Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Funeral Home of Horrors - Megan Hess and Shirley Koch

Episode Date: March 12, 2023

Megan Hess, a former owner of the Colorado funeral home, Sunset Mesa, has pleaded guilty to secretly dissecting corpses and selling body parts without consent from relatives of the deceased. Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, launched a non-profit donor service organization in 2009. They forged dozens of body donor consent forms and sold the body parts for profit. They have both been convicted and sentenced for their crimes.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and special guest co-host  Dave Mack discuss the purpose of funeral homes, how one decides what is done with a loved one's remains, the legal procedures for deciding what is done with bodily remains, using bodies for medical purposes, and much more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 0:45 - Background  2:40 - What is the purpose of a funeral home?  5:05 - Gross Anatomy 5:50 - Deciding what is done with a body after death 8:10 - Donor Services and Megan Hess 13:35 - Can you tell if someone’s ashes aren’t real? 16:00 - Legal procedures for remains  18:10 - Non-transplant anatomical donation 19:30 - Jeff Peacock and finding out his parents were victims of Hess 23:40 - Body parts sold having certain diseases 25:30 - Using bodies for medical purposes 27:50 - Sentencing for Megan Hess and her mother Shirley Koch 28:30 - Wrap-upSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. We're going to have a discussion about a case that is so horrific. And it's not just a case. It's several cases. That just the mere thought of will certainly give you pause when you begin to think about what's going to happen to me when I die. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan.

And this is Body Bags. I am so pleased to welcome back to Body Bags my buddy Dave Mack, investigative reporter with Crime Online. What a day for you to come back. The cases we're going to be discussing today, it would make stronger men certainly faint, I would think, and certainly something you probably didn't think about when you got the call from me. Joe, it's great to be back. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. First of all, every time I'm around you, I learn something that is totally foreign, something I didn't even know I didn't know kind of thing. But when I found out we were going to be talking about a funeral home. What happens after we pass from this world to whatever one believes is next. And we all have different feelings about that.

I've told you before, my wife, she believes in, you know, mausoleum, having that place to go to visit the dead. I am of the mindset. It doesn't mean much to me. But if I found out somebody was doing something with my body after I was gone that I didn't say they could do, I would have a problem with that, a big problem. And I think most people do. I think we have an understanding that we live on this earth. We have certain rights that we expect while we're alive, and we have certain beliefs

in when we die. Finding out that somebody could do something to a loved one after they are gone, that really grinds my gears and it's something I didn't see coming, Joe. Most people, you don't give it a second thought most of the time. The word victim gets thrown around a lot nowadays, but can you say victimize the dead? Perhaps. I think in the cases we're going to discuss today, you're victimizing family. Let me ask you this, Joe. A person dies. And at that point, we know that a body gets picked up and they get taken somewhere. And after all the legal stuff, whether it's an autopsy or whatever,

that they end up at a funeral home. What is the purpose of a funeral home? Where do we begin in the process of the dead body? Funeral homes have not been something that have been part of the human story forever and ever. You know, if you're into the Civil War and history, there are those images of the transportable embalming service that they had during the Civil War. It's the first time you actually saw it just because these battlefields were so distant, people began to get used to having bodies embalmed. And that just wasn't the case. And the reason was these battlefields were so far away, the bodies had to make it back to families to be buried. We hear about mummies and all that stuff, but that's elite stuff. For the common everyday person, funeral homes and that sort of thing were kind of a luxury, certainly the preparation of a body. And in order to do that, you have to have a facility that is certified, that is bona fide,

that falls within the legal parameters of whatever state you're living in, that's going to take care of the remains and take care of them in an appropriate manner. When you look at it from a familial standpoint, you're putting a lot of trust into the hands of these people that come to your home if you have a loved one that passes away at home. And it might be reportable to the coroner, but the coroner releases, we just call it releasing from the scene from a medical legal perspective. The funeral home will take the body back and then begin to prepare the body according to the family's wishes. And then you have bodies of individuals that pass away in hospitals.

It's kind of the same thing. The bodies will be removed from the floor or from the emergency room and taken. And when I say floor, I mean removed from the med-surg floor or wherever they are being treated, ICU, and be placed in the morgue at the hospital. And then a funeral home will come and remove the body. That's actually how I got my start. I was working as a morgue attendant in a hospital. The bodies will be removed from the morgue by the funeral home and taken and be prepped. Either they're going to be buried or they're going to be cremated. There's a third option that many people probably heard of, but they're not completely aware of, and that is an anatomical donation. And that does happen.

It happens with some frequency. And each state has an anatomical board. Bodies will be donated by families and they'll be sent to medical schools. And they're used for gross anatomy examinations to teach medical students basic human anatomy. Not like reading in a book or dissecting some animal like you did in biology class in high school. I'm talking about actually doing a detailed dissection in a gross anatomy lab at a medical school. And many times, bodies are donated for those purposes. When you say gross anatomy, you're not talking like, oh, gross. I mean,

that's an actual medical term, right? When you hear gross anatomical dissection, you're talking about an overall dissection, as opposed to, say, if you're doing a microscopic examination where you're looking at a very specific item, gross anatomical dissection essentially means that you have a sample or specimen if they have a limb that is amputated, that will be grossly dissected by the pathologist at the hospital to try to understand the disease that this person is suffering from. If I want to donate my body to science, I can make that clear. This is what I want. Right. Yeah. And they'll do it.

But you can't then turn around and say, hey, I know Dave Mack had a lot of weird stuff going on with him. When he dies, we're going to take it. You can't just decide I'm going to take this body and not that one, right? No, no, you can't. And that's why these decisions are left up to families. I mean, you can pre-prepare. And people that decide that they want to make an anatomical gift of their mortal remains can't do it. And they do it prior to death.

And all of this is set up in advance. And interestingly enough, and I'm not here to advertise for anyone, but I've had several people ask me, because I teach forensic science, and specifically in forensic science, I teach medical legal death investigation, have people that ask me, hey, I'd really like to donate my body to the body farm at the University of Tennessee. Now, if you've done any study in forensics, you know what goes on up there. It at the University of Tennessee. Now, if you've done any study in forensics, you know what goes on up there. It's the study of essentially decomposing remains. So people will donate their body to be in a natural environment where it will be studied as it begins to break down. So there's any number of ways that bodies can be donated and utilized

after death. Oddly enough, it was the Casey Anthony trial where many of us heard about the body farm in Tennessee for the very first time because they were able to scientifically utilize the smells, odors, and things like that that they were able to use at that trial as they were researching what could have been in the trunk of a car. Fascinating stuff, but still that's something that you or your family has to decide that nobody else gets to make that call. This has to be either you doing this prior to death or it has to be your family making a decision on your behalf at that point in time, according to what they believe your wishes were. Because sometimes that does, in fact, happen. For that purpose, you begin to think about if you can donate your whole body, is it possible that your body can be piecemealed? Why would your body be piecemealed? That is, parts of your body be

taken and donated. And in certain circumstances, that, of course, can happen. And I think that goes to what we're talking about today. When I hear the term donation, all kinds of thoughts come to mind. I think about helping people most of the time. But you think about, in a medical sense, donors, people that do donations of their organs, people that donate their eyes for those that can't see. But there is a name that is going to stick with me for a while, and it's the name of a business. It's called Donor Services. It's out of Colorado, and it was run by a woman named Megan Hess, who was involved in a situation where she not only had this donor services business, but hang on to your hats, in the same building, also housed the funeral home that her

family had owned for years. Dave, this is absolutely horrific. A huge tip-off is when you have what is referred to as a body broker and a crematorium slash mortuary funeral home in the same building. To be straight up with you, it is scary to think that we have a funeral home and, hey, on this side, go to the left we cremate go to the right we got your body parts i would assume these are in separate buildings away from one another that as a body is being prepared the family has decided this body has been donated to science that they would go towards the body donated to science this one oh we want to cremate or bury this one goes to the funeral home that's what i thought before today i think it probably goes without saying. With cremation, it's obviously less expensive

than if you have a full-on burial where you're purchasing the casket and the prep of the body and, of course, the services that are associated with it, opening up either a crypt or creating a grave with a vault and all those sorts of things. I guess one of the reasons they would want to do this, to do a cremation, is that it's cost effective. Other people just believe that they would rather see the money that is going to be left behind for their family to go to some other purpose other than some expensive funeral. But herein lies the problem. When you have a crematory service like this that is essentially attached to a business that is titled donor services, you begin to think about, well, what are the possibilities here? What's going on? Well, in Hess's case, along with her mother, who also

co-owned these businesses and had for years, what they were doing essentially as it came down to it, they were selling cremations to families. All right. They're saying, I'm going to take care of your loved one. We're going to cremate the remains. We will return them to you in some type of vessel, an ornate jar of some type, and we'll be done. But that wasn't the case. It's estimated that hundreds, if not thousands, of cases that passed through there for the purposes of cremation, these people were going back into a room and actually dissecting off specific body parts of the deceased and piecemealing out the bodies. They would either sell a piece of the body, say from knee to foot,

or from wrist to the tip of the fingers, or shoulder to the tip of the fingers. They would dissect these bodies out for the purposes of anatomical study to what turned out to be not legitimate businesses or legitimate organizations. They'd be paid great sums of money. And then the remainder of this, they would essentially cremate. Or if they had completely piecemealed out the body, just latch on to this. If they completely piecemealed out the body of a family's loved one, they would essentially return an urn sealed to the family containing something other than human remains that had been burned.

Perhaps sawdust, perhaps wood. In some cases, it could have just been dirt that was given back to the family. And all the while, you know, the family thinks that they've got their loved ones here, maybe in some special place in the home where they pass by periodically, think about them, think about the good times that they had and how much they loved them. But that's not what they had. These families had no idea what had happened to their family members during those moments. And that's to be crystal clear. Megan Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, owned this business. People came in there.

They are at the lowest of low. They've lost a loved one. And they are now going to go through the process of, as you mentioned, the cremation and the return of the cremated how do i know i know what the cremains looked like was we spread her ashes not everybody does that but we did and i was shocked at what came out of this bag okay so joe how do i know how can i tell the difference between the cremains that i thought was my mother and find out that it's dirt or maybe somebody else maybe somebody else's cremains. You can't.

That is unless you want to go the extra step and invest in having a scientific study conducted on the cremains. And you're right, Dave. That's what they were referred to as. They are called cremains to look for any kind of organic substances that are not consistent with human remains that are left over after cremation. Because the process of cremation is something that most people are not familiar with. When the body is placed into the crematory, it's a gigantic oven that actually operates off of natural gas.

You've got multiple jets that are in there that burn at an incredibly hot temperature. And after the body has been in there for a period of time, the remains are literally rendered down. Now, they're not completely rendered down to the smallest particle at that point in time, because there's another process that the body has to go through. I've seen this happen in a couple of different ways. You have two processes. There used to be a method where they would roll the remains between two opposing large marble stones, marble in some cases, and those cremains, that that remained, are essentially crushed up. Now it's more common to have this auger that kind of spins around and it renders down the remains to their smallest particulate component so that it's virtually unrecognizable.

Of course, the most difficult thing to get rid of in a cremation are the teeth because teeth are the most resilient. So if you were in a legitimate cremaine, collection of cremaines, if you were to look into that, the ideal, I'm not saying it happens every time, but the ideal set of circumstances is that you would only have essentially what appears to be dust before you. And many times that does not completely happen. But in this case, if you were a family member and you were of a mind to go and open up the urn, Lord only knows what you would have in there,

particularly if it came from Hess and her mother. It's legal to donate body parts. It's legal to donate heart, kidney, lungs, I guess, all those things. We signed that off on the back of our driver's license. But there has to be some rule of thumb here, some law on the books about hacking up my body and selling off the parts without my family knowing. There has to be something there that sounds like a science fiction movie. the books about hacking up my body and selling off the parts without my family knowing. There has to be something there. This sounds like a science fiction movie. It sounds like some kind

of horror film. But what is there to prevent somebody from hacking off my arm and shipping it off somewhere? There's any number of laws on the books around the country relative to desecration of human remains, abuse of a corpse, those sorts of things. But when it comes to this particular sphere, all things are not the same for every location. With Hess, the Hess case in particular, one of the interesting things from the perspective of point of law is that this case was not investigated because some family member went and opened up the urn and said, oh, my goodness, look here. I have something that just looks out of place. I found a stone in here or I found a piece of wood in here or something like that. That's not the way this happened.

Because as it turns out, the feds actually began to look at this from the perspective of fraud. You have an organization like Hesse's facility where they are essentially promising one thing and you have the family members paying for this very specific thing and they're not receiving in return what they've paid for. They're being defrauded. And that's what the feds looked at with their investigation. And they put two and two together because it's like we said early on in our conversation. You got a funeral home slash crematory. And oh, by the way, you got an anatomical services company that's here. And you begin to look at these two things. And I think the feds, they even said, this is odd. Why would you have

these two things associated with one another? You would think that the anatomical services or a NATO is what that's referred to as. And you think about that term, non-transplant, the elements of the human remain that are sourced for the purposes of medical training are those items that we would not commonly associate with, say, an organ transplant. You know, when we think about heart, lungs, liver, kidney, eyes, those sorts of things. This is a separate category. And this is a category that Hess and her mother kind of danced around on the edges of this business with where they were actually advertising. They would go out and talk about the types of services that they provided. And they did have essentially at its foundation a legitimate

business. But possibly one of the problems that they ran into is that they realized that they had a virtual gold mine on their hands. And I mean that literally, Dave. Not only were they piecing out these bodies to go to the study of anatomical structures, but they were actually extracting the gold from people's teeth, the dead. Can you imagine that? That was actually the offensive thing that got the ball rolling, Joe. In 2018, one of the workers who had been an assistant manager in that facility, Shirley Koch, the 69-year-old mother of Megan Hess,

she actually took this employee and showed her her collection of gold teeth. She was removing gold teeth and keeping them. And later, Shirley actually took the gold teeth and sold the gold out of them and took a family trip to Disneyland. That's what got this former employee so incensed that she went to the press. An article began in an eight-part series was done by Reuters that the FBI saw, and they were like, well, wait a minute. So they started digging into it, and that's where all of this began to collapse

for Megan and her mother, Shirley. But there's one family in particular, Joe, that came out of it. And this is the shocking reality. A man named Jeff Peacock, his mother and father passed away in 2013. They'd been together a long time. And Joe, they died within days of one another. Jeff's dad, Harry, had negotiated their cremains before. He did everything. He was shopping around for the best deal, and he settled with Megan Hess at Sunset Mesa Funeral and paid for everything so that when they did pass, it wouldn't be left to the family to decide anything. They were cremated and interred within days of one another. We're talking August 10th, Harry was buried.

August 12th, his wife passes away. It was five years later in 2018 when the story broke. The FBI calls their son, Jeff, and says, hey, we need to talk to you about something. Those cremains that are in that urn, they're not your mom and dad. We've been able to trace that your dad's body was parted out and parts of your mother are gone as well. That's what this man gets hit with five years, six years after his parents are dead, he finds out that this place they trusted parted out his body after death. And the place they've been going with flowers and everything else to share memories of their mom and dad, their remains are not there.

I don't even know how you plumb the depths of it. They say that there's two things that will impact you in this world at a real deep level. That's divorce and death, those two things. And they run a close second. Death, as it applies to grieving, the grieving process, it takes, just let's kind of frame this a little bit. It takes a while, obviously, for you to make it through the identifiable steps of grief, okay? It's a tough process.

I know many people in my listening audience can certainly identify with it. I can. I've lost a child. My family has lost a number of people over the years. And it's one of these things that you work your way through it, and there are identifiable steps. But can you imagine, can you begin to imagine that you're working your way through such a traumatic life event where you have not just one, but two parents that die, at least from a chronological standpoint, they die within a very short period of time of one another. How impactful that is. It's like getting hit in the chest with a 10-pound sledgehammer.

And somehow, someway, you make it through those stages. You get this far out down the road with the process. You get this phone call to let you know from this total stranger calls you out of the blue and says, hey, look, I hate to tell you this, but mom and dad, their remains were sold. They were sold on the market. You sit there and you think, you know, those hands that soothed me when I was a sick child, those hands that disciplined me, those hands that wrapped me up and loved me when I was hurting, those hands that cooked meals for me, they're gone. You have no idea where they are. You thought that they were somewhere else.

You thought that they were in a different state. And I mean that. And you have agreed to have them cremated. But they're there with you under your watchful eye, your protection. Now, you find out that the memory that you're going to have, you can't, I don't know that there's any way that you could ever really get past this at this point. I don't know that I could ever measure my level of anger that would rise up in me, Dave, in a case like this.

And that's the part that they had to deal with when prosecuting these two. What they did, this mother-daughter team, they sold a bill of goods to people that were grieving and lied to them. They ostensibly stole at least 200 bodies and sold them for profit. But on top of that, Joe, I was going to ask you, I don't know who buys these bodies, but I know that when they're buying body parts or bodies in whole, they're actually requiring them to not have certain diseases. I'm certain of that. And we know for a fact that Megan Hess and her mother, they lied about the condition. Some of these bodies were HIV positive and they lied about it. Yeah, HIV positive. And you had a couple of the HEP groups that were involved too, which people talk about how contagious HIV is. And it is. But when compared to HEP,

you're in a completely different realm at that point in time. And so the general public is being exposed to these diseases. Certainly anybody that's working in a postal service or any kind of transport services, that is the means for these bits of anatomy to be conveyed from one spot to the other. I don't know. It sounds so simplistic, me saying this. It's like the height of selfishness and greed. You begin to look at this, that you would take this kind of risk, expose people out there far and wide to whatever is going on from a pathology standpoint with these remains that you had control of, but yet you're exposing everybody to them just so that you can enrich yourself. would want the stiffest, harshest penalties that could possibly be imposed on these two that they could possibly get. But I got to tell you, I don't know if there's enough time in jail that you could assign to these individuals or sentence them to. They were allowed to plea to take all the charges and plea it down and have some charges

dropped. And I don't think the families are totally satisfied. I know that there has been an appeals process, but I did want to point one last little bit out, Joe, just to make it, if it can be any worse, when they sat with these families, they discussed donation. They discussed donating bodies to science. And there were instances where the family, for personal or religious reasons, outright rejected that. Said, absolutely not. We won't even consider that. And they did not care. They did it anyway. A violation that goes beyond anything I can

even imagine. I'm glad you pointed that out, Dave, because you're not talking about a perpetrator here that just committed fraud by essentially dissecting someone's loved one and selling their anatomical parts. You're talking about somebody that in certain cases had specific instructions. I do not want this to happen, but yet they went ahead and moved forward with it. This takes this to an entirely different level. Look, and I got to say something here. I've got a lot of friends who are physicians or surgeons, this sort of thing that I've run across over the years.

One of the things that you have to do as a medical student and as a resident is learn how to train. For instance, just doing suturing, learning how to suture. I know many cases where surgeons, people that were pursuing surgical residencies, they would essentially take pigs and there would be incisions that would be made into pigs and they would learn how to suture on these deceased animals. And when you have an opportunity to have actual sample from a human being where you can study it and understand the impact of what you're doing as a surgeon or as a treating physician, I think that that's very important and it's certainly something that's needed. There are legitimate businesses out there that provide this service, and it's something, I think, that is a requirement that you have access to, because you want the most highly

skilled people out there working in the medical community that take care of us. But circumstances like this, I can't imagine in my wildest fantasies why anybody would take delivery from an individual that was piecemealing human remains just so that they could make a profit. And they did plea bargain it down. Sentences have been passed. Shirley Koch, 69-year-old mother and co-owner of the facility, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She pled guilty to one count of mail fraud and aiding and abetting. Her daughter, Megan Hess, at 46, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. You know, as I mentioned, there was a lot of pleading going on,

and that was what they were able to negotiate, a 20-year sentence that was appealed, that was upheld by the court, on mail fraud and aiding and abetting. They are going to prison, Shirley Koch maybe for life with a 15-year sentence at nearly 70 years old. Megan Hess, she'll still get out while she's still alive. A lot of the family's not happy about that, Joe. Yeah, I can imagine that. I don't know that there's any amount of time that you could give to these people that would repair the damage that's been done. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.