- A Colorado woman pleaded guilty to a decade-long scheme she ran with her funeral home.
- Prosecutors allege that she harvested organs and sold them to medical buyers without permission.
- The woman also offered fake cremations and ran a body parts business next door to the funeral home.
A Colorado woman who owned a funeral home used her business to defraud customers by selling the organs of their loved ones without permission to her human body parts business and running fake cremations in the process, according to federal prosecutors.
Megan Hess, who owned funeral home Sunset Mesa as well as the human body parts business Donor Services, pleaded guilty to the federal charge at a Tuesday hearing, according to Reuters.
Hess's mother Shirley Koch helped orchestrate the dealings according to prosecutors. She pleaded not guilty.
Hess admitted to running an elaborate scam where she promised cremation services to dozens of families in Montrose, Colorado, and instead held on to their loved ones' organs, limbs, spines, and heads in order to sell them for a profit to surgical or educational buyers, prosecutors allege.
In filings, prosecutors said that the remains of at least 811 individuals were sold through Hess' scheme — and that the vast majority of customers were misled or not asked about what the funeral home should do with their relatives' organs.
"Donor Services' primary source of income was harvesting and marketing for sale purportedly donated human remains, such as heads, torsos, arms, legs, or entire human bodies," Prosecutors said in court documents, adding that she made hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a decade through using her businesses to advertise each other.
Prosecutors also alleged that Hess targeted poor families in her town and accused the pair of regularly giving customers faulty cremation services. On some occasions, customers received ashes mixed with the ashes of other dead people, or even concrete mix, prosecutors said.
Hess was also accused of shipping human heads that carried diseases like Hepatitis C on commercial American and United Airlines cargo planes without properly labeling or marking the shipments en route to buyers in medical fields.
In a 2014 email titled "female torso pics" sent to a prospective medical buyer for organs, Hess wrote, "I'm sorry that I haven't sent photos. I have had terrible donors for your process."
"Meeting with hospice on the 4th….opening the flood gates of donors. They have 4-5 deaths a day. Get ready!!!!!! I have 3 spines when needed," Hess wrote in the email.
On Tuesday, Hess reportedly called the prosecution of her scheme a "legal travesty," according to Reuters.
Attorneys representing Hess did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Prosecutors are calling for Hess to face between 12 and 15 years in prison.