Harvard tells husband his wife’s remains may have been sold during a body parts smuggling operation

Last week, a horrified man received a letter from Harvard Medical School saying it was possible his wife’s remains had been sold by a morgue manager.

Jack Porter of Massachusetts, who works at Harvard, said his wife was supposed to be cremated in the medical school morgue in 2017 after she died of colon cancer, but now fears someone might put her body “in a basement.” can handle.

Last week, a federal lawsuit alleged that a former employee, Cedric Lodge, 55, involved in the school’s “Anatomical Gift Program” sold body parts on the black market.

The program, which is also run at several medical schools, including Tufts, UMass, allows people to donate parts of their bodies to the school so they can be used to train medical students — after which they will be cremated and returned.

“What bothers me is that someone in a basement somewhere in this country or anywhere else caresses my wife’s body parts,” Porter told the Boston Herald. “It could be her brain, her skin, her bones. This is disgusting and therefore there should be a severe punishment,” he added.

Porter told the Herald that he remembered receiving his wife’s cremated remains in 2019, but is now shocked to think someone has them in his possession.

On the day of Lodge’s indictment last week, letters were sent to the next of kin of those supposedly cremated in the morgue.

The college could not say whether people’s bodies had been definitively sold, but in some cases could rule out the possibility of tampering in some cases between September 2021 and February 2022, when Lodge was on leave.

Lodge had been at Harvard since 1995 until the Medical School terminated his employment on May 6 of this year. However, he would not have been involved in human body parts trafficking until 2018.

“At this time, we cannot rule out the possibility that Raya Porter’s remains may have been compromised,” the letter read, which was viewed by the Herald.

Porter, a fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, met his wife Raya in 2011. She was a Ukrainian doctor who had attended medical school in Kyiv.

In the letter, the medical school’s dean said it was working with authorities on the criminal case and Porter said it had responded “very respectfully.”

“We worked with information provided by federal authorities and examined our records, particularly the logs that show when donor remains were sent for cremation and when Lodge was on campus, to try to determine which donors may have been affected,” wrote George Daley, the dean of the medical school at Harvard Medical School, according to the Herald.

“Federal authorities continue to investigate and if additional information emerges, we will contact you,” the dean added.

Porter told WCVB that he was introduced to his wife in 2011 through a mutual friend and it was “love at first sight.” He told the station of similar concerns about where his wife’s body might actually be.

“Someone in a basement somewhere is looking at my wife’s body and caressing it,” he said. “This is what shocks me. They look at it. They’re looking for it.’

He added that while he wanted Lodge to be severely punished, he was more sympathetic to his employer. He said the school was negligent in overseeing the program, but he would not sue the school.

“There was some negligence, but it wasn’t intentional,” Porter said. “They just didn’t know about this.”

The federal filing states that Lodge took the dissected body parts to his home in Goffstown, New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Denise, resold them as part of a national network of traffickers.

Some remains were even shipped through the United States Postal Service.

The U.S. Attorney believes Lodge trafficked the remains between 2018 and August 16, 2022.

Harvard insisted that no other employees of the school be charged or suspected of any wrongdoing.

Several purchasers are also named in the indictment, including Joshua Taylor, of West Lawn, Pennsylvania, and Katrina MacLean, of Salem, Massachusetts, who owned and operated a business called Kat’s Creepy Creations in Peabody, Massachusetts.

“At times, Cedric Lodge used his access to the morgue to let Katrina MacLean, Joshua Taylor, and others into the morgue and choose what was left for sale,” the lawsuit said.

Maclean is also accused of selling the remains he obtained to other buyers in multiple states, including Jeremy Pauley of Enola and Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.

In October 2020, Maclean sold two dissected faces and skin to Pauley for $600, who was hired to tan the skin and turn it into leather before shipping it back to Maclean.

The suit states that Pauley made $8,800 to MacLean and 25 payments totaling $40,049.04 to Taylor via PayPal.

Pauley, 40, had previously been arrested and charged with abuse of a corpse, receiving stolen property and trafficking the proceeds of illegal activity last summer.

Pauley also purchased body parts stolen from a crematorium in Little Rock, Arkansas, by Candace Chapman Scott, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

Scott is accused, among other things, of taking the corpses of two stillborn babies whose remains were to be cremated.

Pauley, in turn, resold many of the remains to others, the charges allege.

Pauley is the owner of The Grand Wunderkammer – a shop that sells ‘strange and unusual’ items to the public and museum exhibits. According to his Facebook page, he is also the executive director and curator of the Memento Mori Museum.

He was arrested last June after police received a tip about Pauley’s suspicious activities and his collections. The caller said they found “several” five-gallon buckets of human remains in Pauley’s basement.

Researchers later recovered the remains, which included human brains, hearts, livers, skin and lungs. The charges of the Lodges, MacLean and Taylor listed in the grand jury indictment include conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen property.

“Some crimes defy comprehension,” attorney Gerard M. Karam said in a statement. ‘The theft and trade in human remains touches the essence of what makes us human.

“It is particularly outrageous that so many victims here have volunteered for their remains to be used to train medical professionals and advance the interests of science and healing.

“It is appalling that they and their families are being taken advantage of in the name of profit. With these charges we are trying to ensure some degree of justice for all these victims.’