A Funeral Home of Horrors - Megan Hess and Shirley Koch

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.

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-up

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.