Colorado funeral home directors that mutilated over 560 corpses and sold body parts jailed.

In Colorado, a former owner of a funeral company and her mother were given prison terms for illegally selling body parts.

Between 2010 and 2018, Megan Hess, 46, and Shirly Koch, 69, dissected some 560 corpses and sold the parts to medical training organizations who were unaware that they had been obtained fraudulently.

Prosecutors claimed that in other instances, entire bodies were sold. Organ donation and sale are both permitted in the US.

Koch received a 15-year prison term, while Hess received a 20-year term.

Prosecutors claimed that Hess, who operated the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in the Montrose community, charged families up to $1,000 (£834) for cremations that never happened and, in some instances, offered them free cremations in exchange for body part contributions.

She then sold body parts like arms, legs, and heads through Donor Services, her side business on the same property, without permission and using falsified donor documents.

Many families who had employed Hess for cremations afterward discovered that the ashes they had received returned were contaminated with other people’s remains.

Leonard Carollo, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Denver, stated in a statement, “These two ladies preyed on vulnerable victims who turned to them in a time of grief and sadness.”

But these rapacious women violated the confidence of hundreds of victims and mutilated their loved ones instead of providing assistance.

Tuesday’s sentencing hearing was dominated by poignant victim testimonies.

According to Nancy Overhoff, who spoke to the Denver Post, “When Megan took my mom’s heart, she crushed mine.” We came today to hear the handcuffs snap, Erin Smith said.

Judge Christine Arguello pronounced it “the most emotionally exhausting case I have ever experienced on the bench” and ruled that the two ladies be imprisoned right away.