Mommy & Me Bodysnatchers

The body, we spend so much of our lives taking care of the body, feeding it, washing it, grooming it, dressing it, dealing with all of its noises and oozes and mischief and mayhem. All that stuff the body can get up to. Sometimes we hate it because we think it's too big or too small or shaped in funny ways. We scrape its hair off, hook it up to machines that fat out or inject fat in. Sometimes we take it outside and we toast it in the sun. The body pays us back by basically acting like a meaty spaceship, propelling our souls and consciousness, the very usness that makes us us through the world. And sometimes the body betrays us by getting diseased, by causing us pain by not working the way it should.

And sooner or later, always, and with no exceptions, it shuts down, lights out. Do you care what happens to your body then? After you're finished with it? No? Okay. That's very chill of you. I admire the heck out of you. But what if your body was stolen? This is the story of a couple of Colorado corpse bandits, the most macabre and morbid mother-daughter team maybe one weird, gruesome species. Let me give you an example. Back in the 1700s and 1800s, stealing bodies from cemeteries and then selling them to doctors and medical schools was a booming business. Sure, it was very nasty and definitely not legal, but you can almost forgive it. Medical students needed to learn anatomy and grave robbers needed to put food on the table. Plus, this was a time when the art and science of surgery was rapidly expanding.

Students needed practice and practice meant bodies, lots and lots of bodies. And while you certainly didn't want your mom a dug up and sold, at least it was in the service of science and not to gratify some truly questionable fetish or perversion, right? Back then, a stolen cadaver was a hot commodity. Why? Because the only bodies that med schools could legally snatch were the bodies of criminals who'd been executed. Not much diversity there in terms of age, gender, physical condition, overall health. You get the picture. And in some places, it wasn't the stealing of the body from its grave that was illegal. It was the dissection of that body, which makes you wonder a lot about, let's say, England in the 1800s. It was jolly good and a corpse from the ground. You just couldn't take a scalpel to it. But why on earth you'd want a corpse, especially in those days of questionable public health and primitive mortuary science?

That's a mystery. Grave robbing was such a problem that in Great Britain, they actually had to pass a law in 1832 called the Anatomy Act to try to get the whole freak show under control. Similar laws were soon adopted in the United States. And what's interesting about these laws are the ways in which they kind of recognize the huge market for cadavers while trying to regulate the who and how and where that supply might come from. First, it was condemned criminals, and then it was the bodies of the poor. And it took a bit, but eventually governments just let out this big exasperated sigh and told grave robbers and med schools, look, at least get the next of kin's permission before you hand grandpa over to the sawbones, okay?

And this is kind of where the situation stands today, believe it or not. The only difference is we no longer sneak into cemeteries in the dead of night to steal the dead. Instead, about 20,000 people in the US donate their bodies to science every year. It's not a huge number, but schools and researchers do manage to make do. They're able to work with such a small supply thanks to embalming. And why is that? It's really simple. Embalming preserves the body for longer, months even. Back in the early grave robbing days before modern embalming was an option, bodies were preserved by soaking them in mixtures of very toxic stuff like mercury and arsenic.

Alcohol was also an option. There was some early experimentation in Europe with injecting alcohol into the corpse's arteries, and this was apparently not terribly effective. And you can find tales of families packing their loved ones in barrels of whiskey. Hope they didn't drink the whiskey afterward, but I have a sinking feeling that some folks probably did. I mean, drunken uncles and goofy cousins aren't new inventions. Yikes.

Now, your primitive embalming, before I forget, involved mercury and arsenic. Those are deadly poisons. This is not an issue for the cadaver, sure. But what about all of those medical students handling that toxic flesh? And turns out that neither arsenic nor mercury nor whiskey were great preservatives anyway. The body's soft tissues rapidly deteriorated, which meant that you had to bury the body for a long time. And I could go on to describe what a foul, terrible experience those early dissections were, but I'd hate to ruin that little debbie you just unwrapped. Let's just say it was nasty in the extreme and leave the rest to your imagination. And yeah, this whole subject is horrific and gross, but it was even more horrific and gross to die a wretched death from something that was completely treatable like appendicitis or a breech birth. Our ancestors were up to their elbows and putrefying corpses for our benefit, right? Now it's not appendicitis that kills us.

It's the shock of the bill we get from the hospital that kills us. Progress. And speaking of progress, it took the Civil War and a doctor named Thomas Holmes to basically invent the funeral business as we know it. See, Dr. Holmes was fascinated by Egyptian mummies. How had this ancient civilization managed to cheat the grave by so skillfully preserving the bodies of their dead?

So Holmes devoted himself to the study of mummified heads. And I got a pause here because what I would give to meet a person obsessed with mummified heads. Come on, Max. Isn't that the guy you want sitting next to you on the plane? Isn't that the conversation that you want to strike up? Anywho, based on what he learned from his mummy studies, Dr. Holmes developed his own embalming solution. Now it too had arsenic as a main ingredient because people back then did not know what a powerful poison it was. Arsenic had been around for well over 2000 years. It was used in traditional Chinese medicine. And before penicillin arrived on the scene, it was a treatment for syphilis. And of course, people were killing each other with arsenic and getting away with it too. At least until 1836, when a chemist named James Marsh created a test to detect arsenic.

Of course, people kept on killing each other, but now they were far more likely to get caught doing it. And here's something depressing to consider. How stupid people are. Here we've had a perfectly reliable test for arsenic poisoning for getting close to 200 years now. Yet how many Dateline episodes have we seen where arsenic was used to whack a spouse? Heads up, arsenic might not stay in the body for more than a few days, but it has a real affinity for the keratin in human fingernails and hair. Which means forensic science can not only tell that you poisoned the mister, it reveals when you poisoned him. So don't do it because you're going to get caught. And also it's wrong.

And I realize I probably should have led with that. Anyway, back to Dr. Holmes and his massive innovation and embalming. You know the expression necessity is the mother of invention? Well, the 620,000 soldiers died between 1861 and 1865. Take that in. 620,000 dead. You would have to take every single death in the Korean War, both World Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, the War of 1812, and the Revolutionary War to get near the number of lives lost in the Civil War.

And I'm not sure people today realize that. Especially the ones who get all hard and sweaty and glassy-eyed at the delicious prospect of a modern Civil War in America because they want to shoot their neighbors for living or thinking or voting differently. And if we learned any damn thing from the Civil War, it should be what a devastating and ghastly tragedy it is for brothers and sisters to take up arms against each other. During the Civil War, American families were torn apart by grief and loss, and they clamored for the return of the bodies of their loved ones. Because funeral rituals help us come to grips with the unfathomable mysteries of death.

And having a body, well, it makes the loss real. And seeing the body, the shell emptied of its animating spark, gives us hope for the existence of a soul, for a life that transcends the fragile suffering of the flesh. And Dr. Holmes wanted to return the bodies of the dead to their people. His and Embalming's big break came when he just happened to be on hand, when Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth was shot and killed. Colonel Ellsworth had climbed to the roof of a hotel in Virginia to take down a Confederate flag. Shh, listen, and you'll hear the echoes of history.

You know what you're hearing right now? A group of protesters pulling down a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina, about five years ago. That's the very thing that Colonel Ellsworth was in Virginia in May of 1861. The very thing that got him killed, and the very thing that paved the way for the modern funeral industry. How? Because Dr. Holmes stepped up and offered complimentary embalming services using his newly discovered arsenic fluid and pump method. Now as luck would have it, Colonel Ellsworth had been a big buddy of President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln took one look at Holmes' work on his deceased friend and pretty much immediately signed Dr. Holmes up to train battlefield surgeons in this new technique, all in the service of sending war dead home to their grieving kin. And this is where the death business as we know it really began. Now I think you'll be relieved to know that by 1910 arsenic was out of the embalming picture. It was making the people who handled bodies sick, plus it could really make a murder investigation extra challenging, as you can imagine. Sidebar, Max, what do you do when everybody you test as a detective is positive for arsenic poisoning? Can you see how that was chaotic for law enforcement back in the day?

Yeah, you'd have to send them all to prison. Everybody's guilty. So arsenic is gone by 1910 and we're going to save the news about the hazards of arsenic leaching from Civil War era graves into the groundwater for another day because I do hate to have all of our fun all at once, right? So if you're wondering, okay, great, yeah, but when are we going to get to those two awful body stealing ladies in Colorado? And the answer is right now. We first had to get all caught up on the truly gross and horrible things people have endured just trying to care for the dead and just trying to become doctors. All of those terrible nights spent first digging up burial sites and then wrestling out the slippery and heavy and unthinkable contents of those graves.

All of those early medical students fishing around and decomposing human flesh, moving as fast as they could to try to understand the workings of the human body before the body on the table before them literally dissolved into a foul puddle. Well, it makes you look at our contemporary Colorado corpse snatchers with real disgust. Their motives had nothing to do with science or human knowledge or compassion. Their only motive was greed. One victim says the sentencing of two funeral directors in Montrose is not enough after they admitted to illegally selling body parts of people who were supposed to be cremated. Megan Hess and Shirley Koch each pleaded guilty to mail fraud this after selling parts of hundreds of bodies to entities around the world. Hess got a sentence of 20 years, Koch got 15. News reporter Nelson Garcia now shows us their sentences aren't enough for one victim's daughter. This day in court was a long time coming for Erin Smith. My mom passed away in 2011 suddenly of cancer. Smith brought Marianne Hamilton to Sunset Mesa funeral home in Montrose to be cremated, so she thought. In 2018, the FBI contacted her about allegations against the funeral directors about selling her mother's body parts. It was like she died all over again. It was this whole thing has been worse than losing her mother. Smith says her organs from her mother's heart to liver and even her hands and feet were sold. That's from NBC TV affiliate 9 News in Denver. The illegal selling of body parts to body brokers. Yes, that is a real true thing that happened is probably happening right now somewhere because human greed is bottomless and human ingenuity is boundless and the dead can't talk. In some ways, it's the perfect crime.

Megan has owned a Sunset Mesa funeral home in Montrose, Colorado. She had another business operating out of the same building called Donor Services, two separate entities on paper. The reality, though, is that Hess's funeral clients had no idea that they were also customers of her body parts brokerage. Maybe they didn't realize what Donor Services was or that it even existed at all. And I wonder if our squeamishness about death is the reason that most of us are blissfully unaware that there exists in these United States, a thriving and lucrative and largely unregulated business in the buying and selling of cadavers and body parts.

I've read about this company in Nevada that was offering free funeral services to grieving families in exchange for the donation of their loved ones remains to science. On the one hand, kind of predatory. But on the other hand, it's just the body, the husk, the empty shell, right? And funeral expenses can crush an already devastated family. You can see how a business model like this makes sense, except this particular company was doing a really half-assed job of storing the donated bodies. Other tenants in the business park where they were located began complaining of a rank stench. They said they were finding blood-soaked boxes in the park dumpsters. So state health inspectors dropped by, and they happened upon a man thawing frozen corpses in the sun by spraying them with a garden hose.

I don't care how contrarian argumentative you are. There's no way you can defend something so vile. So what if Popov's soul's in heaven? I saw him crossing his body in a parking lot. What is wrong with people? Back in Colorado, Megan Hess partnered with her mother, Shirley Coke, and launched into a scheme to profit very richly from the dead, a scheme that worked for eight years, and they got their hands plenty dirty doing it. Anyone who's lost a loved one knows grief muddles your thinking, and the whole funeral process is happening at a time when you're in shock. So many decisions need to be made. Very few people pre-plan their funerals, much less prepay for them. I checked. The International Cemetery, Cremation, and Funeral Association estimates that maybe 24% of the population has a prepaid plan in place. The other 76% of us are weeping, confused, scared, and hoping for compassionate guidance, which we mostly get, truly, unless we happen to show up at Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado.

There, the morbid mother-daughter team of Megan and Shirley promised cremations that never happened. Instead, they sold the bodies they took custody of, sometimes intact, sometimes hacked up into parts. Surgical training companies pay good money for heads and spines and make good use of the knowledge obtained from studying them. Whole cadavers are prized by medical schools, but also by companies testing automobile crash safety. The military needs bodies to measure the impact of explosives on human flesh. The driving force behind the body brokerage business seems like it's education, and that's noble. These bodies aren't being sold as playthings. But unlike the and transplantation game, which is highly regulated, and organs for transplant are never, ever permitted to be sold, body brokers aren't bound by much of any kind of regulation.

You can sell bodies and body parts for research purposes all day long. You don't need a license to be a body broker. You don't need any special training, just a strong stomach, I guess, and a How weird is that? And families who returned to Sunset Mesa Funeral Home to fetch their loved one's cremains never left empty handed. Megan and Shirley handed out boxes of ashes from other people's cremations. And in one case, cement dust had been mixed in with human remains.

So that might be your mama in that urn. And maybe not. There was just no way to know. When the two women went to trial, prosecutors argued that they defrauded 200 families by charging them for cremations that never happened. 200 families with urns of who or God knows what, instead of the cremains of their loved ones. And that, my friends is the reasonably mild part of this story. Former employees told reporters from Reuters News that Megan and Shirley were all up in the chopping and shopping game, dismembering corpses and selling the parts off without the knowledge or consent of any family member. Took the FBI about a minute after reading Reuters coverage to raid Sunset Mesa Funeral Home. And then it all came out in court. Megan and Shirley had unlawfully dissected 560 human bodies, the bodies of people in their own community.

And those bodies had names and histories. Those bodies belong to people who've done the whole live, laugh, love thing, right up until the moment that Megan and Shirley hacked them up and sold them off to the highest bidder as science meat. Donating your body to science is a noble thing. And learning from those donations and thus improving the human condition, noble. Being hacked up by a couple of aquanetted sociopaths and then sold off piece by piece, not noble, not even a little bit noble. So what were those bodies worth to Megan and Shirley?

I found a 2018 price list for human body parts from an entity called the Biological Resource Center. 2018, because that was the year Sunset Mesa Funeral Home was busted. The going rate for a whole cadaver, $5,000. An intact torso, $2,900. Heck, a single elbow commanded 200 bucks. I was very surprised to learn that a head with a brain only went for $500. But keep that head connected to the torso. And now you're looking at a cool 3,300 bucks. There was money to be made in that little funeral home. And Megan and her mommy were ruthless in pursuit of profit, meaning they not only dismembered for dollars, they even lied to their body parts customers as much as they lied to their cremation customers. Because one of the only real rules in the body brokerage business involves disease. It is absolutely illegal to sell any human body part that is positive for an infectious disease. But Megan and Shirley cheerfully sliced up and sold human remains that were positive for things like Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C and HIV. Of course, they lied and said the parts were disease free. Like I said, sociopaths. And here's a fun fact. They're not even the only parent-child duo in the diseased corpses for profit world. A father-son team was busted in Chicago in 2019. The Donald Greens, senior and junior, kept any number of diseased fetched as much as $100,000 a piece. The Greens didn't even bother to sell make-believe cremations.

They were coaxing corpses from grieving families by promising that remains were being donated to science to further human knowledge. And it was a load of bollocks. They were storing and selling those bodies for every nickel they could get. Ghouls. Tell you what, though. Based on photos, the two Donalds were just as hooked on excessive use of hairspray as Megan and Shirley.

I'm wondering now if their defense attorneys missed an opportunity to float a hairspray causes brain damage defense. Not that Megan Hess's lawyer didn't present something similar. Her defense gamely suggested that a traumatic head injury suffered decades earlier accounted for Megan's seeming inability to comprehend that you're not actually allowed to sneakily hack up dead people and sell their parts off for money. Whether there's any truth to the defense argument, I can't say. I do know that the court didn't buy it and go ahead and file this part under the category titled No Honor Among Thieves. Upon getting raided by the FBI and arrested, Shirley Koch was like, she made me do it. She called her daughter the brains of the operations and surely copped only to chopping up bodies. She said all the selling and arranging and negotiating was entirely done by Megan. Megan had the contacts, Shirley said. Megan had the ideas. And one of those ideas of Megan's involved mailing body parts and shipping them on commercial flights.

Remember the bit about how the women were knowingly selling diseased tissue to unsuspecting buyers? Well, they were mailing and shipping it to that counts as hazardous material. And it is very much against Department of Transportation rules. They were sending it over state lines and they call that mail fraud. And it's amazing how many criminals get caught in this seemingly low-key little trap. Because the law is super interesting in a case like this.

Selling body parts isn't illegal, remember? But fraud definitely is. Megan has pleaded guilty to fraud in July 2022. And despite a righteous effort on the part of her defense to delay sentencing, a court date was set for January 3rd, 2023. And at that hearing, her mother, Shirley Koch, pleaded guilty to a single count of mail fraud plus aiding and abetting. Megan Hess, age 46, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. That's the maximum sentence possible under the terms of her plea agreement.

Shirley Koch, age 69, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. And I'll give her this. She took responsibility and did apologize for her actions, for whatever that's worth. FBI Denver Acting Special Agent in Charge, Leonard Carollo, said this. Quote, these two women preyed on vulnerable victims who turned to them in a time of grief and sadness. But instead of offering guidance, these greedy women betrayed the trust of hundreds of victims and mutilated their loved ones. Without knowledge or consent, the women disrespected the wishes of the grieving victims and degraded the bodies of their family members to sell them for profit. These two criminals continued in their atrocities for years, showing no remorse or contrition, even after they were exposed. Nothing can guarantee solace for the victims or repair the damage done. But perhaps this sentence can mark the end of a horrible chapter in their lives.

End quote. Well, you hope, right? I can't imagine the pain and horror those families endure. And I find my thoughts returning over and over to one particular victim, a teenager. To lose a child is such unfathomable pain. And then to learn that your child's body was so obscenely violated. It's monstrous what they did at Sunset Mesa Funeral Home. Monstrous. There's nothing victimless about this crime. And if you're listening to this episode when we released it March 3rd, 2023, you are just days away from the scheduled restitution hearing in this case. Prosecutors want any property owned by the two women sold for the benefit of their victims. They're also hoping to lay hands on at least some of the money made from the sale of bodies and body parts.

These kinds of things always feel like such a crapshoot. Because often a convicted criminal's forgotten gains are long spent. And any amount awarded to the victims ends up being more symbolic than anything. But the grim goings on at Sunset Mesa Funeral Home had a huge impact on the funeral and body broker business in Colorado. It's illegal there now for funeral homes to license body donation businesses. Colorado law also restricts funeral homes and or crematories from having more than a 10% interest in tissue banks and vice versa. Plus, abusing a corpse went from a misdemeanor in Colorado to a class 6 felony. Granted that is the least serious of the felonies, but a misdemeanor is like jaywalking. Mutilating a corpse should at bare minimum get you into a little more trouble than crossing a street outside a designated crosswalk for the love of God. I think we can all agree on that. I hope we can at least. Because if we've reached the point where we're all basically ah screw it, it's just a dead body. Somebody can make a buck off of it, let them.

Then we're no longer just ghoulish weirdos. We're doomed. You know, like as a species. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Most of us stop biting each other by kindergarten, but some folks just cannot keep their teeth to themselves. Witches and serial how human bite marks became a legit form of evidence, except maybe not quite so legit after all. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

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