A former owner of a funeral home in Colorado has been given a 20-year prison term for defrauding relatives of the deceased by dissecting 560 bodies and illegally selling the body parts.
Megan Hess, 46, pleaded guilty to fraud in July. She operated a funeral home, Sunset Mesa, and a body parts entity, Donor Services, from the same building in Montrose, Colorado. The 20-year term was the maximum allowed under the law.
Shirley Koch, her mother, who is 69 years old, also admitted to fraud and received a 15-year sentence. According to court documents, Koch’s primary responsibility was dismembering the victims.
“Hess and Koch used their funeral home at times to essentially steal bodies and body parts using fraudulent and forged donor forms,” prosecutor Tim Neff said in a court filing. “Hess and Koch’s conduct caused immense emotional pain for the families and next of kin.”
The federal case was brought about by a 2016–2018 Reuters investigative series on the country’s largely unregulated body part market. Former employees claimed to Reuters that Hess and Koch performed illegal body dismemberments, and the FBI raided the establishment a few weeks after a 2018 story was published.
In their filing, prosecutors stressed the “macabre nature” of Hess’ scheme and described it as one of the most significant body parts cases in recent U.S. history.
“This is the most emotionally draining case I have ever experienced on the bench,” U.S. District Judge Christine M. Arguello said during Tuesday’s sentencing hearing in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Hess’ lawyer said she has been unfairly vilified as a “witch,” a “monster” and a “ghoul,” when instead she is a “broken human being” whose conduct can be attributed to a traumatic brain injury at age 18. In court on Tuesday, Hess declined to speak to the judge.
Koch told the judge she was sorry and took responsibility for her actions.
It is illegal in the United States to sell organs such as hearts, kidneys, and tendons for transplant; they must be donated. But selling body parts such as heads, arms, and spines, which is what Hess did or used in research or education is not regulated by federal law.
Hess committed crimes, prosecutors said, when she defrauded relatives of the deceased by lying about cremations and by dissecting bodies and selling them without permission. The surgical-training companies and other firms which bought the arms, legs, heads, and torsos from Hess did not know they had been fraudulently obtained, prosecutors said.
At her funeral home, Hess charged families up to $1,000 for cremations that never occurred, prosecutors said, and she offered others free cremations in exchange for a body donation.
Prosecutors said she lied to more than 200 families, who received cremated ashes from bins mixed with the remains of different cadavers.
Source: Reuters