A former Colorado funeral home director who dissected over 500 corpses and sold body parts without the consent of grieving relatives has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Megan Hess, 46, and her mother dissected some 560 corpses between 2010 and 2018, selling body parts to medical training companies that didn’t know they had been illegally obtained.
Her 69-year-old mother, Shirley Koch, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for helping chop up the bodies, the Colorado Department of Justice said Tuesday.
“Hess and Koch used their funeral home at times to essentially steal bodies and body parts using fraudulent and forged donor forms,” prosecutor Tim Neff said in a court filing.
“Hess and Koch’s conduct caused immense emotional pain for the families and next of kin.”
Hess operated a funeral home, Sunset Mesa, as well as an illegal Donor Service, from the same building in Montrose, Colorado.
The pair would frequently charge grieving families upwards of $1,000 for cremation services that never took place.
Instead, they would harvest or prepare the entire bodies to be sold.
