Pod corner: ‘Last Seen: Postmortem’

In the WBUR podcast Last Seen: Posmortem, host Ally Jarmanning digs into the world of legal remains trading.

LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:

Last June, the morgue manager at Harvard Medical School was arrested on charges of stealing and trafficking in human remains that had been donated to science. His arrest unraveled a nationwide network of bodies traders. Member station WBUR dug into this case and ended up exploring the world of legal remains trading in the podcast Last Seen: Postmortem. Here’s an excerpt with host Ally Jarmanning. And a warning – this segment contains descriptions of human remains.

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ALLY JARMANNING: I actually couldn’t believe how easy it was to find human remains collectors to talk to. I logged onto Facebook and searched, well, skulls, and I found a bunch of Facebook groups specializing in the oddities trade. I joined a public group called Real Human Skulls Only, No Scammer. Despite the name, there are a lot of scammers in this group. People post stolen photos and try to get some cash. Some of these posts – it looks like they dug up a grave and snapped a photo of the bones to sell. The skulls are cracked and look dirty. They don’t have any hardware that a medical specimen would have. There are also more legit listings, too.

So, like, this one says, vintage medical-grade partial human noggin, $450 plus and then a picture of a little ship – so plus shipping. Some of the listings spell human H-O-O-M-A-N to avoid getting flagged. And instead of using numbers to list the price, they include emojis of the figures.

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JARMANNING: I joined another group – this one called The Serious Wet Specimen Collectors, Buyers and Sellers Group. This page is filled with jars of preserved organs, animals, reptiles. There are dead puppies and kittens in jars, a ball python with no eyes in a jar, a 6-inch sea slug in a jar. There are human specimens, too.

(Reading) Human wet specimen of a child’s tongue, windpipe heart and lungs who passed away tragically from choking on a marble.

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JARMANNING: All my clicking around leads me to a page for something called The Ossuary. The description says, we ensure a safe home and dignified transition for prior medical specimens and cremains. I reach out to the couple that runs it, Justin Capps and Sonya Cobb, and they are more than happy for me to come visit them at their home in Smyrna, Delaware. Justin and Sonya don’t have any connection to the thefts at Harvard, but I want to talk to them and those like them because they’re part of the demand for human remains. And that demand causes people like Cedric Lodge to allegedly find the supply. So I want to understand why they do this and how.

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JARMANNING: It’s dark when I arrive. I’m meeting Justin and Sonya at dinnertime. They’re night-shifters. Sonya works in long-term care as a nurse. Justin is an ordained minister, and he keeps Sonya’s hours, so I’m catching them at the beginning of their day. Their neighborhood of newish single-family homes and duplexes is tucked away off a busy road. I spot their house.

(Laughter) His car’s license plate says, skulls. Other than the license plate, the house looks pretty typical in this little subdivision – until I step inside.

Wow.

JUSTIN CAPPS: Welcome to our humble abode.

JARMANNING: Right away…

CAPPS: (Laughter).

JARMANNING: You can’t miss it. Oh.

My eyes immediately drift under the TV, where a skeleton rests on its back in a glass box, glowing under blacklight. Across the room, next to the overstuffed leather couch, another skeleton hangs in an upright coffin. A spinal-column lamp sits on a table, and I haven’t even turned to my left and my right yet, where two pairs of skeletons flank the front hall.

This is not really a living room anymore. It’s been turned over to the skeletons.

SONYA COBB: Yeah.

CAPPS: Pretty much – yeah.

JARMANNING: Standing here, I count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 full skeletons.

COBB: No, there’s seven.

CAPPS: My coffin table (laughter).

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JARMANNING: Oh, wow.

Justin lifts the lid of the coffee – I mean, coffin table to reveal the seventh skeleton in the room.

COBB: So this was an antique coffin…

CAPPS: 1860s.

COBB: …That we sent to the Smyrna prison ’cause they have a wood shop department, and they redid this and put the legs on it and made it into a coffin table for us.

JARMANNING: Wow. And this was the coffin that skeleton came in?

COBB: Yep.

CAPPS: Yeah, it was stored in this.

COBB: Yes, that was the deal with the coffin – or the skeletons when they came. They were all stored in antique coffins…

CAPPS: Which we’ll see in a second here.

COBB: …And they all had to go with antique coffins. So when they all…

JARMANNING: Justin and Sonya don’t have all these remains as a gag or so they can live in some kind of haunted house. And they don’t see themselves as collectors at all.

CAPPS: Hate saying that we collect remains, even though we collect in the sense that we gather, and not that we collect because we’re mormidly – you know, want to have a house full of bones. I didn’t wake up and go, oh, you know what? I think bones are something I want to play with. This was something I was called to do. People rescue puppies and kittens, and we rescue medical specimens. These items, people – they were lost to time for whatever reason, no longer being used, collecting dust in storage. I got one over there that’s been chewed on by mice so bad, she’s falling apart. And they deserve better than that.

JARMANNING: This journey all started with Tyler.

CAPPS: Yeah, he’s a geriatric skull. He has one tooth.

COBB: He has one tooth.

JARMANNING: Oh, yeah – one little molar.

COBB: That’s why I fell in love with him. He was geriatric. I worked in hospice. It was perfect.

JARMANNING: They found Tyler in an oddities shop they often visited. He wasn’t for sale. He was just decoration.

COBB: He was smiling at me. I don’t know what it was.

CAPPS: He looks happy, doesn’t he?

COBB: He looked happy.

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CAPPS: When COVID hit and the store closed, Justin wanted to help out the owner and offered a loan of $1,200. He took Tyler as collateral. The owner never paid back the loan, and Tyler sparked something for Justin and Sonya.

COBB: They got Tyler for me, and then I said I needed a whole skeleton for the corner.

JARMANNING: From there, Justin got to work, looking for how to get Sonya her skeleton. Websites like Skulls Unlimited sell human skeletons for upwards of 7,200 bucks. But Justin and Sonya didn’t believe buying a human was morally right.

CAPPS: These were former people. These were someone’s parents, someone’s children, brothers, sisters. They need a little bit more respect than they’re given.

JARMANNING: Justin kept hunting, and he found a fraternal organization – he won’t say which one – that was looking to offload skeletons they’d been using for rituals, and that’s how Justin and Sonya ended up with seven skeletons in their living room – and more if they can find more space.

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JARMANNING: Their goal, eventually, is to open a real ossuary – a building filled with human bones. They’re thinking a church where people could visit and maybe get married and see the final resting place for forgotten remains. They know it sounds kind of weird.

When I was telling people this is what I’m doing this week – I’m going to visit some folks who rescue human remains – they were like, what the…

CAPPS: Yeah (laughter).

COBB: And I get that – yes.

JARMANNING: So, like, what do you say to – how do you explain to people, like…

CAPPS: Get to know someone like us first ’cause this is honestly not just unique, but it’s trailblazing. It’s different. It’s something nobody’s ever really seen before, and we have the opportunity to do something wild, crazy and cool. And you’re standing here in my living room, seeing this yourself. There’s nothing gross here. There’s no blood, no guts and no gore. This isn’t set up like Halloween or something. You’re not coming in here to be…

JARMANNING: And it really isn’t. It’s tasteful. The skeletons are in glass display boxes or hanging in coffins. They all have names. It’s almost museum-like. I’m not grossed out by it at all. I’m more intrigued. I’m interested in their interest in it all. I do wonder, though – how different are Justin and Sonya than any other collectors?

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