A Colorado funeral home operator who was accused of stealing body parts and selling them to medical and scientific buyers, making hundreds of thousands of dollars in what authorities called an “illegal body parts scheme,” has pleaded guilty to fraud by mail on Tuesday, the Justice Department said.
The woman, Megan Hess, 45, the main figure in the scheme, was assisted by her mother, Shirley Koch, who is in her late 60s, prosecutors said. As part of a plea agreement, eight other criminal charges against Ms. Hess were dropped. She could face up to 20 years in prison.
“I overstepped the bounds of consent and I’m trying to make an effort to fix it,” Ms. Hess said in United States District Court in Grand Junction, Colo., on Tuesday, according to The Daily Sentinel. “Take responsibility.”
Ms. Koch has pleaded not guilty, but there is a change in her plea hearing scheduled for July 12.
Here’s how prosecutors said the scheme worked: From about 2010 to 2018, Ms. Hess was in charge of Donor Services, a nonprofit “body brokering service,” and Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors, which offered to arrange cremations , funerals and burials in the small western town of Montrose in Colorado.
Ms. Hess and her mother sometimes obtained consent from families to donate small tissue samples or tumors to their deceased relative, according to an indictment in the case. In other cases, their request was denied, and sometimes they did not bring up the subject at all.
In any case, according to the documents, in hundreds of cases funeral home operators sold heads, torsos, arms, legs or entire human bodies. They often delivered cremated remains to families under the assumption they were the remains of a relative when they weren’t, according to the indictment.
The income the mother and daughter earned from selling body parts allowed them to become the cheapest option for cremations in their region, increasing their supply of corpses, authorities said. Still, authorities said families typically pay $1,000 or more for a cremation that often never happens.
The scheme involved falsifying documents, such as signatures on organ donation authorization forms, and misleading buyers about the results of medical tests performed on the deceased, court documents said. According to authorities, Ms. Hess altered lab reports so that they said people tested negative for diseases such as HIV and hepatitis when they actually tested positive.
Lawyers for Ms. Hess did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department and a lawyer for Ms. Koch declined to comment on the plea agreement.
Add Comment