Imagine losing a loved one. Imagine planning for their funeral and taking their body from the funeral home.
Only to find out that some organ of theirs has mysteriously disappeared.
Well, the people who left the bodies of their friends and relatives in the care of Megan Hess and Shirley Koch don’t have to imagine anything. It happened.
According to their indictment, the mother and daughter team operated the funeral home in Colorado and illegally sold bodies on the side.
Yes, they were fencing body parts without regard to relatives and friends’ feelings or even the dead’s peace.
Megan and Shirley’s charge sheet revealed many heinous deeds, some of which we can’t share. And some that we have to.
10 /10 They Had A Front
Megan and her mum needed somewhere that people could drop dead bodies without thinking twice, somewhere that’ll give them a regular supply of organs. And what better place to set up than a funeral parlor.
So in 2009, Megan Hess, aged 43, and Shirley Koch, 66, established the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado, to help residents with funeral and burial arrangements.
The cremation services were said to have served as the perfect cover-up. They’d offer cremation services, so families don’t find out what happened to their loved one’s body.
9 /10 They Had Two Fronts
Why use one when you can have two? The mother-daughter team also opened up a ‘nonprofit’ donor services business that also operated from the funeral home.
According to the federal indictment revealed on 17 March 2020, the donor services business harvested parts and sold them to interested buyers for research, medical, educational, and scientific purposes.
On many occasions, Hess and Koch didn’t seek the deceased’s family’s permission before taking what organs they wanted. And even when the family permitted them, they usually harvested way more than what was authorized.