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
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.
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?
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.
So while it doesn't seem like the appropriate charge, it is the charge that would send them to prison for the longest time.
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.
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.
Yes.
First of all, Vanessa, I'm sorry to hear about your dad passing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the victims that I interviewed for this podcast were traumatized in a way I have never, ever come across, ever.
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.
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.
Showing 41–60 of 73 · page 3 of 4
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