Sunset Mesa Funeral Home operator Megan Hess has confessed to stealing hundreds of bodies and body parts and reselling them to individuals and companies that purchased them for scientific, medical and educational purposes, according to a plea agreement filed on Tuesday.
Hess was initially indicted along with her mother, Shirley Koch, with whom she ran the funeral home in the Colorado town of Montrose, on six charges of mail fraud and three counts of transporting hazardous materials in March 2020. She pled guilty to lesser charges - one count of mail fraud and one of aiding and abetting - just weeks before her trial was set to begin.
The plea agreement describes Hess concocting a scheme to steal and sell body parts as far back as 2010 and conducting the lucrative operation through 2018. After opening the funeral home with Koch in 2009, the pair launched a nonprofit "donor services" company out of the same address and sold the body parts of the deceased while providing fake ashes to grieving relatives, charging families $1,000 or more for the bogus cremains.
The two women were also accused of shipping to their mail-order customers bodies that had tested positive for - or belonged to individuals who had died from - an array of infectious diseases, including hepatitis B and C and HIV, all while certifying the corpses as disease-free.
Because they were essentially getting paid twice for each body, the mother-daughter duo could afford to charge lower prices than competitors, thus ensuring a constant supply of new flesh, according to authorities. One year, they allegedly made so much money just from the gold teeth extracted from bodies that they were able to take the whole family to Disneyland.
Hess faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, although prosecutors are seeking a sentence of 12 to 15 years. Koch is still set to stand trial and faces up to 135 years in federal prison if convicted on all charges.
Colorado funeral homes are the least regulated in the US, according to Colorado representative Matt Soper, but this case has motivated local authorities to seek changes in state laws. One new regulation prohibits funeral home operators from running body broker businesses, another increases regulatory oversight of funeral homes in the state, and a third steps up legal penalties for abusing a corpse.
Source: Funeral home owner in US sold body parts
See, also: Man rejected from blood drive over pregnancy question - specifically, our comments at the bottom, about an inferred black market for whole blood, used for making black market plasma, to deliver cut-rate, black market life extension services to people without insurance
(Editor's note: There are terrible rumors going around in Palestine that this is exactly what the Israelis are accused of doing with the dead natives' bodies, there, in Israel.
You don't have to take our word for it - just search for "palestinian missing organs".
We sure do hope that Ms Hess and Ms Koch are not Jewish. That would make for bad optics - carving up dead Americans' bodies like they was so many cattle, for profit ... double-dipping ... fake ashes ... and, worst of all, melting down gold teeth, to take the family to Disneyland - all very ugly and hard to explain to the public.
Our guess is that Mom was the brains of the outfit. But who taught her? Where did she learn it? There is more to this story.
And what about her customers? Who goes looking for cheap body parts, marked down to half price, for quick sale? Other criminals, of course - white collar criminals, who are pocketing the difference between what they are budgeted to spend and what they are actually spending. There's more to that story, too.
One of these days we will write the story of our younger brother's death, and how Goble's Fortuna Mortuary played keep-away with our younger brother's ashes. Goble's ignored our calls and emails. We actually have no idea what happened to our younger brother's body, or his alleged cremains. For all we know, our baby brother was sliced, diced, and marked down in price, too.
There's no need to fabricate anything. All we need to do is quote the emails. Everything is in writing.
Food for thought.)