A Pennsylvania man with a very distinct style pleaded guilty to his role in the scandal embroiling the Harvard Medical School Anatomical Gifts Program morgue.
Jeremy Lee Pauley, 41, of Thompson, Pa., who the feds have also listed as living in Bloomberg and Enola in the same state, pleaded guilty Thursday before U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Chief Judge Matthew W. Brann to conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen property.
In the plea deal, he admitted that he had purchased human remains he knew were stolen and reselling many of those body parts to others.
Specific body parts Pauley purportedly purchased were spelled out in another defendant’s indictment and include: “2 brains, one with skullcap, 3 hearts one cut, 2 fake boobies, one large belly button piece of skin, one arm, one huge piece of skin, and one lung.”
Pauley was one of seven people caught up in the case in which morgue employee Cedric Lodge, 55, of Goffstown, N.H., allegedly stole body parts from the morgue to sell them online to some curious customers.
His alleged customers and conspirators also charged in the Pennsylvania case include his wife Denise Lodge, 63; Katrina MacLean, 44, of Salem; Joshua Taylor, 46, of West Lawn, Pa.; Matthew Lampi, 52, of East Bethel, Minn. Candace Chapman-Scott, of Little Rock, Ark., was indicted in federal court in her home state for allegedly doing similar things as Cedric Lodge but in the mortuary she works for, which does work for the University of Arkansas’ anatomical gift program.
Pauley, who sports body modifications far in excess of the typical fare including gauged ears and lip rings — which he also has — including an inked eyeball, lizard-skin-like facial tattoos and metal spikes popping from the top of his skull.
It’s a look befitting his work as the “lead preservation specialist of retired medical specimens and curator of historical remains and artifacts” for his own museum, named Memento Mori — a Latin phrase meaning to remember you must die — and his eponymous Pauley Institute of Preservation, as the Herald has reported.
He was federally charged with abuse of a corpse, receiving stolen property and other charges and was the man MacLean — the owner of Kat’s Creepy Creations, a Peabody shop that advertises itself on its Instagram page as “Creations that shock the mind & shake the soul” — allegedly described as “the dude I sent the chest piece to tan.”