Colorado Funeral Home Owner Jailed For Illegally Selling Body Parts

Let those of us who haven't harvested 560 dead peoples' body parts and sold them illegally cast the first stone. That's exactly what this quack Megan Hess in Colorado and her 69 year old mom were doing instead of cremating bodies like they said they were going to.

Woof... Talk about betrayal of trust. You leave the body with these folks and think there's a final resting place for your loved one. Later on, you find out that those aren't ashes in the urn they gave you. It's actually just concrete (or someone else's ashes).

Let's preface this whole thing by stating the obvious: there has to be consent to do anything like this and apparently this lady was forging donor forms, which isn't great. It isn't uncommon for certain organs to be donated for transplant, but these aren't allowed to be sold. It's also not super uncommon for people (like surgery training programs) to buy some of the other parts that are allowed to be sold. Unfortunately, the government doesn't regulate the sale of certain body parts like heads, spines, and arms. I'd like to think there's a screening process involved that prevents a Dahmer-type "researcher" from buying up a dead dude's wiener and displaying it in a jar on the mantle. Hopefully the buyers were verified third parties (unaware of the shady stuff going on) doing actual research to better humankind and not black market necrophiliacs or cannibals or some shit. This lady was also misleading buyers by shipping out bodies that were riddled with diseases despite telling them they weren't, which seems problematic in the corpse peddling biz. 

The lady and her mom will be going to federal prison for 20 and 15 years, respectively. She blamed her behavior on a traumatic brain injury from when she was 18 years old but I guess that didn't hold up. It massively sucks for the families involved that put their trust in these people. If there's any solace at all for those affected, at least they know these people won't be deceiving any other families any time soon. 

Maybe my brain wiring is a little whacked out, but after reading this I immediately thought of the 'Always Sunny in Philadelphia' scene where they ask Carmen (a trans woman) if "they" sold her surgically removed penis to China. As it turns out, this lady and her mom were actually kinda doing some similar morbid shit in real life at this funeral home.