A funeral home is under investigation for allegedly selling gold teeth taken from a dead body so the owner could go to Disneyland.
Megan Hess runs both Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services, a company selling body parts to laboratories, out of the same building in Montrose, Colorado.
It is thought to be the only case in America of a body parts broker and funeral home sharing a building.
The FBI is now investigating the businesses, which have an unusually high number of complaints against them, following a report by Reuters.
Megan Hess (pictured) runs both Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services
Former employees told Reuters about some of the worrying practices at the funeral home.
Kari Escher said Hess’s mother, Shirley Koch, who embalmed and dismembered bodies, would allegedly pull teeth from the corpses to extract the gold in crowns or fillings.
‘She showed me her collection of gold teeth one day,’ said Escher, who said that Koch had told her she’d sold one batch to pay for a trip to Disneyland.
She said Koch told her: ‘She had sold a different batch a year prior, and they took the whole family to Disneyland in California on the gold that they cashed in.’
Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services, a company selling body parts to laboratories, are based out of the same building in Montrose, Colorado (pictured)
Hess made the process of donating easy, with a drop down option on her website
Both Hess and Koch declined to speak to reporters.
It is not against the law to buy or sell human body parts for scientific research and education.
It is also legal for funeral homes to sell items recovered from dead bodies, such gold teeth and fillings.
But it does pose an ethical problem.
‘The conflict of interest of having a side business in body parts just leads to problems,’ said Steve Palmer, a funeral director in Cottonwood, Arizona, and a former member of the policy board at the National Funeral Directors Association, told Reuters.
‘There are no ethics there when you do that. You are not looking at the full disposition (of a body). You are looking at how to make money.’
Hess would charge $1,000 for torsos, $1,200 for a pelvis and upper legs and $500 for a head, price lists showed
Another ex staff member said they never heard Hess tell donors that their loved ones’ bodies would be sold for profit.
Colorado state funeral regulators are also investigating Sunset Mesa. A spokesman revealed the funeral home had a ‘higher than average’ number of complaints against it – nine open complaints currently.
Hess told Reuters she took orders for body parts via Hotmail and would charge $1,000 for torsos, $1,200 for a pelvis and upper legs and $500 for a head, price lists showed.
Meanwhile, the funeral home charged $695 for cremation and $1,995 for a basic burial, although if someone chose to donate the body to Donor Services, the charge was dropped to $195, according to Reuters.
Hess made the process of donating easy, with a drop down option on her website.
Her funeral home site listed her credentials, including a PhD in mortuary science.
After being questioned by Reuters, she removed the ‘Add to Cart’ donation page and the mention of the mortuary science degree from her online biography.
Her funeral home site listed her credentials, including a PhD in mortuary science