With its former morgue manager awaiting his prison sentence, Harvard Medical School must now defend itself from lawsuits alleging it failed to stop him from selling body parts from donated cadavers.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court last week reopened civil cases from plaintiffs who say their family members’ corpses were violated by Cedric Lodge, who has pleaded guilty to interstate transport of stolen goods. He faces up to 10 years in prison.
Lodge harvested and sold body parts like skin and heads. Civil lawsuits in Boston painted a wild picture of Lodge as a ghoul who took his job in the morgue way too far, even noting his personalized license plate – “Grim-R.”
“The Grim Reaper posted images of himself dressed up in the garb of an undertaker in a Dickens novel with a black top hat and overcoat,” one lawsuit said. “His license plate and open association with macabre hobbies revealed his view of his job at the morgue as a backdrop for his fantasies instead of a place of reverence and respect.”
The lawsuits against Harvard failed in Superior Court but the Supreme Court ruled Oct. 7 that 47 plaintiffs can sue the university, which had said it was immune from suit because of the “good faith” defense under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act.
Those plaintiffs sufficiently alleged Harvard did not act in good faith, Justice Scott Kafker wrote, even though harvest and selling body parts was not what Lodge was employed to do.
“Harvard may, however, be held responsible for its own misconduct,” Kafker wrote.
“It had a legal obligation to provide for the dignified treatment and disposal of the donated human remains, and failed miserably in this regard, as Harvard itself recognized. Harvard also had a duty to oversee Lodge’s conduct and to place proper controls over the morgue itself – both of which it allegedly disregarded for years.”
Lodge and his co-defendants unsuccessfully argued in motions to dismiss their criminal indictments that pieces of dead bodies can’t be considered “goods.” He, his wife and two of his customers were charged after it was revealed he was selling body parts from corpses that had been donated to Harvard Medical School for research.
Katrina MacLean of Salem, Mass., and Joshua Taylor of West Lawn, Pa., are co-defendants. MacLean operates a store called Kat’s Creepy Creations.
She explained her involvement by pointing at her “somewhat unusual interest” in a nationwide oddities community that collects body parts. The indictment says she sold remains stolen by Lodge and Taylor was a purchaser.
MacLean paid $600 to Lodge for two dissected faces in 2020, it says.
Taylor, who also recently pleaded guilty, paid Lodge’s wife Denise more than $37,000 over three years for body parts, the indictment says. Memos on money transfers said things like “head number 7” and “braiiiiiins.”
