Cremation: Body Parts for Sale

A funeral director by the name of Megan Hess ran a funeral home and a body-part distributing company. Both. Under. The. Same. Roof.  And no one blinked or thought that was strange at all.  After a few years of selling body parts to medical research and academics, the FBI came knocking at Megan's door and the agency was shocked to its core to discover that someone named Megan would stoop so low as to pulling out gold teeth from cadavers and then dismembering the bodies and selling the pieces…and sending the pieces to buyers. Through. The. Mail. 

Megan offered huge discounts and even free cremation if you were willing to donate a body part to medical science.  She made it seem like a small piece would be donated and you’d get the rest of the body back (as ashes).  But that is not what happened.  People got boxes of cement mix, or the remains of dogs, or other people, but for sure not the person you had brought to her to be cremated.

She was raking in up to $40,000 a month – she was swimming in money, bathing in money, living laughing and loving in money, until the FBI came and shut her down.

Megan got away with it because the industry was not regulated.  Organ donation is heavily regulated, but not heads, limbs, torsos, or knees!  It’s still kind of the wild west and there is money to be made if you can get your hands on a dead body that you didn’t kill.  That’s the hard part because killing is a crime but selling body parts is not.  Not even a tiny bit.

Funeral directors play an important role in people’s lives (and death - sorry).  People have always died, but it wasn’t until the Civil war that the funeral industry was born.  Death moved from the home, where it was a family matter, to the battlefield and hospitals, where it stopped being a matter of the home and became a matter for the medical profession.  Our current funeral system was born out of a perfect storm of war, advances in medicine, germ theory, and a millionaire’s trip to Egypt in 1930.

Sound crazy?  Not as crazy as giving people a box full of cement mix and watching them cry as they spread it lovingly in a forest.  Megan knows crazy and she will tell you that the funeral industry is just chock full of sane people trying to make an honest “living” (sorry).