Last Seen

About Last Seen

A collection of mysteries about unexpected people, places and things that have all gone missing.

Publisher

WBUR

Category

true crime

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Jul 2018

Latest episode

23 Dec 2025

Latest episodes

1 of 57 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   23 Dec 2025TRANSCRIPT

   Postmortem, Update: The sentences

   In this update episode of Postmortem, reporter Ally Jarmanning updates us on the criminal cases against Harvard Medical School's former morgue manager Cedric Lodge, his wife Denise, and Jeremy Pauley, whose arrest first exposed the nationwide network of human remains trading. All were sentenced to time in federal prison.

2. 

   29 Jan 2025

   Introducing: What Remains from NHPR's Outside/In

   Introducing “What Remains,” a special series from NHPR’s Outside/In. A classroom display of human skulls sparks a reckoning at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. A movement grows to “abolish the collection.” The Penn Museum relents to pressure. But there are more skeletons in the closet. To hear all three parts, including the prologue, subscribe to Outside/In. (https://outsideinradio.org/what-remains)

3. 

   1 May 2024

   Postmortem, Ep. 5: A reckoning

   In Episode 5 of Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard, reporter Ally Jarmanning digs deeper into the "legitimate" realm of body-parts collecting ⁠— museums ⁠— and asks the burning question: How different is this from the world of Jeremy Pauley in his basement or Cedric Lodge seizing a financial opportunity at Harvard's morgue. At the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, she takes us through displays of skeletons and sometimes-troubling human specimens. What comes up here and at museums around the country ⁠— did the people who used to belong to these bodies ever imagine themselves in a jar, or on a shelf? Did they give permission for decades of gawking? After all this reporting, Jarmanning examines the ethics of it all, probing how we should treat the dead, and who gets to decide. And she returns us to Harvard, where hardly anyone, except Lodge, has been held to account. If you have questions, comments or tips about this story, you can reach us at LastSeen@wbur.org (mailto:LastSeen@wbur.org).

Inside a recent episode

Postmortem, Update: The sentences

Published 23 Dec 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] And she calls the police, the police come. He ends up getting interviewed by the FBI, and it seems like he exposes this network of people that buy, sell, trade, human remains for collectors to buy, to tan skin, and to leather, to make wallets in books out of these products. And it really, it was sprawling. So it turns out that Jeremy Polly, even though he wasn't buying directly from Harvard Medical School, he was buying from people who bought from Cedric Lodge at Harvard Medical School. He was selling to people in Minnesota, he was buying body parts from a woman who worked at a mortuary in Arkansas. […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

21,093,030

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.6 / 5

3,536 ratings

Spotify

4.6 / 5

121 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 67 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

57

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

100

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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