Ashley Fantz
speaker
73 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Ashley Fantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I found out it was like the plot twist. I never saw coming for sure. But I was diagnosed with a deadly congenital heart defect that typically kills people in their teens and early 20s. And it's a very rare defect. It's called anomalous right coronary artery.
No, thank God I didn't. Even though doctors remarked to me, like one doctor really threw me because I became a guinea pig for all of their tests because it's such a rare defect. But one cardiologist said to me, I don't even understand why you're still alive. And I said, well, while you puzzle on that, I'm going to get another doctor because I don't want to be talked to that way.
I've always been a distance runner, but I never had any symptoms while I was exercising. I really didn't have any symptoms. But one night I was giving my toddler a bath And I started having really intense chest pain, which sent me to the ER. And I was fine. I think I actually just probably had gas. And so that's what caused me to go see a cardiologist.
You know, in your 40s, as a woman, you learn to be very aggressive with doctors who otherwise would blow you off and say, oh, it's anxiety or whatever. Sure.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I have an awesome scar that runs down my chest. And I love to talk to people about not only what happened to me, but also get conversations going about death. So I'm a real hit at parties. And
Actually, it was a colleague of yours, Adam Hoff, who sent me a news story about the narrative that undergirded the podcast, which was a mother and daughter who owned a funeral home in rural Colorado who were luring people in through the front door with the promise of discount cremation, which we know is very expensive normally. The funeral industry is a billion dollar business.
And instead of cremating people, they were giving people a mixture of a variety of people's cremains that they kept in a Home Depot tub and were dismembering bodies and selling them. And so I was interested, although that sounds very horror show and it is very horror show. I was like, well, I started thinking, what is a body worth spiritually, monetarily? I really wanted to explore that.
Yeah, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that body brokering is legal in the United States. But it's highly unregulated. So to back up lying to your funeral clients or your cremation clients and saying that you're cremating their loved ones and giving them ashes. Meanwhile, you're actually dismembering bodies and selling body parts. That is fraud. That's illegal. Okay.
But the actual selling is okay. Yes. It's legal in this country. It's highly unregulated, which is why a lot of this criminality bubbles up in that world. The United States is the largest exporter of body parts to the rest of the world. And how much individual body parts are worth, an arm, a leg, a head, you're worth more in parts than you are in as a whole.
So I could sell your body, your entire body, Vanessa, to a medical device company or some other body broker who's going to sell it to someone else, or it could get sold to the DoD for explosives, experiments, or tests, I should say.
Yeah, there have been alumni of certain universities will say, okay, I want to give back to my university by donating my body after death. And so that person's assumption is this body is going to be used by the medical students to learn and perhaps find a cure, etc. But then those bodies can be resold to other places, which has happened where the DOD has purchased bodies. Wow.
Yeah, so this town is near Telluride, but it's nothing like Telluride. It is economically distressed, small town. So to have a daughter and mother who ran a funeral home Megan Hess, and her mother's name was Shirley. They were beloved in town.
Megan was someone who used her funeral home and an adjacent event planning space to let people who had various classic car hobby club, like, come and meet there. They were known for throwing these very thoughtful, elaborate funerals, like an elderly woman whose favorite color was pink draping the entire chapel in pink, or... You know, they put on a certain face to the community. We're a warm hug.
This is where you come to for Megan to reach over and put a hand on your shoulder or perhaps embrace you. Well, meanwhile, the dollar signs, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, are we're going to give you... everything from a variety of other people's cremains, call them your uncle or brother, and we're gonna chop up the bodies and sell them."
And they were selling them for tens of thousands of dollars. I think well into the millions.
One floor, not to be a stickler on that. I mean, like the idea of like an old lady in a basement does sound like not too far off, but Shirley was operating in a back room. And it's not as if no one worked at this funeral home. There were people who worked at this funeral home who might hear the buzz of a saw in the back. Now, if you're working in a funeral home, okay, perhaps a saw is necessary.
So there was all kinds of ways that people who worked in this funeral home sort of justified what they were hearing. And also, you know, you have to be pretty crazy to think, what if they're chopping up bodies and selling them in the back? Like that didn't occur to people.
But to your point about Megan, I mean, Megan was sort of like, if Tammy Faye was really big into 1990s makeup and had like the glamour shot hairdo,
that escapes the frame i mean i think people admired her i know they did because they told me that she was you know a girl boss and that she ran her own business and it was incredible but at least one employee two employees talked to me and said look she was terrorizing whenever you questioned her she made sure that she laid you out flat
There was something off about that place. It's just I knew in every fiber of my being that something was off. When we figured out what was going on, it was truly a house of horrors. So how did this idea to do this even start?
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