• 8-year sentence for selling body parts
• Sales included brains, skin, hands, and faces

The former Harvard Medical School morgue director, Cedric Lodge, was sentenced to eight years in prison after being found guilty of stealing and selling body parts “as if they were baubles.”

Authorities said Lodge was at the center of a gruesome scheme, shipping brains, skin, hands, and faces to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere after the donated bodies at Harvard were no longer needed for research.

His wife, Denise Lodge, was sentenced to nearly one year in prison for assisting him, and both appeared Tuesday in federal court in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

In one instance, Cedric Lodge supplied skin to a buyer to be tanned and turned into a book cover, described by U.S. attorney Alisan Martin as a “deeply horrifying reality.”

She added that the couple sold a man’s face — perhaps to be kept on a shelf, or for even more disturbing purposes, according to court filings.

Martin noted that Lodge, 58, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, treated parts of “beloved human beings as if they were baubles for profit,” collecting thousands of dollars from 2018 to March 2020.

Typically, donated bodies are returned to families or cremated after research or teaching, but Lodge admitted removing parts before cremation.

Lodge had managed the morgue for 28 years and expressed remorse in court.

His attorney, Patrick Casey, called his actions “extremely serious,” stating: “Mr. Lodge acknowledges the gravity of his conduct and the harm inflicted on the deceased and their grieving families.”

Harvard suspended body donations for five months in 2023 after charges were filed.

Prosecutors noted that at least six others, including a crematorium employee in Arkansas, have pleaded guilty in the investigation of body-parts trafficking.