Harvard morgue scandal reaches Mass. high court, exposing vast ‘gray market’ in body parts

BOSTON (CN) — The recent scandal in which body parts donated to Harvard Medical School were stolen and sold by the morgue manager — resulting in a dozen lawsuits by families that reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court Monday — has shed light on a large and disturbing trade in human remains that has so far operated under the radar and with minimal regulation.

“I’m continually surprised and appalled by how large the market seems to be,” said Sam Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts who has studied the topic.

“You’d be shocked by the array of people participating in these markets,” he said.

Federal authorities indicted Cedric Lodge, Harvard’s morgue manager, in June 2023 on charges of stealing parts of donated cadavers including bones, brains and skin and shipping them to buyers through the mail.

“Some crimes defy understanding,” U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Gerard Karam said at the time.

But there’s no federal law against trafficking in human remains. The charges were based solely on selling and receiving stolen goods.

In addition, selling body parts is legal in 42 states. The only states that restrict such sales are Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

“I walked into a natural history store in California and saw a human skull for sale,” Redman recalled. A store called JonsBones in Brooklyn, New York, does a brisk business selling human skulls and bones.

The trade has been greatly accelerated by the Internet, because “buyers and sellers of human remains can live anywhere and find buyers from anywhere,” said Damien Huffer, who is conducting research on the topic at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

“Some platforms like eBay and Etsy have been able to crack down on human remains sales almost entirely via targeted content moderation,” Huffer said — but while other social media sites ban sales in theory, users are routinely able to evade the restrictions through “deliberate misspellings of words or hashtags and specific emojis.”

In the Harvard case, a Pennsylvania man is accused of sending $37,000 to Lodge for body parts. Another alleged purchaser was Katrina Maclean, owner of a specialty store called “Kat’s Creepy Creations.”

Families who donated their loved ones’ remains to Harvard for scientific purposes sued the university, but a lower court said Harvard was immune from suit under a nationwide Anatomical Gifts Act because it acted in “good faith.”

At Monday’s oral argument, plaintiffs’ attorney Jeffrey Catalano said the law didn’t apply because it covered only the contractual aspects of the donation, not the treatment of the body afterward. But the justices seemed unimpressed.

“I just don’t see the argument that the whole process isn’t covered by this,” Justice Scott Kafker said.

Catalano had better luck with his fallback argument: that Harvard didn’t act in good faith because it was answerable for the conduct of its manager.

Harvard’s lawyer, Martin Murphy of Manatt Phelps, said the university wasn’t liable for Lodge’s actions because they were outside the scope of his employment. “The more outrageous the employee’s actions, the less the employer is responsible,” he argued.

But this troubled Kafker. “The more excessive they are, the less responsible the employer is. There’s something bothersome about that. I just can’t get my arms around it,” he said.

“How is it, when it gets so egregious, you can’t hold anyone responsible? That’s what gnaws at me,” Kafker went on. “It does seem problematic at the end of the day that the institution that got the body and benefited [isn’t] responsible for its manager.”

Catalano then pressed, saying Harvard not only was responsible for Lodge’s actions, but also actively knew or should have known about them because the morgue was equipped with security cameras and access controls.

“He was letting unauthorized strangers in, and he was dragging body parts out to his car with a license plate that said ‘Grim Reaper,’” Catalano said.

The Keches Law Group attorney also appeared to score a point by arguing that a decision favoring Harvard would discourage families from donating bodies to science because they would have no recourse if the remains were abused.

The trade in human body parts goes back to the very beginning of the country, because “as soon as there were medical schools, there was a need for cadavers,” Redman said. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was also a tremendous interest in collecting remains in museums — often in pursuit of dubious projects such as comparative racial anatomy, phrenology and eugenics.

The lack of regulation stems from an old legal principal that no one could own a dead body, said Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School. “Without property rights, it was much harder to protect” against abuses, she noted.

U.S. museums possess about 500,000 sets of human remains and the Smithsonian alone had 38,000 at one point, according to Redman, whose book “Bone Rooms” chronicles such collections.

Many remains were gathered for profit by shady government officials, soldiers, slaveowners, doctors, border agents and people who dug up potter’s fields.

While the donation of dead bodies for transplants is highly regulated, the donation of remains for medical instruction and research is a legal gray area. In many cases, poor people who can’t afford a funeral home’s services are encouraged to donate the body to science in return for a free cremation. The remains then go to a “body broker” who dismembers the corpse and sells the parts, often paying a referral fee to the mortician.

Body brokers are almost entirely unregulated, and a Reuters study in 2017 found widespread abuses including filthy conditions, dismembering corpses with chainsaws and discarding bodies in medical waste incinerators instead of cremating them.

One of the few attempts at regulation was a 1990 federal law called NAGPRA that made it illegal to traffic in Native American remains and required a large number of museums to return such items to descendants or tribes. Largely as a result, Redman said, the Smithsonian’s collection of human remains has dropped from 38,000 to about 30,000.

But Redman is skeptical that there will be additional broad-based regulations soon. “There’s no interest group representing the dead,” he observed.