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
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.
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.
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.
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
Ed Shirley's fraud was across the board and that they were taken by that.
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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
That's right. That's right.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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