•  Cover Up: Body Brokers

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For eight years, Megan Hess ran Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in the small town of Montrose, Colorado. She promised clients discounts on normally expensive cremations, a seeming kindness in a town where many are poor. But in the back of the funeral home, Megan’s elderly mother Shirley was actually dismembering the dead. And then Megan was selling the body parts – heads, torsos, legs – to companies that claim to do medical research. 

The families who trusted Megan – they had no idea what she was really up to. When they came to pick up the ashes of their loved ones, they instead received a mixture of ashes of various people. They had no idea of their betrayal until some received a strange phonecall from the FBI.

Megan and Shirley were body brokers, trading on a dark network where people buy and sell bodies. What exactly were the two women after? Who was really buying those stolen bodies, and why? 

credits

Cover Up: Body Brokers is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, in association with Black Bar Mitzvah.

Host: Ashley Fantz
Senior Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin
Associate Producers: Rachel Yang, Callie Hitchcock
Story Editors: Emily Martinez, Matt Shaer, Anthony Pucillo
Sound Design, Mixing & Original Music: Garrett Tiedemann
Field Producers: Megan Burney, Monique Laborde
Recording by: Jimmy Guthrie at Arcade 160 Studios, Atlanta
Fact Checking: Sara Ivry

For Campside Media:
Executive Producers: Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, Matt Shaer
Operations Team is Doug Slawin, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, Emma Simonoff, Destiny Dingle, David Eichler