In July 2022, Sarah Pauley defied her estranged husband's orders and started poking through items on his side of the basement. What she discovered was straight out of a horror film: alleged human remains. But as Rolling Stone explains, nobody is accusing Jeremy Pauley of being a killer. Instead, he is the "alleged linchpin" of a macabre network of people who buy and sell such remains, writes Brenna Ehrlich. His story is connected to the hard-to-fathom case earlier this year in which the manager of the Harvard Medical School morgue was accused of selling body parts on the black market. Cedric Lodge allegedly let people into the morgue to browse and buy various specimens, and authorities say he and his wife, Denise, made a lucrative income this way. Both have pleaded not guilty to selling donated bodies.
Who would buy such things? As Ehrlich explains, a surprisingly robust community of people who see themselves as "oddity collectors" across the US. The law can be gray on the matter, but such collections are "mostly technically legal," writes Ehrlich. Jeremy Pauley, for example, had long kept antique specimens in jars with labels explaining where they came from, says Sarah Pauley. Then came her basement discovery. "I lifted the lid of a bucket and I knew immediately [that this was different] from his previous work, which was legit," she says. On his confiscated laptop, police found an inquiry from a mortuary worker in Arkansas (also charged) on whether he knew of anyone interested in an embalmed brain. He allegedly paid $1,200 for two brains and a heart. The full story unpacks all of this, including interviews with family members whose loved ones donated their bodies to Harvard, only to have them sold piecemeal. (Read other longforms.)
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