Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - A Small Town Funeral Home Hiding a Big Secret - Cover Up: Body Brokers

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

In the small town of Montrose, Colorado - Megan Hess ran the Sunset Mesa funeral home. Known for her kindness and warmth, Megan was beloved by her customers. But behind this sweet demeanor, Megan was ...hiding a dark, twisted and shocking secret operation. What was going on in the back room of Sunset Mesa funeral home? Find out on this season of Cover Up: Body Brokers, listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes of Cover Up: Body Brokers right now, completely ad-free. Catch new episodes of Cover Up: Body Brokers every week wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to The Binge and unlock all episodes ad-free today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey witness listeners, if the Gary DeVore case left you hungry for more shockingly wild true crime, you're going to want to hear about this next one. From the same team that brought you witness, cover up body brokers, unravels what may be the most outrageous and twisted criminal scheme to ever be documented on a podcast. We travel from Hollywood, California to the small town of Montrose, Colorado, where we meet Megan Hess, who runs the local sunset mace of funeral home. Megan was known to be thoughtful and kind amongst her community, offering discounts on normally expensive cremations in a town where many are poor,
Starting point is 00:00:34 but in the shadows of kindness lurked a shocking and disturbing secret operation. In the back of the funeral home, Megan's elderly mother Shirley was dismembering the dead bodies for Megan to then take the parts, heads, torso, legs to companies that claimed to do medical research. Megan and Shirley were body brokers, trading on a dark network where people buy and sell human bodies. What exactly were the two women after? Who was really buying those stolen bodies, and why?
Starting point is 00:01:05 And how did this twisted operation eventually come crashing down? Find out on CoverUp Body Brokers. Take a listen. About 10 years ago, a woman named Charlotte Downing was working for a funeral home in Colorado. The place looked homey, a low-slung, ranch-style house, off-white sort of stucco-looking, neatly mowed lawn. Charlotte was in her late 50s, petite, energetic. She didn't always go into the office, but on this day she had to get a few things done.
Starting point is 00:01:40 She wandered into the back of sunset Mesa funeral home where the embalming took place. I remember one day going into the prep room and I can't even remember why, but I opened the freezer door. And the bodies, there were so many bodies, they were stacked on the shelves where they were supposed to be, and then they were just kind of piled together on a couple of gurnings in the middle. Some of them had sheets over them, some of them didn't. Some of them were actually laying flat, some of them looked like they had just been thrown in. Bodies in a funeral home, that's normal, right? But not like this. A freezer in a funeral home is supposed to be neat and organized. Bodies should be covered and tagged.
Starting point is 00:02:26 That is not what Charlotte saw. Here the bodies were naked, haphazardly tossed on top of one another. Legs intertwined with legs. There were so many bodies, there wasn't even room for Charlotte to step inside further. She quickly found her boss, the owner of the funeral home. Her name was Megan Hess. I said, Megan, what in the world? And she said, oh, there's a funeral home in Grand Junction, it's way behind on Criminjum, a cremating, and we're trying to help them get caught
Starting point is 00:02:57 up. They're crematory broken, so we're cremating for them. Sometimes when I get in a situation where it is just totally beyond me, I just... ...clam up. Charlotte tried to calm down. She was in a difficult spot. What she saw didn't seem right, but she really needed this job. And her job was to tell everybody how great sunset Mesa was. She was the funeral home's PR person. So she told herself, what do I really know about the nitty gritty that goes on in a funeral home?
Starting point is 00:03:35 And Megan had an explanation. She always had an explanation for everything. She could be very intimidating, but also she had so much confidence in herself that when she said something, you bleed it. She never stuttered. But Megan's confidence was hiding something. Shara had no idea where those bodies were heading next. She was going to get swept up in a sprawling, cross-continental criminal enterprise, and Charlotte would pay a very steep personal price. I'm Ashley Fonds. I've been an investigative reporter for decades.
Starting point is 00:04:19 I've covered a lot of crime, some really dark stuff. But the story I'm going to tell you about the place where Charlotte worked, sunset mace of funeral home, it's not like any crime you've ever heard of. It's so much stranger, so much more twisted. What happened at that funeral home violated something at the very core of what makes us human. It changed how people in this small town think about death
Starting point is 00:04:49 and what happens to us after. From campsite media and Sony music entertainment, this is Cover Up, Body Brokers. Episode 1, The Funeral Director. We see this funeral home as this big mystery. Mysterious building and I'm so sorry. If you want to you can reach behind you and we'll shut the door, that might help. We only have four chiming clocks in our house. We're four.
Starting point is 00:05:44 When I first learned about Charlotte, I knew right away that I wanted to talk with her. From what I could tell, she had a complicated relationship to this story. She's a grandmother who wears wireframe glasses. Her blonde hair is an in-nete bob and it's gone gray near the roots. Even when Charlotte's saying something serious, she'll punctuate it with a laugh, something self-deprecating. I'm gonna check in with you as we go along because I want you to feel comfortable.
Starting point is 00:06:14 Yeah, because you're the one that got me in this mess. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, Charla, I'm gonna enjoy this despite the heavy stuff that we're gonna talk about, because it's just so easy to talk to you. So Charlie, why did you want to talk to us for this story? As you know, because we have discussed it, I vow I would never give an interview about what had happened. I've tried to keep a very, very low profile. Search for cover-up body brokers wherever you get your podcast to start listening today. file.

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