Bring out your dead. Their body parts, anyway.

Megan Hess is going to prison So's her mother, Shirley Koch.

Hess has been sentenced to 20 years. Koch got 15.

They're looking at hard time because they've been illegally selling bodies and body parts out of their now-closed funeral parlor, Sunset Mesa, in Montrose, Colorado.

It is in fact (surprisingly) legal to sell body parts, and there's actually a body broker industry that supplies parts and the whole for a variety of purposes. 

You just can't do it without the permission of the next of kin. And you can't misrepresent where the bodies are going. 

“Koch and Hess neither discussed nor obtained

authorization for donation of decedents’ bodies or body parts for body broker services,” the Department of Justice said in a statement, adding that in some instances, the families had specifically declined to donate the bodies.

According to the plea deal, Hess told mourning families that their loved ones would be cremated, but instead sold parts of or whole bodies for scientific, medical or educational purposes as part of a body broker business she operated from the same premises as the funeral home. (Source: Washington Post)

Hess had quite a vertically integrated operation going there: funeral parlor, crematory, and body broker. 

This structuring of the business ensured that Hess “would always have a fresh supply of stolen bodies which she could later sell to unwitting customers” who were unaware the bodies had been stolen rather than donated, according to the government’s sentencing statement. 

Overall, Hess & Company stole roughly 500 bodies.

Among the victim stories, there was one woman who paid $2K for his father to be cremated. Come to find out, Sunset Mesa slipped her someone else's remains, while those of her father "were sold for use in a human body exhibit abroad."

Hmmm.

How'd you like to show up at a human body exhibit abroad and have the shock of recognition that the body on exhibit looked a lot like dear old dad. (By the way, I've been to a human body exhibit. It was at Boston's Museum of Science, and the bodies on show were plasticized. I must say it was fascinating. My husband and I took our niece, Caroline, who may have been 9 or 10 at the time. The exhibit is okay for kids, and I thought we had explained to Caroline what she was seeing. But about half way through, Caroline asked us, "Hey, are these real bodies?")

They're not the only body brokers to get into trouble. A man made a good faith donation of his mother's body to an Arizona body broker, thinking it was going to be used for Alzheimer's research. Come to find out, the body had been "used as a test dummy in an experimental Army IED blast. The ashes that were returned to him turned out to have only come from her hand."

Ouch.

Hess and Koch were also charged with dealing with diseased body parts - HIV, hepatitis - which can only be transported as hazardous materials, but weren't. These diseased parts were also misrepresented as healthy. 

Hess' defense was that she was in cognitive decline from a head injury she sustained as a teenager. (She is in her mid-forties.) Her mother's excuse was that she was just misguidedly trying to help her daughter make a go of her business. 

Whatever the not-so-mitigating circumstances, Hess and Koch deserve to serve some serious time. (And who can help but notice that these ghouls share their last name with notorious Nazis - Rudolf Hess and Ilse Koch? Jawohl!) 

Meanwhile, I have to say I find the idea of a body broker business pretty interesting, I guess in a weird and ghoulish kinda-sorta way.

I've always thought that donated bodies nobly found their way onto the autopsy tables of medical schools, not as bombs-away dummies for the military. Who knew?