A funeral home director in Colorado has been accused of selling body parts and giving funeral home families fake ashes of their loved ones.
Megan Hess pleaded guilty Tuesday and faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Hess, 45, and her mother, Shirley Koch, operate a funeral home in Montrose, Colorado. In 2020, they were arrested and charged with six counts of mail fraud and three counts of illegal transportation of hazardous materials.
The indictment claimed that for eight years, from 2010 to 2018, the owners offered clients cremation services for a cost of $1,000, but instead of cremating the bodies, they provided body parts to medical research or educational facilities and gave the families of the deceased fake ashes, or other people’s ashes.
They also forged signatures on family consent forms.
In 2009, Hess set up a body-broker service doing business as Donor Services, under a nonprofit organization called Sunset Mesa Funeral Foundation.
The pair illegally shipped infectious body parts after telling the body part purchasers the organs were disease-free. Specimens with Hepatitis B and C, and HIV were shipped.
Hess and Koch initially pleaded not guilty, but changed their plea this week.
Representative Matt Soper of Colorado told reporters, “One thing that I heard over and over from the families is it was like a second death.”
He said Colorado funeral home directors are not properly regulated in the US.
“It just kind of hits your gut,” Soper said. “You can’t believe that body brokering, selling body parts, chopping up body parts, giving people concrete, they’re not things you hear about in the United States of America.”