CO Funeral Home Sold Body Parts, Gave Families Fake Ashes; Guilty Plea

MONTROSE, CO — A Montrose funeral home operator accused of unlawfully selling body parts and giving clients fake ashes has pleaded guilty to mail fraud in a deal with prosecutors.

Megan Hess, 45, pleaded guilty to a single count of mail fraud and aiding and abetting, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. As part of her plea deal, prosecutors dropped all other charges against Hess, including five additional mail fraud counts and three counts of transporting hazardous material. Sentencing will be set at a later date.

“I exceeded the scope of the consent and I’m trying to make an effort to make it right,” Hess said in a Grand Junction federal court Tuesday, according to The Daily Sentinel. “I’m taking responsibility.”

For eight years beginning in 2010, Hess admitted she ran a scheme to steal bodies and body parts of hundreds of people, then sold those remains to clients, buying the remains for scientific, medical or educational purposes.

Court documents said Hess in May 2009 started Sunset Mesa Funeral Foundation, which was billed as a nonprofit that would help people with limited resources access funeral and cremation services. That same month, she created a trade name for the nonprofit called Donor Services. Its main revenue driver: harvesting supposedly donated human remains, including heads, torsos, arms, legs, or entire human bodies, and then marketing for sale — and then selling them — to customers who used the remains for scientific, medical, or educational purposes. The scheme was billed as “body broker services," court documents said.

Hess met with families seeking funeral services from the organization, later dubbed Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors, and discussed the disposition of their dead relatives as well as funeral arrangements. Meanwhile, Hess used Donor Services to deal with clients who were buying the "donated" human remains.

In some instances, Hess ran the scheme with her mother, Shirley Koch, prosecutors said. Koch sometimes met with families and was involved in processing and preparing the bodies for brokering, court documents said.

Hess and Koch would meet with families seeking cremation services for a dead relative, and would tell the families they would cremate the individual and give back the remains. Families were often never told, and never authorized, the organization's selling of the dead relative's body parts.

In hundreds of instances, families outright rejected the notion of donating body parts, but the organization did so anyway.

And in some cases, families agreed to have a small sample of skin or tumor donated, only to later find out much more of the relative's body was donated, and sometimes for purposes they weren't aware of or hadn't agreed to, authorities said.

The organization used the income to advertise low rates, making it the cheapest cremation option in the area, court documents said.

The funeral home then often delivered remains to the families that were, in many cases, replaced or supplemented with a different person's remains.

"Nevertheless, the families were charged, and paid typically $1000 or more, for a cremation that never occurred," the indictment alleged.

To donate the remains, Hess developed authorization forms that, in dozens of instances, contained forged signatures from the families. In hundreds of other instances, remains were sold through Donor Services even though no such authorization form existed, forged or otherwise.

"All of the customers of Donor Services relied on Hess's representations that the remains they purchased were legitimately donated," the indictment alleged. "These customers would not have purchased the remains Hess sold had they known that the remains were not, in fact, donated and had instead been stolen."

Furthermore, prosecutors said Hess and Koch often took blood samples to test for diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, since many clients require bodies to be disease-free. In dozens of instances, they received positive test results, and sent clients altered test results to conceal the diseases, prosecutors said. Bodies and body parts of people who died with infectious diseases were shipped through mail and on commercial airline flights, violating transportation regulations, authorities said.

In one case, a human head belonging to a person with Hepatitis C was shipped in United Airlines cargo, authorities said. In another instance, a human head, spine and legs belonging to an individual with Hepatitis C were shipped on an American Airlines flight. And in a third case, a human head belonging to a person with Hepatitis C was also unlawfully shipped on an American Airlines flight, prosecutors said.

The duo raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in the fraud scheme.

"These customers relied on these representations and would not have purchased the remains had they known that the remains were infected with these diseases," the indictment said.