The director of a funeral home in Colorado was sentenced to 20 years in prison Tuesday for charges including fraud, after illegally selling bodies or body parts from more than 500 victims without the consent of their families.
Megan Hess, 46, ran the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado, and pleaded guilty to mail fraud and aiding and abetting. Hess’s 69-year-old mother, Shirley Koch, had also admitted to charges of mail fraud and aiding and abetting as part of a plea deal, and was sentenced to 15 years.
It is legal to sell human remains, and a Reuters investigation found that the body broker industry was not closely regulated in many states. However, the government said agents had confirmed that hundreds of the bodies sold by Hess had been stolen, as the families had not given informed consent for how the bodies would be used. It is also illegal to sell infected body parts.
“Koch and Hess neither discussed nor obtained authorization for donation of decedents’ bodies or body parts for body broker services,” the Department of Justice said in a statement, adding that in some instances, the families had specifically declined to donate the bodies.
According to the plea deal, Hess told mourning families that their loved ones would be cremated, but instead sold parts of or whole bodies for scientific, medical or educational purposes as part of a body broker business she operated from the same premises as the funeral home.
This structuring of the business ensured that Hess “would always have a fresh supply of stolen bodies which she could later sell to unwitting customers” who were unaware the bodies had been stolen rather than donated, according to the government’s sentencing statement. The case contributed to changes in Colorado law over recent years to prevent similar cases from happening in the future.
The government emphasized the “immense emotional pain” inflicted on grieving families by Hess and Koch’s actions, noting that “for many of the victims, the wounds caused by the indignities of the offense have been so great that it has been difficult for them to move on in their lives.” Many families who had paid for cremations later discovered that the cremated remains that were returned to them did not belong to their loved ones, the government said.
The charges against the two women also included shipping the remains of people who had tested positive for or died of infectious diseases including HIV and hepatitis B and C. Deliveries were then made via mail or on commercial air flights, after Hess and Koch had falsely told buyers that the bodies or body parts were free of disease, thereby violating rules on the transportation of hazardous materials.
“The defendants’ conduct was horrific and morbid and driven by greed,” Cole Finegan, the U.S. attorney for Colorado, said after their sentencing Tuesday. “They took advantage of numerous victims who were at their lowest point given the recent loss of a loved one. We hope these prison sentences will bring the victim’s family members some amount of peace as they move forward in the grieving process.”
An FBI official said the two women “continued in their atrocities for years, showing no remorse or contrition even after they were exposed.”
Hess’s lawyers, in their sentencing statement, described her as a “broken human being” who had sustained a “serious head injury” at 18, and argued that she had experienced “observable cognitive decline” as a result. Koch’s lawyers, meanwhile, said she had cooperated with the authorities and had broken the law in a “misguided effort” to help her daughter’s business and work toward medical cures.
According to Reuters, one victim had paid $2,000 for her father’s cremation in 2015. She was later informed by the FBI that she had been given the wrong ashes, while her father’s remains were sold for use in a human body exhibit abroad.
The federal inquiry against the two women began shortly after Reuters news agency spoke to former employees about concerns over deceptive marketing and the selling of gold fillings at the establishment as part of an investigation into the sale of human body parts published in early 2018. The news agency said at the time that — while the arrangement was not necessarily illegal — it had not found any other business in the United States that housed a funeral home, crematory and body broker at the same premises and under the same ownership.
This is not the first case to be brought against body brokers in the United States.
In 2018, a Michigan man was sentenced to nine years in federal prison after being convicted on seven counts of wire fraud and another on the illegal transportation of hazardous material after renting out body parts for medical or dental training, despite knowing that some of the remains had tested positive for conditions such as HIV and hepatitis.
The following year, a body broker in Arizona was ordered to pay $58 million to donors’ families after a Reuters investigation found that their relatives’ bodies were used in U.S. Army blast experiments without consent. In some cases, the donors or their families had explicitly objected to the use of bodies in military experiments.
In one case, a man who donated his mother’s body in the hope of helping Alzheimer’s research later found out that her body had instead been used as a test dummy in an experimental Army IED blast. The ashes that were returned to him turned out to have only come from her hand.
Megan Hess, 46, ran the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado, and pleaded guilty to mail fraud and aiding and abetting. Hess’s 69-year-old mother, Shirley Koch, had also admitted to charges of mail fraud and aiding and abetting as part of a plea deal, and was sentenced to 15 years.
It is legal to sell human remains, and a Reuters investigation found that the body broker industry was not closely regulated in many states. However, the government said agents had confirmed that hundreds of the bodies sold by Hess had been stolen, as the families had not given informed consent for how the bodies would be used. It is also illegal to sell infected body parts.
“Koch and Hess neither discussed nor obtained authorization for donation of decedents’ bodies or body parts for body broker services,” the Department of Justice said in a statement, adding that in some instances, the families had specifically declined to donate the bodies.
According to the plea deal, Hess told mourning families that their loved ones would be cremated, but instead sold parts of or whole bodies for scientific, medical or educational purposes as part of a body broker business she operated from the same premises as the funeral home.
This structuring of the business ensured that Hess “would always have a fresh supply of stolen bodies which she could later sell to unwitting customers” who were unaware the bodies had been stolen rather than donated, according to the government’s sentencing statement. The case contributed to changes in Colorado law over recent years to prevent similar cases from happening in the future.
The government emphasized the “immense emotional pain” inflicted on grieving families by Hess and Koch’s actions, noting that “for many of the victims, the wounds caused by the indignities of the offense have been so great that it has been difficult for them to move on in their lives.” Many families who had paid for cremations later discovered that the cremated remains that were returned to them did not belong to their loved ones, the government said.
The charges against the two women also included shipping the remains of people who had tested positive for or died of infectious diseases including HIV and hepatitis B and C. Deliveries were then made via mail or on commercial air flights, after Hess and Koch had falsely told buyers that the bodies or body parts were free of disease, thereby violating rules on the transportation of hazardous materials.
“The defendants’ conduct was horrific and morbid and driven by greed,” Cole Finegan, the U.S. attorney for Colorado, said after their sentencing Tuesday. “They took advantage of numerous victims who were at their lowest point given the recent loss of a loved one. We hope these prison sentences will bring the victim’s family members some amount of peace as they move forward in the grieving process.”
An FBI official said the two women “continued in their atrocities for years, showing no remorse or contrition even after they were exposed.”
Hess’s lawyers, in their sentencing statement, described her as a “broken human being” who had sustained a “serious head injury” at 18, and argued that she had experienced “observable cognitive decline” as a result. Koch’s lawyers, meanwhile, said she had cooperated with the authorities and had broken the law in a “misguided effort” to help her daughter’s business and work toward medical cures.
According to Reuters, one victim had paid $2,000 for her father’s cremation in 2015. She was later informed by the FBI that she had been given the wrong ashes, while her father’s remains were sold for use in a human body exhibit abroad.
The federal inquiry against the two women began shortly after Reuters news agency spoke to former employees about concerns over deceptive marketing and the selling of gold fillings at the establishment as part of an investigation into the sale of human body parts published in early 2018. The news agency said at the time that — while the arrangement was not necessarily illegal — it had not found any other business in the United States that housed a funeral home, crematory and body broker at the same premises and under the same ownership.
This is not the first case to be brought against body brokers in the United States.
In 2018, a Michigan man was sentenced to nine years in federal prison after being convicted on seven counts of wire fraud and another on the illegal transportation of hazardous material after renting out body parts for medical or dental training, despite knowing that some of the remains had tested positive for conditions such as HIV and hepatitis.
The following year, a body broker in Arizona was ordered to pay $58 million to donors’ families after a Reuters investigation found that their relatives’ bodies were used in U.S. Army blast experiments without consent. In some cases, the donors or their families had explicitly objected to the use of bodies in military experiments.
In one case, a man who donated his mother’s body in the hope of helping Alzheimer’s research later found out that her body had instead been used as a test dummy in an experimental Army IED blast. The ashes that were returned to him turned out to have only come from her hand.
