Ashley Fantz
Appearances
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And so that's a lot of moving parts, Vanessa. Sorry to make this complicated, but that's kind of when the walls started coming in on Megan.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Well, there is a search warrant that served on the funeral home. And this was in February of 2018. Megan's at the funeral home. FBI comes in. We all like to call serving of a search warrant a raid. So maybe for shorthand, we'll call it an FBI raid. So they go in and they, you know, get all documents that they can possibly get, and they start to build a case.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Well, building a case takes a long, long time. And they perpetrated this crime for nearly a decade. And so there were close to 500 families were victimized. So imagine the task that the FBI had ahead of them in contacting people. And so what do you say when you get someone's voicemail? Well, some of the voicemails that were left for...
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
survivors of this crime for the families were, it was just, some of them told me they thought it was a joke, and they didn't call the number. You know, like, what is FBI? It's not my dad and my urn. What? That's ridiculous. So the survivors were asked to bring their ashes, if they still had them, to a community college where they could be tested.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Well, Megan was known, according to the people that I interviewed, who worked with her and who knew her as a big and frivolous spender. So one of the things that they did was they went on a lavish Disney World vacation. Meghan had a very young daughter and sort of loved to spoil her.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I would say that it was interesting to think about Meghan as a mother who I think sincerely, of course, loves her daughter. And so she wanted to just sort of give her the things that Meghan didn't have growing up. I don't think Meghan had, based on my reporting, much money growing up.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And one of the things that they were doing at the funeral homes is a bit of a spoiler, but they weren't just dismembering bodies and selling body parts. They were yanking the gold out of people's teeth and melting the gold and selling the gold, which, of course, is quite evocative of practices of the Nazis. It's really as dark as it gets to me.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And I've reported, as I'm sure you have, on really terrible things that people have done. And I would say, honestly, I don't know. I mean, how do you say something is worse than all the serial rapists I've written about in my time?
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
It took well over a year, by the way, for them to get arrested. So imagine you're in this small town. You know what they've done to your relative. There's been an FBI raid. It's all over the papers. You trusted this woman. Many people loved her, praised her. And you feel this betrayal, and yet you have to run into her at Target. You have to run into her at the grocery store, right? Yeah.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
So people were boiling. People were boiling mad and were so devastated. But it took a very long time for her to actually be arrested at home. Her mother was at her home at the time, and they were both cuffed and taken in, and they were charged with fraud. Now, a lot of people think, fraud? Shouldn't they have been charged with abuse of a corpse? But that isn't really a thing, right?
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And if you're going to charge someone in these type of crimes, fraud is a... Because she's, of course, shipping these bodies interstate commerce. She's fraudulently filling out forms to transport these things. She's lying in this way that, you know, justifies a fraud charge. That carries a pretty hefty sentence, 15, 20-year sentence.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
So while it doesn't seem like the appropriate charge, it is the charge that would send them to prison for the longest time.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I mean, they both pleaded guilty. Megan was sentenced to 20 years, Shirley got 15. They appealed that saying the judge went over the sentencing guidelines. And shockingly, they won their appeal. And so there's going to be a resentencing based upon that finding. And so that's what we're waiting for. Now, they are not going to get out.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I mean, maybe I shouldn't say this, Vanessa, but the odds of them getting out of prison, that's just not, that's not a thing. Prosecutors will not allow that. They'll recharge them and go through the whole thing.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
First of all, Vanessa, I'm sorry to hear about your dad passing.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, my own father died about five or six years ago. And same thing. I mean, I had never really thought about what happens at a funeral home or what could happen. But... While this crime has taken place in funeral homes, I would say that it's definitely not the norm.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And I don't want people to listen to this podcast and walk away thinking that they distrust their local funeral home or to question whether or not the cremains that they have in their urn or wherever they keep them is normal. not their loved one. I think the odds of that are extremely, extremely low.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And by the way, coroner's offices are also big places where bodies can be brokered because there are people who are employed at coroner's offices whose job it is to clean up the body parts, right? And so who's going to know if a leg or an arm goes missing in your backpack? I mean, you just don't know. It is best practice. And I had no idea before I reported this story.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
But if you're unable to watch a loved one be cremated, and I'm not sure that I could ever watch my mom be cremated. I mean, you know, you can get you can appoint a family representative who is less emotionally invested or would be hurt to to watch the body go in.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
There's also a way to know, and anyone can look this up and learn more about this, but there should be sort of a metal plate that doesn't burn, that has a serial number and various other identifying information that goes in with the body that needs to come out with the body that can stay in the cremains. So again, I totally get it.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
You don't want to sift through cremains, but you can have a family friend look in there and say, oh, I see this metal piece in there. So there's kind of ways to protect against this. But Congress has had the opportunity time and time again to regulate body brokering, and they haven't done it.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
On its face, there's nothing like working on a real human body to learn not just anatomy, but if you're a medical device company and let's say you want to throw a conference to show off or a training session to show off your new jaw implant.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And let's say surgeons, dental surgeons, or whoever is going to be putting that jaw implant in, they want to work on real human heads and you want to be able to provide them with real human heads. So there's one aspect of that. Then there's people who are donating their bodies to universities and And then there's also brokers who buy and sell bodies because they seem to have body fetishes.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
So there's one broker who I came across who was buying and selling with body. Like, he collected human skin. He was using human skin as currency to purchase, let's say, a finger or a leg or whatever. And, you know, Vanessa, when I... I've spent... I mean, I'm so old. I'm 48. I've been doing investigative reporting and reporting almost exclusively on trauma and violence for 20 whatever years.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And the victims that I interviewed for this podcast were traumatized in a way I have never, ever come across, ever.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Yes. I mean, you know, just imagine if this had, you got a random call from the FBI saying what you have is likely not your dad.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Guilt for working with this funeral home. Of course they shouldn't feel guilty, but they do nightmares. One woman in our podcast described waking up and feeling, her brother suffered from neurological disorders his entire life. And his head was removed and sold and wound up at Vanderbilt University Medical School.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And I tried to get Vanderbilt to talk to me about this, and they essentially, I mean, they all but gave me the bird. I mean, they were like, we're not going to talk to you. So I was really outraged about that. I thought Vanderbilt would do better, but apparently not. Wow. You know, a lot of medical schools just don't have guardrails.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Well, Americans love capitalism. Yeah. Yes, this is true. So, I mean, I don't think whether or not you're poor or how much money you have, it really doesn't dictate whether or not your body is likelier to be
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
bought and sold what are your wishes would you donate your body to science after this or what what's the plan before i got asked to report right and host this podcast i was before my surgery i was taking care of final plans for myself even though like i believed that i was going to be okay i was just you know when you have a daughter or a kid you just have to get your stuff together
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
So I thought about donating my body. Now, I definitely wouldn't donate it to just anyone. There's a doctor at the University of Miami who is in the last episode of the podcast, and I think I would heavily consult with him because he's sort of a leader in the U.S. To advocate that donated bodies are treated with respect at the University of Miami, they're given a second funeral.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
They are used for the purposes of... educating the medical students he took me on a tour of the donated bodies but they remained in the tanks it's like this isn't show and tell that's disrespectful to these people who have given a final gift so that we can teach future doctors that's the way it should be done now It's not done like that most of the time.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
In fact, the business card that he handed to me had a unicorn on it. And I said, oh, wow. And he goes, because I'm a unicorn. I'm a unicorn in this field. Most people don't care.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I honestly don't know. Vanessa, I think since I survived, I kind of decided to stop. It was so overwhelming to me to think about it all the time that I've kind of stopped thinking about it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I have a will. I have all of that written out. I just, it's interesting you're asking me that because I haven't fully decided what I'd want. What about you?
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I do always like to joke that I want like a mausoleum and it's sort of like that movie Big with the Voltan, you know, like talking thing. I want like a mausoleum where my likeness is sort of like a Madame Tussauds kind of, and I just tell you the story of my life. You put a quarter in me and I'm just like, yeah. It's kind of elaborate.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I think just getting more comfortable with death for me was a positive takeaway and learning more about the history of the advent of the modern American funeral home. And so asking these questions to me is interesting. Why is it that we hand over our dead? I mean, Of course, it's understandable. We don't just want to start burying people in our backyards. There's a hygiene issue there.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
But why is it as a culture that we just hand over our bodies to a business that then charges us an unjustifiable amount of money to care for our dead? Why do we not want to see it? Why do we not want to confront it? And so I think if there's a positive thing that comes out of it is just start asking yourself those questions and not to be afraid of it.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I mean, it's totally normal to be afraid of death. I feel like everybody kind of is. But it made me a little bit more comfortable with it. A friend of mine who is from India, when her father died, she had to stand in line with his body as she marched toward a pyre. And she had to watch her father's body be thrown into the pyre. And
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Once he was cremated that way, she had to sift through the ashes herself. Now, she's very much an American, and that made her sick to her stomach and traumatized her and the whole thing. But it's interesting to think about the way other cultures handle death and handle saying goodbye to the body.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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."
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And they were selling them for tens of thousands of dollars. I think well into the millions.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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,
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
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?
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
What I was able to report was was that early on in her early 20s, she didn't go to college. She went to work for a funeral home in the same town for a guy who was as shady as shady can be. And at his funeral home many years later, there would be cremains just left abandoned in the that guy.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
I also know that she was doing business for a time with a body broker named Walter Mitchell, who's now in prison, and he's in prison for throwing human heads into a forest in Arizona. He considered those heads his product, if you will, and he needed to lighten his load because he couldn't sell them. And so he's in prison for that and something else.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
But he told an FBI agent who would go on to investigate Megan that Megan was sending him heads in bloody Ziploc bags. And even for somebody like Walter Mitchell, that was like a bridge too far. So there was just absolutely no respect in any way, shape or form for the dead or for their families.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Yeah, it's a great question. She used a nearby shipping company who was never charged. And I need to be clear in that the buyers who bought from Megan, whether they were medical schools or they were other brokers or they were other companies that purported to perform medical research or to create medical devices, they were never charged. The FBI was very clear that they felt like Megan's
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Ed Shirley's fraud was across the board and that they were taken by that.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
Sure. Sure. There was an elderly woman whose husband died and she went to pick up his cremains. And when she did, it was a day that Megan wasn't there. And she talked to an employee and an employee went to the back, came to the front again and told this woman, we can't find your husband. I don't know where he is. Now, that is curious, right?
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
You can't find the cremains of my husband who was just taken here several days ago. So the daughter of this elderly woman who did not live in Montrose, Colorado, she lived in California. So this mother called her daughter and the daughter was like, there's something really wrong here. They can't find my stepfather's cremains? What's up with that? So...
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
That woman called Megan and had a disturbing, what she thought was a very disturbing conversation with Megan, where Megan just sort of talked over her, was rude to her. Oh, we got it all together. Oh, yeah, I found him. We put him in the safe. Well, why did you put him in the safe? What would be the reason to put him in the safe?
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
So it was through the questioning of this woman that things started to sort of gel a little bit. But it would have ended there were it not for a Reuters investigative reporter who had already been working on a big project at Reuters about body brokering. And he is actually the one who started sniffing around the funeral home and what was going on there.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And he entered stage left and heard through various other people that this woman couldn't find her husband's cremains, called the daughter and was like, look, we will pay to have, eventually they were given some ashes. We will pay to have those ashes you were given tested to see what they are. Like a DNA test. Like a DNA test or to test these ashes.
Infamous
The Business of Body Brokering
And it turns out that it definitely wasn't that man. It was a mixture of a variety of cremains. There were watch parts, like trash. There was trash in the, like, burned trash in the cremains. So the Reuters reporter just kept digging and digging and digging. And he ended up having a conversation with an FBI agent who's in our podcast who handles a dragnet of cases like this.