A Colorado funeral home operator who made headlines back in 2020 after being arrested alongside her mother for illegal body part sales has been sentenced to 20 years behind bars.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado announced that 46-year-old Megan Hess had received a 20-year sentence after her prior guilty plea to mail fraud and aiding and abetting in connection with the allegations against her. Per prosecutors, both Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, were engaged in the illegal selling of “body parts or entire bodies” without the consent of affected families.
Koch, who previously pleaded guilty to the same charges, received a sentence of 15 years behind bars.
Between 2010 and 2018, the former operators of the Montrose-based Sunset Mesa Funeral Home are said to have stolen bodies or body parts from hundreds of victims. In some instances of cremation, families are said to have received ashes that did not actually stem from the bodies of the deceased.
Upon the initial announcement of Hess and Koch’s arrests in March 2020, it was also revealed that Hess had started a nonprofit by the name of Sunset Mesa Funeral Foundation, which did business as Donor Services and operated its body broker services “out of the same location” as the funeral home in Montrose. Although the two women’s subsequent plea agreements resulted in multiple charges being dropped, both were initially also charged with illegal transportation of hazardous materials.
“These two women preyed on vulnerable victims who turned to them in a time of grief and sadness,” Leonard Carollo, FBI Denver’s Acting Special Agent in Charge, said in a statement shared on Tuesday. “But instead of offering guidance, these greedy women betrayed the trust of hundreds of victims and mutilated their loved ones.”
Speaking with regional outlet KRDO, as detailed in the video above, a Colorado Springs woman whose deceased husband’s body was among those alleged to have been targeted in the case, reacted to news of the guilty plea by urging viewers to consider the continued trauma affected families will be faced with despite this latest development.
“Who does such a vile, dastardly, despicable thing at a person’s most vulnerable time, and at a most sacred time?” the woman, Danielle McCarthy, asked.
