BLOOD MONEY

Jeremy Lee Pauley allegedly sold stolen body parts from rural PA. Then his wife turned him in.

After her husband split, Sarah Pauley descended the basement stairs alone. To the left was the washer and dryer; to the right was her husband’s work station, a messy table he’d told her to avoid.

For years Sarah had done what Jeremy Pauley asked. Now he was gone, and she was curious. She turned right, towards the orange Home Depot buckets pushed against the wall, and yanked the lid off one. The antiseptic stench of formaldehyde hit first.

Peering inside, she saw what appeared to be organs preserved in some kind of liquid. In another she recognized human skin, she said. She felt a sinking dread.

Her discovery would ultimately result in federal charges against Pauley and six others, for participating in a sprawling conspiracy to buy and sell human body parts stolen from a mortuary in Arkansas and from the Harvard Medical School morgue. Pauley, 41, did not respond to requests for comment, though court papers indicate he has agreed to plead guilty at an upcoming appearance in Williamsport. He is not in custody.

This story, of how Pauley built an “oddities” business in Enola and how authorities busted it, is based on interviews with people who know him and who have not spoken publicly before, as well as a review of past and current social media and dozens of pages of state and federal court documents.

Pauley, who has a half-face tattoo, one eyeball tattooed black and a 15-point metal mohawk embedded in his skull, called himself a “preservation specialist,” which meant in part that he collected and sold human body parts to private clients around the world.

He often posted on Facebook about his upcoming sales: dominoes made from human bone fragments, a plastic tub of vertebrae, a cardboard box of “budget skulls.” He had a particular penchant for preserved human fetuses, Sarah said in an interview with the Inquirer, which he displayed along with other specimens in a china cabinet in their dining room.

Sarah met Pauley through a former roommate in 2015, when she was 18 and he was 32. They started dating three years later, and he proposed after four months, she said. As his wife, she often modeled with and posted specimens he was trying to sell.

Pauley told her that as a “pretty young woman,” with long black hair and dramatically-lined hazel eyes, she made him more approachable, she said. In the beginning, she was charmed by him. Among tattoo artists and at oddities conventions, he didn’t look so out of place, and he seemed like his own man, smarter and more interesting than anyone she’d ever met.

“If you talked to Jeremy yourself, you’d wonder if everyone else you talked to was out of their minds,” Sarah, now 27, said.

But by the summer of 2022, Pauley had become violent, she said. She told police he threatened to kill her and cut her into pieces if she ever left him, according to a temporary restraining order she sought against him. He told her he didn’t fear prison, where he’d already done time for stabbing his girlfriend’s ex in 2003.

Once Pauley was served with a protection-from-abuse order in June 2022, he had to vacate the couple’s shared home. Sarah, suspecting he immediately decamped to the home of another woman, headed to the basement.

Her choice launched a local and then federal investigation with ongoing repercussions; Pauley could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines for the most serious federal count he’s facing.

Pauley’s lawyer in the federal case, Jonathan White, says his client is being maligned because of the way he looks. (White advised Pauley not to comment for this story).

“The news articles and media have made him out to appear as some sort of monster or sicko,” said White. “It’s the quintessential statement: you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

As she awaited his first court appearance this summer, Sarah Pauley remembered the early days of their romance, when Jeremy showed her photos of the type of things he liked to collect. She told him she didn’t know people could own human remains, that it was even legal.

“He just said, ‘Oh no, you can,’” she recalled. “‘It’s a whole world.’”

‘If it’s interesting, I’m interested’

Jeremy Pauley nurtured a reputation for years as a charismatic, knowledgeable figure in the world of oddities — a decentralized community whose members can be defensive, accustomed to being misunderstood.

Oddities collectors today take their inspiration from the centuries-old European Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. Starting in the sixteenth century, wunderkammern were “repositories for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects,” as the Museum of Modern Art describes it — forebearers of the modern museum.

In recent years, the niche passion has surged, said Adam Hutter, 39, co-owner of Little Devils Curiosities, an oddities shop in Fishtown, and founder of the World Oddities Expo. Hutter hired Pauley to do social media for his company in 2018, and fired him in early 2019, he said. (The termination did not have to do with illegal activity, he said.)

Oddities itself is an umbrella term, Hutter said, encompassing antiquities, quack medicine, the paranormal, natural history and taxidermy. Aficionados across the world buy and sell objects of interest at yard sales and flea markets and in popular Facebook groups, like the 178,000-strong Oddities Marketplace.

“At the base of it, it is art and science for alternative people,” Hutter said. “I tend to say, if it’s interesting, I’m interested.”

Many devotees deal mostly in benign oddities — Little Devils, for example, is packed floor-to-ceiling with antique fortune-telling gear, cases of “real preserved spider webs,” vintage uranium glassware that glows under black light, and fetal pigs in tiny jars.

Human and animal bones raise more ethical questions, and sellers who deal legally in them follow strict rules, which differ state by state.

The Brooklyn-based company JonsBones, for example, only deals in medically-prepared human bones. Such remains date from between 1890 and 1984, the period when U.S. medical schools required students to purchase their own skeletons for study. The company does not purchase human bones from graves, ossuaries, archaeological or tribal sites, said founder Jon Pichaya Ferry in an interview. To make sure of that, he examines bones specifically for signs of medical preparation, such as latches, springs, and joints. The company also does not deal in “wet specimens,” or biological tissue preserved in liquid, because they are too difficult to trace.

Pauley often publicly described his interest in oddities as that of an educator committed to respectful study of the human body. He is a “blood artist,” which means he paints with blood, and notes on his website that he “dedicates his time in preserving and reconditioning retired specimens to continue their use to students.”

Pauley’s current girlfriend, who is also an oddities dealer and goes by the name Sophie Mae Vee, described Pauley as “very, very kind-hearted.” She said he had always been upfront about what he was buying and selling and didn’t intentionally purchase anything illegal.

“He didn’t know,” Vee, 27, said.

‘Would you know anyone in the market?’

Before they separated, Sarah and Jeremy Pauley lived in a white three-bedroom house in Enola, across the river from Harrisburg. Jeremy Pauley often received packages from all over the world for his business, Sarah Pauley said.

“He would get ancient Egyptian stuff, or maybe French Toulouse stuff or African tribal stuff,” she said.

He also received more gruesome freight.

In the summer of 2021, Katrina Maclean, the owner of a Massachusetts oddities shop called Kat’s Creepy Creations, sent a shipment of human skin to Pauley, according to the federal criminal complaint, and allegedly “engaged his services to tan the skin to create leather.”

Prosecutors say Pauley sent a photograph of the human leather he had created back to Maclean and she agreed to send him more in lieu of payment. He then shipped the tanned human skin to Massachusetts. Maclean had acquired the skin from cadavers stolen from the Harvard Medical School morgue by an employee, Cedric Lodge, and his wife, Denise Lodge, according to court filings. All three would ultimately be charged this summer as part of the human remains trafficking network.

In the fall of 2021, a new opportunity presented itself. A mortician based in Arkansas, Candace Chapman Scott, reached out to Pauley on Facebook, prosecutors said.

“I follow your page and work and LOVE it,” Scott wrote, according to court filings. She explained that the mortuary that employed her had a contract with a local medical school to cremate donated cadavers. Typically such “cremains,” as they are called, are supposed to be either returned to the families or put to rest in a local cemetery, the complaint said. But Scott had a different plan.

“Just out of curiosity, would you know anyone in the market for a fully in tact (sic), embalmed brain?” Scott asked Pauley.

Over the course of the next year, Scott messaged Pauley lists of stolen body parts, and he paid her thousands of dollars for them, according to the complaint. In an example prosecutors wrote about in detail, in February 2022, an Arkansas resident gave birth to a stillborn baby boy and named him Lux. His body was supposed to be cremated and then returned to her. But instead, Scott allegedly stole his remains, sent photos of them to Pauley on Facebook, and then sold them to him for $300, court filings say.

Scott returned “cremains of unknown origin” to the Arkansas mother.

‘It was basically him or me’

In the basement on that hot, cloudy day in July 2022, Sarah Pauley was furious — and afraid. A few weeks earlier, police had visited the house after an anonymous tip of “possible human body parts being sold on Facebook,” but they did not have a search warrant and did not visit the basement. She feared Pauley would now try to frame her for what she had discovered.

She searched through Pauley’s Facebook on a shared laptop he left behind, and found messages she thought confirmed her suspicions that the specimens she saw had been illegally obtained. Then she called police.

“It was basically him or me,” she said. “And I chose me.”

On July 8, 2022, police officers removed the buckets from the basement, noting their alleged contents in a police criminal complaint filed in conjunction with Pauley’s subsequent arrest: “Human brains (2), skin, heart, kidney, spleen, fat, skull with hair, (2) livers, (6) pieces of skin/fat, Trachea, child mandible with teeth, and (2) lungs.”

Local police arrested Pauley in August 2022 for dealing in stolen body parts. That case remains pending, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for this August. Pauley’s lawyer in that case did not respond to requests for comment.

But the national investigation was far from over.

In June of this year, federal authorities announced charges against six people, including Pauley and another Pennsylvania man named Joshua Taylor, 46, of West Lawn, for buying and selling stolen human remains.

Pauley had assisted federal investigators, a related federal criminal complaint filed recently in Kentucky revealed.

“According to an interview conducted with [Jeremy] Pauley, he provided information on a network of individuals involved in the sale and transportation of fraudulently obtained human remains,” that complaint said.

Pauley and his current girlfriend, Sophie Mae Vee, have attempted to rally supporters on their public Facebook pages, decrying what they see as misinformation and portraying themselves as victims of unfair attacks.

“Jeremy’s devotion to unusual antiquities is as unconditional as his appearance is, which is unfortunate in a situation where clickbait is as far as media reaches,” Vee wrote on Facebook on June 15, a day after the indictments were announced.

In an interview, she said it was a good thing that federal investigators had helped to root out bad actors in a misunderstood community — though in her view Pauley was not among those bad actors.

“I think as stressful as all this has been, this is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to the oddities community,” Vee said.

Others in or near the oddities world have expressed horror with the group’s alleged actions, and dismay at how the case will further malign “a peculiar paradise,” as Hutter, the World Oddities Expo founder, described it.

“It is unfortunate that there are a lot of people just learning about the oddities community this way,” Hutter said. “It is definitely not a fair first impression, or a representation of the core values of this worldwide subculture.”

Undeterred, Vee says she and Pauley are planning to open a Pennsylvania oddities shop in the spring.

They plan to sell antiques, she said, alongside animal and human remains.