Colorado Funeral Home Sells Head – IOTW Report

Colorado Funeral Home Sells Head

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For one funeral home operator in Colorado, it wasn’t enough to charge bereaved families for cremation and burial services. Megan Hess allegedly struck on what authorities call an “illegal body part scheme” to pad her income. According to the New York Times, Hess, 45, has pleaded guilty in a Grand Junction, Colo., federal court to a single count of mail fraud. In exchange for her plea, prosecutors will drop eight other criminal charges, but she still faces up to 20 years behind bars. Her mother, Shirley Koch, is also implicated. Both originally pleaded not guilty to all charges; Koch’s change-of-plea hearing is July 12.

Prosecutors say Hess led the scheme between 2010 and 2018 by establishing a nonprofit “body broker” as an offshoot of her business, Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors. She and her mother “sometimes obtained consent from families to donate small tissue samples or tumors of their dead relative,” as the Times puts it. Whether consent requests were accepted hardly mattered, authorities said, and the operation involved a lot more than tissue samples. In hundreds of transactions, or “transfers,” they allegedly sold parts including heads, 

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8 Comments on Colorado Funeral Home Sells Head

  1. If whoever gets to handle AOC’s corpse is in the pieces & parts business, I’d like to have her brain. Just scotch tape it to a postcard and send it to me; you won’t need extra postage or anything.

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