This is an episode of Inside the Tent, a podcast going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning shows.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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. They were body brokers. Megan was selling the body parts - heads, torsos, legs - to companies that claimed to do medical research.
So where did Ashley start? Megan and Shirley had been convicted, so there were plenty of court documents and media coverage to review. And then she began contacting the victims.
The victims were the families that trusted Megan. When they came to pick up the ashes of their loved ones, they instead received a mixture of ashes of various people.
The moment that Adam and Campside reached out to Ashley about Body Brokers was surprisingly emotional. Ashley was recovering from open heart surgery and was personally confronting issues of death and mortality. That said, the unregulated industry of body brokering was not familiar to her.
Adam and Ashley discuss the FBI’s approach to the case and reporting on the sense of betrayal felt by residents of the small town, who were taken advantage of at their most vulnerable moments.
Body Brokers is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, in association with Black Bar Mitzvah.
Listen to Inside the Tent on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And let us know what you think: questions@campsidemedia.com
Surprisingly, this is not the only Campside Media podcast to center around cremation. Noble, released in 2024, focused on 300 bodies on a property in the tiny town of Noble, Georgia and one of the most expensive investigations in the history of the American South.
We hope to see you inside the tent again soon. Subscribe now for updates on all of Campside’s hit shows.
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