A California man admitted to keeping human torsos in a freezer for his corporate clients. A Michigan man sold more than 200 severed human heads in a two-year period. An Arkansas woman is accused of putting a human fetus for sale on Facebook.
A vibrant human remains trafficking market has exploited body donation programs across the country for decades, resulting in the mishandling, dismemberment, and sale of corpses intended to be used for medical education or research, according to court records for multiple criminal cases involving trafficked human remains.
Harvard Medical School drew national media attention in June, after its morgue manager was arrested and accused of conspiring to transport and sell the remains of people who volunteered for the school's anatomical gifts program. Cedric Lodge has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The donors had intended to donate their bodies for educational or research purposes; instead, their skin, bones, and organs were harvested and sold via social media.
The Harvard morgue scandal was vast in scale — one lawsuit estimated that up to 400 donated human cadavers were affected. But it's far from the only anatomical gifts program that has fallen prey to human remains trafficking. For decades, authorities and media outlets have been unearthing gruesome tales of cadavers harvested from medical schools and research facilities.
Here are four instances where human bodies that were donated to science were instead callously carved up and sold: