A White Bear Lake tattoo artist has been sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for buying and selling stolen human remains, including the corpse of a stillborn baby that was meant to be cremated.

Mathew R. Lampi, 53, of East Bethel, received his sentence in U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania last week after previously pleading guilty to interstate transport of stolen goods. He was ordered to surrender to authorities Feb. 3 to begin serving the sentence.

The case is part of a multi-year federal investigation that uncovered what officials say was a nationwide, shadowy market for human remains. Multiple defendants have been charged in Pennsylvania and Arkansas, and several have entered guilty pleas.

According to the June 2023 indictment and other federal filings, Lampi bought human remains between September 2021 and August 2022 that were stolen by a woman who worked at an Arkansas mortuary and crematorium. He bought human hearts, brains, an arm, a pair of “smoker’s lungs” and a corpse of a stillborn baby named Lux.

“Lampi’s conduct, and the conduct of his coconspirators, shocks the conscience,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo to the judge last month. “The Sentencing Guidelines simply do not account for the egregiousness of this type of crime, and the range they yield in Lampi’s case is insufficient to establish a just sentence.”

Prosecutors asked the court to depart from the guidelines range and imprison Lampi for two years, saying the “nature of this crime was especially heinous as compared to a run-of-the-mill interstate transportation of stolen goods case.”

Lampi is the owner of Get to the Point Tattoos, which he ran in the Wildwood Shopping Center for many years. His business license, which was first filed in 2000, is listed as “Active/In Good Standing” on the Minnesota Secretary of State’s website.

‘Hearts and brains coming’

Beginning in late 2021, Jeremy Pauley, of Enola, Penn., began buying human remains from Candace Chapman Scott, who stole the remains from her employer, Arkansas Central Mortuary Services of Little Rock, Ark.

Lampi and Pauley then bought and sold remains from each other, exchanging nearly $130,000 in online payments.

Around Dec. 7, 2021, Pauley wrote to Lampi and said “he had hearts and brains coming” and sent photos of the remains that Chapman Scott had displayed in her apartment. Lampi offered to buy three items for $4,000 from Pauley, who told him, “Deal! Soon as it all gets here I’ll wrap it up and send it out,” according to court documents.

The next day, Pauley sent Lampi more photographs and said he had four more brains, three hearts, a “perfect” lung, penis and a set of testicles.

A few months later, on Feb. 27, 2022, a deal was made between the two men for Lampi to buy the stillborn baby’s corpse. Chapman Scott had sold the corpse to Pauley for $300. Pauley traded it plus $1,550 to Lampi in exchange for five skulls.

Prosecutors said the baby’s mother had a pendant made from his purported ashes and “treasured that memento of the child she never got to know. But it was a lie; the ashes she was given were not the cremains of her lost baby boy.”

On May 27, 2022, Pauley reached out to Lampi, saying he had a pair of “smoker’s lungs” for sale, which he then sold to Lampi for $1,900.

Police tipped off

Local police talked to Pauley in June 2022, after being tipped off he was advertising human remains for sale on Facebook.

“Hello so what did the police say(?),” Lampi asked him through WhatsApp.

Pauley responded that he had been asked about the human remains and “in the end the only thing that mattered was nothing was proved grave robbed or stolen out of a morgue,” followed by a smiley face emoji.

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A search of Lampi’s home in East Bethel failed to recover Lux’s remains. In April 2023, Lampi, through his attorney, voluntarily turned Lux’s body over to the FBI, prosecutors said.

But the harm was already done, said prosecutors, who added that Lux’s mother “grieved all over again when notified that her son had been stolen and sold as part of this macabre, underworld trade.”

Lampi’s sentence includes three years of supervised probation following incarceration. He was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and $1,700 in restitution to Lux’s mother.

Pauley and Chapman Scott are awaiting sentencing after entering guilty pleas to federal charges.