Case of stolen body parts from Harvard Medical School morgue began with a tip from an ex-lover

Federal and state court documents, as well as interviews, lay out the unlikely origins of a grisly case that led investigators from small-town Pennsylvania to an Arkansas mortuary to the halls of Harvard University’s storied medical school.

It began last summer, when officers from the East Pennsboro Township Police in Pennsylvania received a complaint about “possible human body parts being sold on Facebook,” according to an affidavit filed by the department in August.

On June 20, 2022, a pair of officers arrived at an off-white multifamily home near the banks of Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, not far from Harrisburg.

The home’s occupant was Jeremy Pauley, a 41-year-old onetime aspiring model who was difficult to miss. Half of his face was covered by a tattoo, and his shaven head had been implanted with metal spikes. He also claimed to have tattooed his eyeball — “which many mistake for a contact,” he wrote in an online profile.

Pauley considered himself a “body modification artist” and collector of “oddities,” part of a fringe community that deals in human remains. His personal website includes photos of what appear to be several fetuses in jars. On Facebook, he shared photos of stacked bones. And he’d once dabbled, he said in an interview with the website Dread Central, in art made with human blood.

Pauley spoke passionately and protectively about the work. Specimens donated to science, he wrote on his website, “deserve the upmost [sic] respect and care — long after their immediate use in the scientific field,” and he was quick to assure that it was all above board.

“My doing business comes under great scrutiny,” he told the podcast “Uncovering The Underground” in January 2022. “So I can assure you, everything I deal in is on the up and up.”

What officers found that day last summer was unsettling, perhaps, but not apparently criminal. Pauley was in possession of three full skeletons, according to police, and “approximately 15 to 20 human skulls.” The human parts, he said, had been purchased through legal means.

Satisfied, officers left.

The unannounced police visit did not appear to have alarmed Pauley. In a message to Matthew Lampi, an alleged buyer from Minnesota, he said that police had shown up following an anonymous complaint but that “in the end the only thing that mattered was nothing was proven grave robbed or stolen out of a morgue,” according to federal court documents unsealed this week.

He ended that text, the feds say, with a smiley face emoji.

Ten days after the initial police visit, meanwhile, Pauley agreed to sell Lampi “one half head, one whole head minus skullcap, three brains with skullcap, one heart, three liver, five lungs, two kidneys, one full pelvis female, one piece of skin with nipple, four hands” from an Arkansas seller for $4,000, according to the federal court documents quoting online messages between the pair.

But on July 8, 2022, police received a second complaint about Pauley — this one, Cumberland County (Pa.) District Attorney Sean McCormack told the Globe, from “someone [Pauley] was no longer dating.”

The caller reported finding suspected human remains in the basement of Pauley’s home, including “human organs” and “human skin” packed inside of several 5-gallon buckets, according to police records.

During a second visit to Pauley’s home that day, police — armed this time with a search warrant — allegedly recovered three 5-gallon buckets containing, among other things, two human brains, two lungs, a heart, two livers, and a skull with hair.

What followed was a sweeping probe that would grow to include multiple agencies and several states.

Soon after, authorities say they were able to find Candace Scott, who had allegedly been shipping Pauley body parts she’d stolen from the Arkansas mortuary where she worked.

After looping in federal investigators, authorities were able to track down Lampi, who’d allegedly been buying and selling from Pauley, as well as Cedric and Denise Lodge, the Goffstown, N.H., couple now accused of selling cadavers stolen from Harvard Medical School, where Cedric Lodge was employed.

Katrina Maclean, a Salem woman who runs Kat’s Creepy Creations in Peabody, and Joshua Taylor, of Pennsylvania, have also been charged with buying from the Lodges.

Pauley is due in federal court later this month, where he is scheduled to be arraigned and have a proposed guilty plea agreement heard.

Neither Pauley nor his lawyer responded to calls seeking comment.

The Lodges both declined to speak with reporters following court appearances last week in Concord, N.H. Attempts to reach Maclean last week were unsuccessful.

McCormack, the local district attorney, declined to comment on Pauley’s criminal history, but the official Pennsylvania online court search showed little besides mundane traffic issues.

The local case in Pennsylvania remains open, McCormack said, though discussions are ongoing about whether to dismiss charges and defer to federal prosecutors, as often happens in such instances.

“It’s shocking,” McCormack said in an interview this week. “I’ve been a prosecutor for 33 years now, so I’ve seen a lot.

“But nothing like this.”

Indeed, as the story of the stolen remains ricocheted across the world, it wasn’t far from the minds of those in Cumberland County.

“Oh, the skin guy,” said one person who answered the phone at a law-enforcement agency in Cumberland County this week.

Asked whether he’d ever encountered such a case — an alleged black market for stolen body parts — Cumberland County Coroner Charlie Hall was succinct.

“I didn’t know it even existed,” he said.

Spencer Buell and Steve Annear of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Dugan Arnett can be reached at dugan.arnett@globe.com. Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com.Follow him on Twitter @cotterreporter.