Cedric Lodge: Grave Mistake

13:02Cedric Lodge:And staring down the reality of his wife's cancer diagnosis, Cedric Lodge took advantage of that opportunity.

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14:46Cedric Lodge:When Cedric Lodge's wife Denise was battling cancer in 2015, he quickly spiraled into desperation. Denise had to stop working, and hospital bills were piling up. Cedric's salary as the manager of the Harvard University Medical School morgue wasn't cutting it. They were in a dire financial state. Unfortunately, this is an extremely common situation in our society. Most people in Cedric's shoes would turn to GoFundMe, or maybe even open up an Etsy shop or launch a YouTube page, literally anything to bring in extra cash. Social media makes it easier to get our stories out there and gain support. And sometimes that feels like the only tool people have at their disposal.

15:45Cedric Lodge:But Cedric used that tool differently. He logged into Facebook, where he met a woman who could help him tap into a much different kind of market. Candice Scott from Little Rock, Arkansas. That's Thomas Gloom, author and host of the Morbid History Podcast.

16:31Josh Hall:into trash bags and then taking them home.

16:35Cedric Lodge:At home, Candice would post in Facebook groups and other online forums for people interested in the so-called oddities market. Long story short, people all over the country buy preserved human remains. Most of these people are interested in remains as collector's items and put them on display. But there are some that use them for rituals. Regardless of anyone's intent, there's no evidence that anyone ever consented to their body parts being sold for these purposes. But that didn't seem to matter to Candice, who only sell dollar signs. There's a good amount of money to be made in the oddities market.

17:21Cedric Lodge:A human skull can sell for$450, a brain for$3 ,500, and an adult skeleton for$7 ,500. There are also fetal skeletons for sale, as well as other children's body parts, including those from children who died tragically. The caption of one of those posts reads, quote, Beautiful peace born out of a heartbreaking accident. It's something we see a lot on this show, people cosplaying as something with empathy, when really they're exploiting others for personal gain.

18:02Josh Hall:You can't really know everything that's going on in people's minds and hearts, but I'm sure some of these folks have twisted things in their own mind.

18:13Cedric Lodge:Candace was supposed to cremate remains and return the ashes to the family. Instead, she stole the remains. Sometimes she sent back the ashes and the family would have no way of knowing anything was missing. Other times she sent the family ashes from someone else's body. And this is where things become even more cruel and unusual. Candace openly told her customers that her crematorium often received remains of stillborn fetuses. She stole the fetuses and sold them for a few hundred dollars. Then she would steal a handful of ashes from an adult body and send that back to the family who was expecting their baby's ashes.

19:00Cedric Lodge:Grieving families had a stranger's ashes in their possession, and they had no idea. Candace got away with it for years.

19:11Josh Hall:My guess is that some of these people are just sick. these people have been doing this for so long and no repercussions. I think that they just felt like they were untouchable.

19:29Cedric Lodge:It's unclear how exactly Cedric came across Candace's business, but with industry ties, it probably wasn't a far leap. And once they connected, Cedric realized he could be just as successful as her. He went to Denise and told her his plan.

19:50Josh Hall:Cedric told her the body parts were nothing more than medical waste, and he convinced her that the sales could be used to help pay for medical expenses.

20:03Cedric Lodge:Cedric explained to his wife how easy it would be for him. In his eyes, they were sitting on a mountain of untapped capital.

20:13Josh Hall:When the cadavers were given back to him, he was supposed to be either packaging them up to be sent back to the families, or he was the one taking them to the crematorium and burning them to ashes. Depending on what the cadavers were being used for, sometimes he would get these remains and they were already cut up because of the dissections that the medical researchers were doing. But then there were other times where he's alone in the morgue and he has the tools that he needed.

20:48Cedric Lodge:Denise was apprehensive at first, but Cedric eventually convinced her that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Eventually, she came around and even agreed to help him.

21:03Josh Hall:She'd take pictures and post them online in all these different places and sell them. And some of them she was just sending through the mail.

21:15Cedric Lodge:Cedric and Denise's side business took off. And the families he worked with at Harvard never had a reason to ask questions. They believed their loved ones' bodies had been donated to science. To Harvard. So Cedric took whatever he wanted.

21:35Josh Hall:He didn't have a specific part he was aiming for. It was whatever he could get a hold of and felt like he could get away with taking and eventually selling. It was fair game to him. He took heads, brains, skin, bones, organs, hands, faces, dissected parts.

21:57Cedric Lodge:Cedric packed up dismembered body parts from the Harvard morgue. loaded them into his car, which bore a license plate that read G-R-I-M-Dash-R, then drove from Massachusetts back to New Hampshire. He connected with two people who would become his main customers, 46-year-old Joshua Taylor and 44-year-old Katrina McLean.

22:25Josh Hall:There was a group of people that would buy from Cedric. They were quote-unquote collectors. I don't know if they're displaying them in their homes or if they have some creepy cellar under their house, but there was another group that they would take these parts and resell them at a higher price.

22:45Cedric Lodge:Joshua lived in Pennsylvania. Like Cedric and Candace, he bought and sold remains, shipping them nationwide. outside. Katrina owned a storefront called Cat's Creepy Creations in Peabody, Massachusetts, right outside Salem and about 20 miles from Harvard. She also transported remains she bought from Cedric to Pennsylvania, where she had regular customers of her own. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Harvard's campus was a ghost town, Cedric even invited Katrina and Joshua to visit the morgue like it was his own storefront.

23:20Josh Hall:All of this was done without Harvard's knowledge or consent and without any permission from the donors or their families. And in total, the couple is said to have made between$40 ,000 and$95 ,000 from the sales of these stolen body parts.

23:42Cedric Lodge:That amount of profit certainly isn't nothing, but most people wouldn't think it's worth it.

23:49Josh Hall:It seems like Cedric was doing it for the thrill. It seemed like there was a bit of hubris involved. He felt like he was untouchable, and he was this guy who could walk and move in two different worlds. On Harvard's campus, he was the respected, long-tenured manager of the morgue. But then online, he could be that double agent who had the insider scoop, and he could get you things that you couldn't get in other places.

24:26Josh Hall:Drugs are also a thing that, for years and years, have been sold online. The people that do that, they find workarounds and different ways to do it. Like maybe you're not selling the drug, you're selling the spores or the seed. It's sold as a decoration or some sort of cleaning supply. It's shielded. It's hidden. You're being sneaky about it.

24:54Cedric Lodge:But Cedric and those in his network showed much less discretion.

24:59Josh Hall:I mean, these people were just listing what the body parts were. Skull. There was one guy who bought brains and he wrote as the tagline, brains, like the movie Return of the Living Dead. That's what the zombies said in there. So again, the hubris starts to come out.

25:25Cedric Lodge:Everything from online posts to PayPal transactions had these kinds of descriptions. And there were lots of transactions, especially between Katrina and a man named Jeremy Pauly.

25:40Jenna Miscavige Hill:I always tell people I was the goth kid who never grew up. From very young age, I always enjoyed the darker side of things.

25:50Cedric Lodge:Jeremy was like the Jeff Bezos of the oddities market. Being in his network was a clear sign of Cedric's success. But pretty soon, Cedric would learn that Jeremy and his inner circle were in a downward spiral.

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27:22Cedric Lodge:In 2018, Cedric Lodge was at the height of his criminal scheme, stealing human remains from the Harvard University Medical School morgue and selling them for profit. Cedric had gone into business with some big names in the so-called oddities market, including Candace Scott, Katrina McLean, and Joshua Taylor. And pretty soon, Cedric made another crucial connection with a man named Jeremy Pauly.

27:52Jenna Miscavige Hill:I eventually started collecting the basic oddities that you could find on eBay and things at the time. One day when I purchased my first human skull, it was the biggest thing in the world to me when at some point my interest in the macabre shifted more from just the fact it was a macabre to more like I wanted to learn about what made things special and I just kept collecting and kept networking and talking to people professors doctors anybody that would be willing to let me talk their ear off and it just spun into something that for many years I was doing it I would sell to collect. I would sell things and kind of have a side hustle to afford the collection I was building.

28:35Jenna Miscavige Hill:And I'd own other businesses. And then at some point, my wife said to me, she was just like, why don't you just do this full time? Because like, you're so invested and you love it so much.

28:46Cedric Lodge:Jeremy was a star in the oddities world. He also lived in Pennsylvania and shipped items nationwide. He had a thriving business and everyone in the industry knew of him. In fact, he bought one of the stolen fetal remains from Candace Scott. At the same time, people in the industry considered Jeremy an artistic genius. One of his specialties was using tanned human skin to make book bindings. In 2018, when Cedric launched his illicit business, Katrina started buying skin from him and selling it to Jeremy at a markup. Katrina, Jeremy, and Joshua had all known and done business with each other for a while.

29:32Cedric Lodge:And when Cedric entered the picture, he was like a goldmine to them. They had an endless supply. And their transactions showed it. From 2018 to 2021, the group completed about 60 transactions among each other, worth tens of thousands of dollars. Each time, they used their personal emails and PayPal accounts. Clearly, they were comfortable with what they were doing. Maybe a little too comfortable.

30:06Cedric Lodge:In 2022, Jeremy and his wife divorced. One day when she stopped by their house, she went down into the basement and discovered five-gallon buckets full of human remains. It's unclear how much she knew about Jeremy's business, like where he was getting the body parts from. It's also unclear what exactly Jeremy was storing in the basement. Whatever it was, it came as a complete shock to his ex-wife and she immediately called the police. Officers questioned Jeremy, who was upfront about what he did for a living. he didn't seem to think he was doing anything wrong while we don't know exactly what he said to them we can make a pretty good guess based on things jeremy's current fiance has said in

30:59Jenna Miscavige Hill:more recent interviews the understanding that the oddities communities is called isn't isn't an egregious thing it isn't as demonized as the normal folk make it out to be I think people, once upon a time, we had a very great relationship with death. We kind of honored the dead in a very different way. We looked at it in a very different way. And as we kind of move more towards our more modern approach to funerary laws and all that, we didn't have that same sentimentalness that we used to have. We don't keep mementos of people with us after they passed. We don't wear hair like we used to from the deceased ones that have passed.

31:40Jenna Miscavige Hill:But it doesn't mean that that practice isn't still ongoing in the world. It's very obscure to us in America, but it's not uncommon in other countries.

31:53Cedric Lodge:Obviously, Jeremy and the people like him believe there's honor in their work. And like we mentioned earlier, buying and selling human remains isn't federally outlawed in the U.S. But when authorities looked through Jeremy's business records, including the social media posts and PayPal transactions, they noticed some major red flags. It immediately became clear that much of Jeremy's supply had originally been stolen by Cedric Lodge. Not only that, but multiple people in Jeremy's network had transported stolen remains across state lines, which is a federal offense. And just like that, the whole operation came crumbling down, with Cedric at the center.

32:46Jenna Miscavige Hill:The manager of the morgue at Harvard Medical School has been indicted in a scheme to steal body parts and then sell them online. Federal prosecutors say Cedric Lodge stole dissected portions of human cadavers, took them home to his home in New Hampshire, and then sold them online. His wife is also indicted, along with two of the alleged buyers. Instead, though, they were butchered, they were packaged, and then sold in a very lucrative underground market for human remains. A twisted criminal scheme dating back to 2018, a nationwide network where people bought and sold human remains stolen from Harvard Medical School and an Arkansas mortuary.

33:30Jenna Miscavige Hill:The alleged ringleader, former Harvard morgue manager Cedric Lodge.

33:37Cedric Lodge:Cedric and Denise seemed to realize their actions were indefensible.

33:42Josh Hall:In June of 2023, Lodge and his wife and several other involved parties were arrested and or indicted on federal charges.

33:55Cedric Lodge:Cedric, Denise, Katrina, and Joshua were all indicted together. Candace and Jeremy were charged separately.

34:04Josh Hall:The charges that were levied against Lodge and his wife were for conspiracy and interstate transport of stolen goods. And then in May of 2025, Cedric and Denise Lodge each pled guilty to one count of interstate transport of stolen goods. Cedric's defense attorney, Patrick Casey, called Lodge's actions egregious. He said, quote, Mr. Lodge acknowledges the seriousness of his conduct and the harm his actions have inflicted on both the deceased persons whose bodies he callously degraded and their grieving families, unquote. And then the attorney went on to say that all of Lodge's years working with cadavers had desensitized him to the importance of respect and care for the bodies that were entrusted to him and the university.

35:01Josh Hall:Lodge spoke a little bit in this proceeding, and he told the judge that he knew it was wrong to take the body parts and that he felt, quote unquote, deep regret for the harm caused to the families. And he said, I betray their trust. And in retrospect, I should have recognized the full impact of what I was doing. On December 17, 2025, a federal judge sentenced Cedric Lodge to eight years in prison because he played what was termed as a central role in this scheme. Denise was sentenced to just over a year.

35:44Cedric Lodge:Denise's lawyers claimed Cedric had used her health crisis to persuade her to go along with things. and since she didn't actually steal or transport anything, she got a lighter sentence. In addition, Joshua and Katrina pled guilty and as of this recording are still awaiting sentencing. Jeremy also pled guilty to interstate transport of stolen property and conspiracy to commit interstate transport of stolen property. He was sentenced to six years in January 2026 and plans to appeal his sentencing. Meanwhile, Harvard has tried to distance itself from the whole thing.

36:28Josh Hall:Harvard Medical School called Lodge's actions, quote, abhorrent and inconsistent with the standards and values expected in its donor program. They also briefly suspended body donations back in 2023 when this all happened and all the investigations were going on. But they are now receiving those donations again. The scandal has potentially impacted over 400 families. And dozens of them are already pursuing civil lawsuits against Harvard. accusing the university of failing to protect donated remains.

37:14Cedric Lodge:The civil suits accused Harvard of allowing criminals to, quote, roam and pick over loved ones' remains for bits like trinkets at a flea market. And it's hard to deny that point. Cedric Lodge clearly saw an opportunity. All the trust and power was placed in his hands, and he took advantage of it. just so people could satisfy their own niche interest.

37:42Josh Hall:Because of what has happened and this whole underground black market network has been brought into the daylight.

37:54Cedric Lodge:Some people have rushed to the defense of the oddities market. They say there are people in that industry who genuinely try to help others through the grieving process. Cedric Lodge obviously didn't care either way. He took advantage of a system that should have meant to help others. And now he's paying the price.

38:22Cedric Lodge:Thanks for tuning in to The Opportunist. This episode was written by Sarah Batchelor, produced by Abby Newhouse and Juliana Postrel, and executive produced by Connor Powell. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. We'll be back soon with another new episode.

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