Two former Colorado funeral home owners were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for a scheme that involved dismembering the corpses of clients’ loved ones and selling their body parts.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado said that Sunset Mesa Funeral Home operators Shirley Koch, 69, and daughter Megan Hess, 46, were sentenced to 15 and 20 years, respectively, after they both had pleaded guilty to one count each of mail fraud and of aiding and abetting.
“The defendants’ conduct was horrific and morbid and driven by greed,” U.S. Attorney Cole Finegan said in a news release. “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.”
From 2010 to 2018, the mother-daughter pair defrauded dozens of families looking to cremate the remains of their loved ones by giving them fake cremains while instead selling the body parts or entire bodies to body-broker services.
The scheme involved harvesting heads, spines, arms and legs in order to sell them to medical training or educational institutes, according to Reuters news agency.
Most of the time, Koch and Hess harvested the remains without seeking the families’ permission. They still carried on with the body part collection even if the families’ rejected the idea when Koch and Hess pitched it to them.
The few families that did agree often resulted in the pair taking more from the corpse than the family permitted, which was usually asked to be limited to small tissue samples, tumors or portions of skin.
When Koch and Hess delivered cremated remains to families, they typically were not those of their loved ones.
Hess targeted poor families in order to increase sales of the body parts, according to court documents cited by Reuters. She also charged families $1,000 for cremations that never occurred.
“Meeting with hospice on the 4th … opening the floodgates of donors,” Hess wrote to a prospective body-part buyer in 2014, per court documents. “They have four or five deaths a day. Get ready!!!! … How about a deal on full embalmed spines … $950?”
Selling body parts as cadavers or for research purposes is not regulated by federal law.
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