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Unsealed court papers clarified the extent of a Berks County man’s alleged role in a conspiracy that federal authorities said involved people in five states who trafficked in stolen human remains
Joshua M. Taylor, 46, who resides in the 1900 block of Gerard Avenue in the West Wyomissing neighborhood of Spring Township, is charged along with six others, including another Pennsylvania man.
Taylor was arrested Wednesday, when the indictments in the case were unsealed, and he is in custody. Federal authorities listed Taylor’s general address as West Lawn, which is the post office that serves West Wyomissing.
Spring police Chief Stephen Powell said his department accompanied federal agents to Taylor’s home when they took him into custody, but he knows nothing about the case except what he’s read in publicly available documents and media reports.
Taylor remains in custody of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, based in Scranton, where a federal grand jury handed down the indictments, pending his arraignment scheduled for later this month.
In the indictment, officials allege Taylor bought and had stolen human remains shipped to him from New Hampshire, transported human remains from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, and sold and shipped stolen human remains to buyers, including Jeremy Pauley, also a Pennsylvania resident.
Pauley, who was charged by a criminal information filing in lieu of a grand jury, plans to plead guilty June 27 to his role in the alleged conspiracy, according to a federal district court filing Thursday.
The charging documents don’t spell out how Taylor initially connected with his co-defendants, other than stating that the defendants arranged via cellphone and social websites to buy, ship and receive body parts such as embalmed human brains, skulls, skin, dissected faces and heads, internal organs and stillborn fetuses.
The indictments and the criminal information filing against Pauley trace some of the trafficking of stolen human remains to 2018.
According to prosecutors:
In June or July 2020, Katrina Maclean, owner of the Kat’s Creepy Creations studio in Peabody, Mass., shipped human skin to Pauley, who resided in Enola, Cumberland County, and Bloomsburg, Columbia County, to engage his service as a tanner to create leather from the skin. Maclean agreed to provide human skin to Pauley in lieu of monetary payment.
Maclean then contacted Cedric Lodge about obtaining human skin to send to “the dude I sent the chest piece to tan.” Lodge agreed to look for skin at Harvard Medical School, where he worked.
From 2018 through 2022, Lodge worked in the morgue for the Anatomical Gifts Program at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Prosecutors said he stole organs and other parts of cadavers donated for medical research and education before their scheduled cremations.
Pauley shipped remains he had purchased from Taylor, Maclean and Candace Chapman Scott, a mortician in Little Rock, Ark., to buyers in several states, including Mathew Lampi in Minnesota.
Lodge at times transported stolen remains from Boston to his residence in New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Denise Lodge, sold the remains to Taylor, Maclean and others.
At times, Cedric Lodge allowed Taylor and Maclean into the medical school morgue to examine cadavers and choose what to purchase.
Maclean and Taylor resold the stolen remains for profit, including to Pauley, authorities said.
Pauley also made purchases from Scott, who stole human remains including stillborn fetuses from her employer just before they were to be cremated.
The underlying motivation, investigators said, was profiting from the theft, sale and resale of organs and other remains that were stolen, without knowledge or permission of the Harvard Medical School or the Arkansas mortuary, before they were to be cremated and the cremains returned to the donors’ families.
Pauley transferred 25 PayPal payments totaling $40,048 to Taylor between April 1, 2021, and Jan. 13, 2022.
From Sept. 3, 2018, through July 12, 2021, Taylor made payment to Denise Lodge’s PayPal account totaling $37,355 for human remains stolen by Cedric Lodge from the medical school.
The memo attached to one of those payments from Taylor read, “head number 7”. On Nov. 20, 2020, Taylor sent Denise Lodge $200 with a memo that read, “braiiiiiins.”
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