Description
When artist Alison Byrnes opened a package she had mailed to herself two years earlier, she was expecting to find a sealed box of her prints - but that's not what was inside.
The United States Postal Service had made a rather serious mistake. Instead of artist prints, USPS delivered a little blue urn -- containing the ashes of a total stranger.
Attempts at finding the family of the deceased failed, and the cremated remains of Jennings L. Heffelfinger sat abandoned and forgotten, year after year.
That is, until 2019, when intrepid reporter Sophie Bearman took over the case. Determined to solve the mystery, Bearman embarks on a personal and professional journey to get the urn back where it belongs. But how much help is too much? Amid a pandemic that forces us to ponder mortality incessantly, Episode 7 offers a refreshing and unexpected take on life and loss.
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...
Published 05/01/24
As haunting as the Harvard morgue scandal is, you don't have to go back very far in history to find practices for sourcing bodies that would be shocking today. Reporter Ally Jarmanning finds that for more than a century, medical schools relied on grave robbing and body snatching to supply...
Published 05/01/24