A reporter follows stolen remains from morgue to sentencing.
Last Seen is a WBUR Podcasts feed of reported miniseries, and its recent episodes follow Postmortem, Allie Jarmanning's investigation into the abuse of bodies donated to Harvard Medical School. Her reporting runs from anatomy labs to Jeremy Pauly's doorstep in rural Pennsylvania, and she returns after the series wrapped to report the sentences.
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Last Seen is a WBUR Podcasts feed out of Boston that carries reported miniseries, and its recent episodes stay with a single unsettling case. The series is Postmortem, from host and reporter Allie Jarmanning, and it is about what happened to bodies donated to Harvard Medical School. Each numbered episode opens with a plain warning that the material can get graphic. It does. 'Postmortem Ep. 1: The crime' sets its scene in June 2023, when Dr. Sabina Hildebrandt logs onto a Zoom call where the dean of medical education has very bad news for Harvard's anatomy program. From there the story widens to how doctors have always learned the body from the dead, including a former student's memory of walking into Harvard's anatomy lab in 1987: the formaldehyde, and the worry about gagging. Jarmanning does her reporting on the ground. In 'Postmortem, Ep. 3: The collectors' she spends nearly an hour on back roads in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, nervous and wishing for a gas station, before knocking on Jeremy Pauly's door. He tells her he is just trying to get on with his life, and he stops answering after that. In 'Postmortem, Ep. 2: The victims' a mother named Amber describes reading a letter at the end of her driveway and holding herself together so she could hug her son on his last day of second grade. 'Postmortem, Ep. 4: The anatomy lab' takes place in a windowless room at Quinnipiac University, where 'body bag' is quickly corrected to 'donor bag' and Jesse Gomes heads the anatomical gift program. That episode also brings in Dr. Berry's research into a historical trade in predominantly Black bodies, and the letters she got from doctors describing their own training in the 1950s and 1960s. It asks whether that history still affects who chooses to donate today. 'Postmortem, Update: The Sentences' returns a year and a half after the series wrapped. Jarmanning tells the host of WBUR's Beyond All Repair how the cases ended: guilty pleas and sentences for Cedric Lodge, the former Harvard morgue manager, for his wife, and for Pauly. Families, meanwhile, are pursuing a lawsuit to find out what went wrong beyond one man. The feed also carries 'Introducing: What Remains from NHPR's Outside/In', a preview of producer Felix Poon's miniseries about roughly 1,300 skulls held by the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. That story includes the museum's first Black director, an activist named Ali pressing for repatriation, and the treatment of MOVE bombing victims. In both series, the question is what the dead and their families are owed. The Postmortem episodes end by asking listeners for tips, stories and voice memos.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants true crime built on in-person reporting and court outcomes rather than speculation, and who can handle frank, sometimes graphic talk about dead bodies, grief and the history of race in medicine.
What sets it apart: The crime at the center of Postmortem is not a murder but what was done to donated bodies. The reporting follows that crime into anatomy education, consent and racism in medicine, then comes back for the sentencing. Sharing the feed with NHPR's What Remains adds a museum's skull collection and the push for repatriation.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A measured return to the Harvard morgue case, where guilty pleas still leave families pressing for answers.
The follow-up to Stolen Bodies of Harvard picks up after the main story should have ended, treating justice as something still in motion. Allie Jarmanning returns to the cases of Cedric Lodge, his wife, and Jeremy Pauly, who have pleaded guilty and been sentenced, then shifts…
A museum's collection of 1,300 skulls becomes a reckoning with repatriation, racism, and scientific ethics.
What Remains follows the Penn Museum's collection of approximately 1,300 skulls into a larger argument over authority, consent, and the treatment of human remains.
A museum forum turns the ethics of human remains into an unsettled public reckoning.
Last Seen's "Postmortem" follows the Mutter Museum as skulls, tumors in jars, a distended colon, and around 6,600 human remains raise a hard question about inherited collections: what does respect mean when bodies were gathered under older standards?
A medical school visit opens into the ethics, language, and racist history surrounding donated bodies.
A visit to Quinnipiac University's Netter School of Medicine starts in a stark white, windowless room, where a woman lies sealed in an opaque white donor bag. From there, the episode turns less on shock than on language.
A Halloween-season visit frames a daughter's fear that her mother's remains were caught up in the Harvard morgue scandal.
A Halloween drive through a New Hampshire suburb gives this episode its uneasy shape, as Amber Hagstrom describes learning that her mother's remains may have been pulled into the Harvard morgue scandal.
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["WBUR's Last Seen returns with Allie Jarmanning reporting that Cedric Lodge, Denise Lodge, and Jeremy Pauly have all been sentenced in the Harvard Medical School body-parts case.", "Cedric Lodge received eight years, Denise Lodge received one year and a day, and both are set to report on January 16 to a federal medical facility in Massachusetts because of serious health conditions.", "The episode also revisits how Jeremy Pauly's ex-wife found buckets of body parts in a Pennsylvania basement and how that discovery exposed a wider human-remains market.", "Harvard's legal exposure changed when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court let families pursue negligence claims after a lower court had thrown them out."]
Last Seen introduces NHPR's What Remains, a reported look at the Penn Museum's Morton Cranial Collection, which holds an estimated 1,300 skulls.
Last Scene, Postmortem, Episode 2, 'The Victims,' follows Amber Hagstrom after Harvard Medical School's body-donation system was tied to Cedric Lodge's alleged thefts.
Last Seen’s “Postmortem Ep.
In Last Seen's "Postmortem, Ep.
Ali Jarmani opens at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, where 139 skulls, about 6,600 human remains, and exhibits like the Hurdle Skull Collection and fetal specimens frame the episode's central question about consent and display.
Last Seen's 'Postmortem, Ep.
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Last Scene, Episode 9, follows WBUR reporter Quincy Walters as he investigates Richard Bento’s disappearance from New England community theater.
Last Seen episode eight examines why people struggle to discard objects tied to grief, identity, and personal history.
Last Seen Episode 7 follows Alison Rivett's 2013 shipment of screen-printed artwork from the Women's Studio Workshop to Michigan, where she instead found an urn labeled Jennings L.
Last Seen’s “Episode 6: A Hole in the Silence” follows Emilio Silva’s search for his grandfather, Emilio Silva Fava, who disappeared during the Spanish Civil War.
Last Seen Episode 5, “Belly Up,” follows Norah Sachs and reporter Paige Blankenbuehler into the 2016 Devil’s Hole trespass, where three men entered a fortified Nevada pool containing critically endangered pupfish.
Last Scene’s “Africa’s Lost Year of Hope” follows Patrice Lumumba and André Blouin through Congo’s struggle for independence in 1960.
Last Seen episode “The Lost World” follows Mike Brown’s role in the 2006 International Astronomical Union vote that reduced the solar system from nine planets to eight.
Last Scene episode "Murph" examines how Jack Roland Murphy became known as Murph the Surf after the 1964 theft of roughly two dozen jewels from New York's American Museum of Natural History.
Last Scene: Episode 2, “Out of Time,” examines Freeports, tax-free storage facilities where wealth and artwork can disappear from public view.
A teaser for a series about CIA-funded mind control experiments at a Montreal psychiatric hospital in the 1950s and 60s.
Last Seen presents Endless Thread’s first Infectious episode, tracing vaccine resistance from Cotton Mather’s 1721 Boston smallpox campaign to modern measles outbreaks.
Last Seen Presents Endless Thread follows the search for a passenger killed in a 1995 Virginia car crash who wore a Grateful Dead shirt and carried two New York concert tickets.
Last Seen's live Boston recording at Faneuil Hall, part of the Globe Docs Film Festival, has Kelly Horan, Jack Rodolico and Stephen Kurkjian discuss the Gardner heist with Endless Thread host Ben Brock Johnson.
Last Seen Episode 9, “The Big Dig,” follows Jack Rodolico, Kelly Horan, and Boston Globe reporter Steve Kirkjian to an Orlando lot linked to Gardner robbery suspect Bobby Guarenti.
Last Scene Episode 8, “Flim Flammer,” examines whether Brian Michael McDevitt, a convicted con artist, could also have participated in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft.
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