Harvard’s Dirty Secret: Bejeweled Skulls and Grave Robbing
The manager of Harvard's Medical school was just indicted for selling human remains to oddities shops, but the history of Harvard's involvement in black market corpse dealings goes back over 250 years. Let's travel through the morgue, past the skeletons found in Harvard's walls, all the way back to the most high profile murder to ever happen at the school.
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SOURCES
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/human-body-parts-policy?id=4325
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdpa/pr/six-charged-trafficking-stolen-human-remains https://www.npr.org/2023/05/01/1173030059/arkansas-woman-stolen-human-body-parts
https://www.npr.org/2007/11/29/16678816/into-the-heart-of-indias-underground-bone-trade
https://allthatsinteresting.com/body-snatching
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Burke-and-William-Hare
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/28/grave-robbers/
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1999/7/9/human-bones-found-during-holden-chapel/
https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/west-boston/samuel-parkman/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Burke-and-William-Hare
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/murder/#transcript
TRANSCRIPT
Listener discretion is advised.
Cedric Lodge walked out of the morgue at the Harvard Medical School, just like he had almost every day for the last almost 30 years. He was the manager of the schools Anatomical Gift program, a program for people who had elected to donate their bodies to medical research. It was a humble job that had the potential to help shape the future of medicine. But that day, May 6th, 2023 would be his last day.
Within a month Cedric would be walking out of a new hampshire courthouse, swarmed by cameras and reporters. He and his wife would be facing federal charges for allegedly snatching bodies from the morgue, bringing them to his home in New Hampshire, and selling their body parts online.
What Cedric was part of was a much larger black market for the trafficking of human remains, but I would also argue it was part of a long standing tradition. See, Harvard has ben in the body snatching game for over 200 years, and the history of medical schools using corpses for research is deep and dark
Today, i want to take you where my dark curiosity lead me. Through he back channels of Cedric’s body ring, to the dark history of Harvard’s medical school, all the way to the most high profile murder to happen at the school. And just a heads up, this one is a little morbid
Welcome to Heart Starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. Today’s episode definitely falls into the horrors category. It’s a great example of where dark curiosity can lead you which is perfect as this is a community for the darkly curious.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the community and I hope you do, you can follow the podcast on instagram and tik tok at heart starts pounding, or support the show on patreon in our Rogue detecting society.. There you’ll have access to some bonus content.
So to start us off, there’s a few more things I want to tell you about what was recently happening at Harvard.
After Cedric Lodge was indicted for being part of an illegal cadaver ring, more information started coming out about what he was doing.
At 6am on June 14th, neighbors on Orchard Street in a small town in new hampshire woke to see police officers carrying boxes out of Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise’s house. The neighbors had always thought the couple was nice, but they definitely had a vibe that was different from the rest of the neighborhood. They had gargoyles in their yard, skull images on their curtains, and a large wooden coffin in their garage. Strange, sure, but everyone knew that Cedric was a manager at a morgue, so they understood it.
But what they didn’t know, was that since at least 2018, Cedric had been *allegedly* trafficking remains from the morgue where he worked back to his house. He was indicted on stealing skin, bones, brains and more and selling them on the internet.
“Who do you think he was selling them too”
I HAD to tell someone about this part, so this is Leo, my darkly curious sibling
Yes, that’s right. These remains were going to private buyers who were largely not using them for medical purposes.
One of the buyers was Katrina McLean, of Salem Massachusetts. Katrina had a store in Peabody Mass called Kat’s creepy creations which sold morbid oddities that “shock the mind and soul” The FBI had already questioned her as part of a bigger investigation in March. Her instagram didn’t even hide what she was doing, under one post the caption read “…yes that is a real human skull,” “If you’re in the market for human bones hit me up!”
It’s alleged that on October 28th, 2020, Lodge invited her to the morgue, where he let her select the dissected faces of corpses she wanted to sell in her collection.
And then there was Jeremy Pauley, a man in Pennsylvania who also sold oddities and human remains, who sent 25 payments totalling over 40k to Lodge.
It’s dark, I know, but this isn’t the first time harvard has made headlines for the black market happenings regarding cadavers.
In 1999, Harvard University was undergoing renovations on one of it’s buildings, Holden Chapel, when the workers noticed there was a strange texture within the walls. After carefully retrieving the pieces of what was clearly not drywall, they realized that centuries old human skeletons had been hidden in the walls of the chapel. And no, this was not a mysterious Harvard murder as some of the staff started hypothesizing
The chapel actually used to be the medical school. So the bodies made sense, but WHY were they hidden in the walls?
Well, at the time of the medical school’s inception, it wasn’t common for bodies to be donated for scientific purposes. In the late 1700’s, Massachusetts had a law that one cadaver could be dissected every four years, and that was really generous for a state at the time. Doctors were graduating with barely any experience or knowledge of the human body. And you could feel it in society, people didn’t trust doctors. You had a way higher chance of dying in the hospital than you had from suffering at home.
in order to teach med students the inner workings of the bodies they’d spend their careers healing, they knew they needed cadavers. And the school was determined to get them.
So, just like many schools at the time, Harvard turned to grave robbing.
And unlike the modern day grave robbing happening at Harvard by Cedric Lodge, this grave robbing was a systemic pillar of the school. John Warren, founder of Harvard Medical school, started his career as a grave robber in the name of science. That’s a fact you can take to trivia night. Warren was part of the Spunker club, a secret society of grave robbers interested in surgery and medicine. They were known for their cleanliness and precision when robbing graves. If you came upon your loved ones grave and it looked like someone had pillaged the site, it was definitely not the work of John Warren.
And John Warren’s spirit was passed on to the students. At Harvard, just like today how you’d be responsible for retrieving your own books for lectures, students used to be responsible for retrieving their own medical cadavers. So they’d take to the local graveyards, under the cover of night, often in groups to go retrieve the bodies. And this was becoming standard at most med schools in the country
One snowy evening in early 1824, a man in West Haven, Connecticut, close to Yale university, awoke at 2am to the sound of a wagon passing his home. He knew it was headed towards the direction of the local cemetery, where days prior, 19 year old Bathsheba Smith had been buried. The next day, a constable was summoned to her grave, where he was shocked, but not surprised, to see the packed ground on top of her grave churned up, as if someone had redug the grave hours earlier. And sure enough, when the constable with the help of two diggers made it down to the wooden coffin, they found it empty except for a few valuables that Bathsheba had been buried with. The grave diggers clearly had one thing they wanted, and it wasn’t jewelry.
News quickly spread of the robbed grave, an occurrence that by that point was so common, you’d be pressed to find someone in town who wasn’t affected by it. And everyone knew it was the medical school.
So the constable got a warrant and marched straight to Yale University, where he found the body of Bathsheba still in her burial clothes, under the stone flooring of the medical building. She was retrieved and brought back to her final resting place, but by noon, an angry mob had gathered outside of the school.
Over the next several days, rioters beat drums, broke windows and even tried to tar and feather a medical student in retaliation. 81 Medical students barricaded themselves in the medical school to protect themselves. And eventually, Ephraim Colborn, a medical assistant at the school was sentenced to 9 months in jail and a $300 fine for the crime, which is almost 10 thousand dollars today. It’s believed that Colborn was taking the fall for the students that really robbed the grave.
Harvard saw this and feared it’s own students going to jail or worse, being scared off from becoming doctors. So the university started hiring professional grave robbers called resurrectionists
One of the men hired by Harvard, who some of the bones in the walls may be from, was Ephraim Littlefield. Ephraim was hired, at least on paper, to attend to the professors of Harvard, cleaning their classrooms and fetching their teaching tools. He and his wife lived in the basement of the medical school, among the schools specimen and medical equipment.
But on the side, Ephraim was in charge of the corpse business at Harvard. If he wasn’t collecting the bodies himself, he was instructing the resurrectionists on where to get bodies and making sure they got paid. He distributed the corpses to professors and then made sure they were secretly disposed of when they were done.
It was a booming business in the 1840’s when he was working there. Each body made him almost 1000 bucks in today’s dollars.
But everything was about to come to a head, unbeknownst to Ephraim. The anger towards medical schools for stealing the bodies of the communities loved ones, the professors abuse of power in the situation. The desperate need for bodies by any means necessary. And Ephraim would find himself at the middle of it when one of Boston's wealthiest men went missing mysteriously at the medical school. After the break
BREAK
Harvard Medical School, 1849. What a time for medicine. The first anesthesia had recently been used in a dental operation, meaning patients could now be put under during surgery. Before this, you had to be awake and fully aware while being operated on
1849 was also the year that the first woman, Elizabeth Blackwell, earned a medical degree. But for how progressive the field of medicine was becoming, it still had a long way to go. Germs hadn’t been discovered yet, and surgery often meant certain death from infection.
It was during this pivotal time, when discoveries were constantly being made that changed the course of medicine forever, that George Parkman walked into the Harvard Medical school, and never walked out. Setting off one of the greatest mysteries in the schools history.
George Parkman was one of Boston’s elite. His father, Samuel Parkman was believed to be the richest man in boston, making his fortune in real estate. He put pressure on his children to be successful as well, and George was trying to live up to his fathers high expectations. He graduated from Harvard Medical school, and after studying in Paris Post grad, he came back to the United States to work on revolutionizing our mental health system.
But, on the day of his disappearance, November 23rd 1849, George was working as a land lord and money lender in Boston. At 3pm that day, he arrived to the medical school to visit Professor of Chemistry, Joseph Webster.
Ephraim Littlefield, the schools henchman, watched as George entered the medical school. It was a friday and classes were out. Joseph Webster, the professor to which Ephraim was attending to that day, typically went out on the town Friday evenings, giving Ephraim the weekend to clean up the chemistry lab and reset it for Monday's class.
But the work didn’t stop for Ephraim on Friday evenings. Even when his boss was away at lavish parties, mingling with Boston’s upper crust. No, now that the weather had cooled and the nights were getting frosty, it was becoming the best time to rob graves. Bodies were better preserved in the winter, being nearly frozen underground. It was around this time that Ephraim would have been busiest securing bodies for the medical school.
Around 5:30pm, Ephraim had finished dinner and went over to Webster’s lab to begin tidying, when he noticed the door to the lab was bolted shut. Webster always left the door open for him. And beyond that, there was the sound of rushing water from the sink on the other side.
Ephraim turned to leave when he heard walking on the back stairs. One pair of feet. He turned around the corner to see who it was, when Webster appeared coming down the stairs.
He told Ephraim that he was examining the chemical properties of grapevine wood and lost track of time. Webster then shuffled out of the building and started his walk home. Ephraim didn’t remember seeing Parkman ever leave.
And soon after, George Parkman’s family starts putting up flyers. George never made it home that night, which was unusual for him. They were offering a reward of 200 thousand dollars in today’s conversion.
Ephraim realizes around this time that he may have been one of the last few people who saw George, and he realizes this right around the time that the police do as well. George hadn't been seen after arriving at the school.
It was the 1840’s so it took the Boston police a little while to figure this out. As was protocol for the time, first they had to blame crime on the Irish, find out that didn’t really make sense, and then they could start looking for the real perpetrator.
And when they arrived the following week to Harvard Medical school, it was Ephraim’s word against Websters. And Webster said that he left the school at 3pm, as he typically did on Fridays. Yes, George came and visited, but then they both left.
Ephraim swore he saw Webster at 5:30, but who were the police going to believe. A known graverobber, who made BANK for procuring bodies for the school and was the last person to see a missing man, or an Upper Class, Ivy League Professor.
As the police are searching the chemistry lab, they notice that the door to Webster’s bathroom is bolted shut. They don’t think much of it, but Ephraim clocks that as being weird. Why is Webster locking all of these doors?
Plus, Ephraim knew why Parkman was coming to see Webster that day. Webster owed Parkman money, and Parkman didn’t let any debts go uncollected, not even for his friends.
To add fuel to the fire. Webster was notoriously bad with money. He worked around other Harvard Professors, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had married into obscene wealth, and Webster felt pressure to keep up appearances. He lived far outside of his means, one time even buying a Mastodon for Harvard that he couldn’t afford to try and win favor at the school.
Ephraim had a bad feeling about what happened to George, and he knew that he was probably the police’s prime suspect. So. He did what he felt he had to.
He opened a trap door on campus to the main sewer line, and walked through 4 feet of waste until he got to Websters toilet. Once down there, he broke through a brick wall separating the chamber from the main line. And sure enough. Through the hole in the brick, lit by the lantern that kept going out from the clogged air, was a mans pelvis and two severed legs.
Ephraim ran to the police to tell them what he found, but this didn’t do much to quell their suspicions about him. How did Ephraim know exactly where to dig through th brick wall. Was it because he put the body there himself. Now there was quite the reward for finding Parkman, was this all so that Ephraim could claim the money.
This evidence that Parkman had been killed at the school sent Boston into a rage. Tensions were already high in Boston at the time, remember, there were Irish people here now. Something Bostonian’s really hated. An influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840’s turned America’s Athens, a city of ideas, innovation, and industry, into America’s dublin, they joked.
But, more importantly, the community was terrified that the school had graduated from robbing graves, to killing people for their corpses. They still remembered reading about how 20 years ago, two Irish immigrants in Scotland were caught suffocating people so they could sell their bodies to a local medical school. Did the horrors wrought by William Burke and William Hare arrive on the shores of Boston??
So, the people rioted in the streets, and Mayor Josiah Quincy had to call in troops to quell them. 25 years after the riots brought on by Bathsheba Smith at Yale
The men went to trial. And it was the testimony of Parkman’s brother that really cemented Webster’s guilt. According to Parkman's Brother Robert Gould Shaw, one day he and Parkman were walking down the street when they came upon Webster. The three had a friendly hello, and when they continued on, Shaw told his brother that Webster offered to sell him some minerals.
This sent Parkman into a rage. It turns out, Webster had borrowed so much money from Parkman, nearly 100,000 dollars, that Parkman now had a mortgage on all of Webster's belongings. He was not allowed to sell off the minerals that were now technically Parkman’s.
Parkman and his brother knew that Webster was borrowing this money to maintain his lavish lifestyle. Apparently it was a not so well kept secret amongst the other Harvard Professors also.
Webster was found guilty of Parkman’s murder and was hanged on August 30th, 1850. The sheriff sent out engraved invitations for other upper class Bostonians who wanted to attend the execution.
He was buried in secrecy on Copps hill, none of his peers were allowed to attend the burial. This was because grave robbers would be excited to get their hands on a premium body like Websters. The notoriety would surely make his body sell for more.
There used to be a flat stone marking where he was buried. But shortly afterwards that stone vanished. Perhaps tossed aside while one of Ephraims henchmen dug through the freshly packed dirt.
By the late 19th century, corpse donation was becoming more widely accepted, and some of the madness surrounding the black market for bodies started subsiding.
Though Harvard has publicly announced that they had no knowledge of what Cedric Lodge and his wife were doing, some could argue that this is the new form the corpse black market has taken on. The selling and trading of corpses not for research, but for collection.
After all, it took me all of 5 minutes to join another facebook group that advertised human remains.
I don’t say any of this to discourage anyone from making the choice to donate their body to science, which I know sounds silly to say after all of this. We are so close to better treatment for type 1 diabetes because of pancreatic cells taken from cadavers. These donations do real, important work. And while there are a few bad actors, there’s even more doctors doing this ethically.
Here’s my morbid reminder that death comes for us all. And while Cedric chose to spend his life facilitating the sale of others. One day, just like John Webster, it could be his body that’s being passed along the black market channels. And that’s the circle of life.
This has been heart starts pounding. Written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Music by artlist. New patrons will be thanked in 2 weeks. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben jaffee. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until Next time. OOOOoooooOOOO