WBUR investigates the Harvard Medical School morgue scandal

WBUR has released Last Seen: Postmortem, an investigation into the scandal unearthed when Harvard Medical School morgue manager Cedric Lodge was arrested for allegedly stealing body parts to sell online. The series reveals a national network of body-part swapping, implicating Harvard and exposing broken promises made to donors.

Hosted by WBUR senior reporter Ally Jarmanning, Postmortem is the latest season of Last Seen — a podcast about people, places and things that have gone missing. All five podcast episodes are available now.  Last Seen: Postmortem is presented in a myriad of ways for audiences to discover it — as a podcast, a radio broadcast, a robust online story at wbur.org and a mini series of videos on Instagram and TikTok. The series will air in five daily installments during WBUR's Morning Edition beginning Monday, June 24.

"This story gives a glimpse into a macabre and lucrative world: a nationwide network of human remains trading," says Jarmanning. For more than a century, medical schools relied on grave robbing and body snatching to supply anatomical dissection classes. This dark history and the relatively recent move to treat donor cadavers with respect and dignity puts the Harvard morgue scandal in context along with the modern ethics of buying and selling human remains. Throughout the series, Jarmanning seeks to answer the haunting questions that drive her reporting: How should the dead be treated? And who gets to decide?

WBUR partnered with Dave Shaw, a WBUR alum and former supervising editor for The New York Times's Washington bureau of The Daily, to be the series editor alongside WBUR's local newsroom ​​deputy managing editor, Beth Healy, and executive producer of WBUR Podcasts, Ben Brock Johnson.

"WBUR has one of the largest public radio newsrooms in the country, with incredible reporters doing singular, in-depth reporting, and Ally is a perfect example of that fact," says Johnson. "WBUR is also one of the largest public radio podcast organizations in the country, and we've been working closely with our Boston-based newsroom colleagues to bring more of their local enterprise reporting to national podcast audiences."

Last Seen: Postmortem takes listeners on a journey that starts in a Pennsylvania basement, where buckets of body parts were first found. The owner of those buckets leads investigators back to Harvard. Jarmanning spends time with the families of Harvard donors as they struggle with the uncertainty of what really happened to their loved ones' remains and attempts to get answers from the medical school. She also examines the subculture of collectors in this realm, visiting a house full of skeletons occupied by a couple who call themselves "rescuers" of human remains.

About the Host: Ally Jarmanning

Jarmanning began reporting on the Harvard morgue story when it first broke last June, providing ongoing coverage as the case unfolded. She's a senior reporter focused on criminal justice and police accountability, championing data and public records in the WBUR newsroom. Jarmanning joined WBUR in 2016 as a member of the Morning Edition team and later specialized in data-based journalism on the digital team.