Harvard Settles With Families Over Grotesque Case Involving Stolen Body Parts

Harvard Settles With Families Over Grotesque Case Involving Stolen Body Parts

In the spring of 2023, the former director of the morgue at Harvard Medical School was charged with stealing and selling human body parts. These were bodies that had been donated to the school in the name of medical research. The man pleaded guilty in 2025.

The whole story was ghoulish, like something right out of a horror movie. Now the school has reached a massive settlement with the families.

The New York Post reports:

Harvard to pay $53M in suit over selling donated corpses on black market

Harvard University will pay $53 million to settle a ghoulish class-action suit brought by families claiming an imprisoned former morgue manager at the Ivy League institution mishandled the bodies of their loved ones donated to its medical school and even sold their body parts on the black market.

A state court judge in Boston preliminarily approved the eight-figure settlement Tuesday in the suit stemming from the 2023 arrest of disgraced former Harvard Medical School’s morgue manager, Cedric Lodge.

Lodge, who worked at Harvard’s morgue for nearly 30 years, was arrested in 2023 and ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school for medical research purposes.

As far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts — including “heads, faces, brains, skin and hands” — which he’d then bring to his home in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

In one horrifying example heard during his trial, Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin called a “deeply horrifying reality” in a court filing.

“In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s face — perhaps to be kept on a shelf, perhaps to be used for something even more disturbing,” Martin said.

More from FOX News:

Harvard condemned Lodge’s conduct in a message to the school’s community Monday.

“His violations … were despicable, abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community,” George Daley, Harvard’s dean of the faculty of medicine, and Bernard Chang, dean for medical education at Harvard Medical School, wrote in the letter.

The university noted that the federal indictment said Lodge acted “without the knowledge or permission of HMS.”

Harvard said the proposed settlement also includes a pledge by HMS to provide a statement to claimant families reaffirming that Lodge’s criminal acts were “morally reprehensible and inconsistent with the standards that Harvard University and HMS expect for the treatment of anatomical donors and their loved ones.”

Watch a video report from WCVB News in Boston below:

Featured image via YouTube.

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