Is there a limit as to how “far down the well” a fraudster will go? It is a question I have been asked a hundred times or more. As a business ethics keynote speaker, business ethics consultant and book author, the answer I give is simple and honest: “No. Imagine the worst case, and I will give you a case several steps lower.”
I was thinking about those conversations when I recently reviewed the fraud case of Shirley Koch and Megan Hess. They were funeral home operators in Montrose, Colorado, and their crime was so disgusting, the prosecutor has called their crimes “horrific and morbid.” I would add-in macabre and worst of all: without ethical compass.
The Funeral Industry
As a business ethics keynote speaker, business ethics consultant, I have had the privilege of knowing many funeral directors and funeral home operators. They have exceptionally high standards as does the industry. However, every industry may have bad players.
Shirley Koch and Megan Hess, sadly, mother and daughter, owned the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado. They could be your grandmother and niece. That is the difficulty of fraud; there is no look; there is no type.
The crime is that the mother and daughter team sold body parts and bodies in an eight-year span from about 2010 to 2018. They seemed to have started out in 2009 with a sense of legitimacy. They engaged in the funeral business as well as what is referred to as donor services. Soon after, the lure of money became stronger than the commitment to ethical behavior.
As the bodies were to be cremated, the mother and daughter would often switch bodies, or sell them or literally butcher the bodies to get at body parts. The loved ones might get back ashes from most anything.
In addition, and against all rules, the couple would sometimes take body parts from patients who had died of infectious diseases. In other words, they cared nothing for the dead nor for the living. Undoubtedly, those who received infected body parts live with worry and fear rather than gratitude. Even those families who agreed to donate a specific body part, were often deceived because the duo might sell the entire corpse.
Penalties
The mother and daughter face 20-years and 15-years respectively. They have each pled guilty to one count each of mail fraud and aiding and abetting.
In the course of their fraud, they literally sold and profited from the bodies of hundreds of people. Their tepid defense was they “did it for medical research.” It was another lie on top of lies. They did it for money, for the gluttony of taking as much as they could from the dead and their loved ones.
Said Cole Finegan, the U.S. Attorney, “The defendants’ conduct was horrific and morbid and driven by greed. They took advantage of numerous victims who were at their lowest point given the recent loss of a loved one.”
The mother and daughter undoubtedly thought they had the perfect cover (the dead can’t talk) and they operated without oversight to take advantage of the deceased and their loved ones. How could they rationalize their behavior? Maybe they never did. They saw a pot of gold and they never connected it with the misery they would inflict on others. In the total absence of ethics, this kind of fraud can happen.
Finally, that a mother would do this to a daughter is unconscionable. She has literally ruined the rest of her daughter’s life. In essence, she murdered the reputation and the standing of the daughter – and all for what? To what end?
Unfortunately, fraud does not have a bottom. It is only stopped by ethical behavior.
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