Megan Hess is a undertaker and usually does funerals and cremations with her mother and father. But she also secretly sells body parts from corpses that are given to her undertaker. Now she has to go to jail for that.
"Add to cart": a common operation in online stores. But the website of "Donor Services" offered not clothes or technology, but body parts. As a Reuters research shows, it was a lucrative business for the operator Megan Hess from the US state of Colorado. According to them, a pelvis with legs costs nearly $1,200, a head $500, a knee $250, and a foot $125.
For Hess, it was an easy part-time job — because the 46-year-old undertaker had a constant influx of new body parts through her funeral home, Sunset Mesa Funeral Home. And under certain conditions there would be nothing forbidden about it. Once consent has been obtained, it is a legal and normal process to resell certain body parts for research purposes. In many cases, however, Hess operated her online business secretly and without the consent of the deceased or their relatives.
She has now been sentenced to 20 years in prison for fraud. The 46-year-old had already pleaded guilty in July. Her 69-year-old mother, Shirley Koch, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
More than 200 families are said to have been betrayed by Hess and her mother, the Colorado prosecutor's office said. At the trial, 26 of those victims told their stories. "They dismembered our sweet mother," said Erin Smith. Her mother's shoulders, knees and feet were sold. "We don't even have a name for such a heinous crime."
"Hess and Koch at times used their funeral home to steal bodies and body parts using fraudulent and counterfeit donor forms," prosecutor Tim Neff said, according to a court filing quoted by the Guardian newspaper. "Hess and Koch's behavior caused immense emotional pain to the families and loved ones."
In the United States, it is illegal to sell organs such as hearts, kidneys, and tendons for transplant; they must be donated. However, the sale of body parts such as heads, arms, and spines—which Hess did—for use in research or teaching is not regulated by federal law.
According to prosecutors, Hess committed criminal offenses when she deceived relatives of the deceased by lying about their cremations and dissecting bodies and selling them without a permit. The companies that bought Hess' arms, legs, head and torso did not know they were fraudulently acquired, prosecutors argued, according to The Guardian.
In a 2016 interview with Reuters, Hess explained that she and her mother processed about ten bodies a month. Her father, Alan Koch, ran the crematorium. She described the donor service as a small family business. The donor services would account for 15 percent of the total business, Hess explained at the time.
But former employees tell how lucrative the illegal side business really was: "She mentioned on several occasions how much money she was getting paid per month, which blew me away," Jennifer Henderson, a former floral designer for Sunset Mesa, told Reuters. "She said that in one month she raised about $40,000 from the sale of donated cadavers."
Kari Escher, who also worked for the funeral home, told Reuters how Koch showed her her gold tooth collection one day. Koch is said to have sold the gold from a few teeth a year earlier. The whole family traveled to Disneyland in California with the money, Escher said.
