and I don’t expect agents at my door”.

Pauley himself would go on to work with the Lodges directly, purchasing more than $40,000 worth of cadaver parts. But, as another indictment would reveal, they weren’t the only people Pauley was buying from.

Around a year after MacLean and Lodge met at the Harvard Medical School morgue, Pauley received a message through his public Facebook page:

“I follow your page and work and LOVE it. I’m a mortician and work at a trade service mortuary, so we are contracted through the medical hospital here in Little Rock…Just out of curiosity, would you know anyone in the market for a fully in tact [sic], embalmed brain?”

The message came from Candace Chapman Scott, an employee (though not, as she claimed in this message, a licensed mortician) at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences morgue. Similarly to Lodge, she handled the storage and movement of cadavers donated through the Anatomical Gift Program. As it turned out, there were some people in the market for embalmed human brains – and a whole lot more in the way of cadaver parts, which Scott would begin to steal from the cadavers donated to her place or work to sell to members of the group over the following year.

The messages quoted in the indictment against Scott are almost laughably juvenile, if they were discussing the desecrated remains of people who donated their bodies to science: Scott refers to “2 large pieces of skin with tiddy”, “one lower chunk of pubic skin with peen and sack attached” and “2 fake boobies” in her messages, as well as describing foetal remains she received for cremation that she sells for $300 to an interested buyer, which were initially given to the morgue for cremation.

Of particular interest in this indictment is a series of sales made to an address in Enola, Pennsylvania, later identified as belonging to Pauley. Amongst these sales were plastic bags full of brain matter and human organs, and foetal remains; Pauley displays images of preserved foetal remains on the front page of his website, where he also declares that he treats the specimens he works with with “the upmost [sic] respect and care”, given his disapproval of the fact that “the majority of cadavers donated to science are not used in the medical field, but are sold for monetary gain”, an undeniably ironic bit of back-patting given the details of this case.

Candace Chapman Scott was indicted for mail fraud and conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property in April 2023, and the Lodges, along with Kat MacLean and Joshua Taylor, faced similar charges in May 2023, shortly after Cedric Lodge was fired from his job at HMS. Jeremy Pauley pled guilty to his charges as a buyer in the scheme in September 2023, and Denise Lodge pled guilty to the transport of stolen property in February 2024, while the other defendants await trial. A statement from two deans of Harvard Medical School released a statement saying “We are appalled to learn that something so disturbing could happen on our campus — a community dedicated to healing and serving others”, and several family members of those who donated their bodies to the HMS have requested the return of their deceased loved ones after the scheme became public.

This truly bizarre case has, naturally, brought with it a whole host of questions about the ethics surrounding the use of cadavers. You’ll no doubt have noticed that the charges brought against the conspirators in these cases regard the transportation of stolen goods and mail fraud, rather than what you might expect – abuse of a corpse, trafficking of human remains, and so on. That’s because the sale of human remains is legal, under US federal law: it’s legal to own, distribute, or sell human remains, unless they belong to Native American people, who are protected under the 1990 Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. Selling human remains is only illegal in eight states in the USA, while another two dozen limit the sale of human remains under certain circumstances (most often when they have been illegally removed from a gravesite).

And those who donate their bodies for research and education purposes inhabit a particularly uneasy grey area. Around 20,000 people donate their bodies to science in the USA every year, a process which requires either the volunteer themselves or their loved ones to provide informed consent for the donation. Usually, this informed consent focuses on the use of the body for research or education, but, with those terms lacking a specific definition, it’s difficult to prosecute those who use these cadavers in less-than-ethical ways. Morgues attached to universities and other teaching facilities, such as the ones Lodge and Scott worked at, exist outside the responsibility of both the Department of Public Health and the medical examiner’s offices, leaving them uniquely vulnerable to misconduct and exploitation.

Oversight for the industry of corpses donated to science remains hazy, with Philip Guyett Junior, who pled guilty to wire fraud after trying to fraudulently offload donated tissue received through the Donor Referral Service he owned, described the so-called “body broking” industry as “harder to sell hot dogs on a cart than it is to get into this business“.

And there is a booming trade in human remains – from sellers like Kat MacLean to Facebook groups like the one Scott sold through, there are plenty of places you can purchase cadaver parts, whether for scientific or aesthetic purposes. Though eBay and Facebook banned the sale of human remains in the 2010s, sales have persisted despite these new attempts at oversight, and on new social media platforms such as TikTok, the sale of human remains has remained a topic of discussion, controversy, and interest. The psychological drive behind the desire to acquire such objects is much-debated and often-maligned, but the collection of human remains for a variety of reasons (whether as a tool for research or as a trophy to establish dominance) has existed for hundreds of years, and show no signs of losing its allure.

Debates remain over the ethics of purchasing human remains, especially given that many historical samples came from disenfranchised groups with no say over how their cadavers were treated; even now, predatory companies sell body parts from those who exchange their bodies for subsidised funerals or other benefits. I think it’s pretty fair to say that the actions of the Lodges and Scott are anything but moral or ethical, but there are plenty of people who argue that human remains for other purposes can be made use of ethically.

With the demand for human remains as high as ever and the limited oversight of donated cadavers, it seems almost inevitable that someone would exploit these blind spots for their own gain. This case does raise some interesting questions about the laws surrounding the handling of those who choose to donate their bodies to science, and whether the oversight is sufficient as it stands now. When the story broke in mid-2023, the American Association for Anatomy called upon “government and law enforcement agencies, academic institutions, and regulatory bodies for both justice and collaborative reform to prevent the misuse and commodification of human body donors”.

There’s no doubt that the grey area that these donors inhabit allowed for the these underhand sales to take place for so long, and, with the trials for both the Lodge case and the Scott case planned for later this year, it will be interesting to see how this highly-publicized scandal might impact the legislation around these issues.

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