.jpg&w=60&q=100&h=60)
-1.jpg&w=60&q=100&h=60)
An ex-funeral home owner and her mother have been sentenced to prison in Colorado after dissecting hundreds of bodies and selling the body parts.
Prosecutors said Megan Hess, 46, and Shirly Koch, 69, dissected some 560 corpses and sold body parts without permission between 2010 and 2018.
Both women pleaded guilty to fraud earlier this year.
Hess will jailed for 20, while Koch was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
According to federal prosecutors in Colorado, the mother-daughter duo harvested body parts, and entire bodies in some cases, for sale.
Hess – who ran the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in the town of Montrose – charged families up to $1,000 (£834) for cremations that never took place and offered them free of charge in exchange for body part donations in some cases, prosecutors said.
“These two women preyed on vulnerable victims who turned to them in a time of grief and sadness,” Leonard Carollo, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Denver, said in a statement.
BBC
