Families spread ashes of unknown people after loved ones remains stolen
The owners of the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose admitted stealing and selling hundreds of bodies and giving families the wrong remains.
Standing on the bank of the Gunnison River, Judy Cressler hoped she'd finally find peace.
She opened a black plastic box, pulled out a bag -- heavier than she expected -- and watched the river's olive green current carry away the ashes inside.
"It’s the right thing to do," she said. "It’s the respectful thing to do."
The years-long saga that brought Cressler and nearly a dozen others to this boat put-in along the Gunnison does not feature respect — certainly not the kind of dignity for the dead this small group of people spreading ashes sought to finally bring.
They once thought the remains they had belonged to the people they loved the most. Instead, the funeral home they trusted stole the bodies of their parents, children, friends and partners — and sold them.
The black plastic boxes they carried to the river's edge instead contained a haphazard mixture of burnt garbage and cremated ashes of people or parts the woman in charge of the funeral home couldn't sell.
"She murdered them after they died," Cressler said. "That’s what it felt like. Like they died twice."
Cressler and hundreds of other victims of the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home atrocity will never get the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones the way they wanted.
This is how they honored the remains of people they'll never know.
The Crime
Harold Cressler's life ended hard.
A former uranium miner with an ear-to-ear smile, he fought off lung cancer on his own for as long as he could. By the time he went to the doctor, he had only weeks left to live.
"He sprung it on us just a few days before he died that he wanted to donate his body to science for the cancer to be studied," his daughter Judy said.
But after he died, she quickly felt something was off about how the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home handled his arrangements. She began to have nightmares operator Megan Hess did something horrible to her dad's body.
Turns out -- she did.
Megan Hess and her mother Shirley Koch pleaded guilty to one count each of mail fraud and aiding and abetting. A judge sentenced them to 20 and 15 years in federal prison after they admitted to stealing and selling the bodies of hundreds of people.
Judy's dad was sold to a company in Saudi Arabia, she said the FBI told her. "My dad was turned into a plastic display, basically."
The nearly a dozen others who gathered along the Gunnison all have similar stories. Some will never know what happened to their loved ones.
All they have are the wrong remains.
The Ashes
Once Cressler realized she didn't have her dad's ashes, she wasn't sure what was in the box from Sunset Mesa. Neither was the FBI.
Special agents took some cremated remains for testing at the agency's lab in Quantico, Va. Families got the boxes back in sealed evidence bags and were told some contained garbage Hess and Koch apparently burned. But there was evidence of human remains too -- just not the people they were supposed to get.
"Those people in that box were bodies or pieces that Megan Hess couldn’t sell at that time," Cressler explained. "You never got back your loved one, even if they were legitimately cremated. You got maybe part of them, but you got other people too. And that’s what’s in that box."
She's kept the box in her closet all these years.
"I’ve kept them and taken care of them and respected them more than Megan Hess or Shirley Koch ever did," she said. "They’re not just ashes, they’re people. Real people that had lives and hopes and dreams and memories and love and were loved and I just think they deserve better than what they got."
So she and her family got in the car and drove from their home in Grand Junction to a park in the town of Delta where they met with other victims. All had different, horrifying stories. All had the wrong ashes in tow.
"This has been extremely traumatic for me and I know for the rest of you as well," Debbie Shultz, whose best friend Lora's body story was stolen and sold by Sunset Mesa.
"I’m not glad that any of this happened to any of you. But I’m glad you’re here and that I’m not alone," she said.
The Goodbye
The trials are over and Megan Hess and Shirley Koch are in federal prison. But closure will never come to the families they victimized.
Meeting at Confluence Park in Delta, Colo. may be the closest they get to saying goodbye. In a ceremony both sacred and surreal, the families gathered to share memories of their loved ones and prepared to spread the ashes for the people whose remains they have.
"This is kind of like a funeral to me for these people," Cressler said.
A funeral has dignity. The odyssey these families have been through has none. Spreading the unknown remains is a chance, they feel, to bring respect to this atrocity.
"We do know that there are human remains in there," Shultz said. "They deserve peace too and I think that the river is about the most peaceful place that I can think of."
As the remains mingled together and floated away in the waters of the Gunnison River, Cressler read a psalm and her daughter softly sang 'Amazing Grace.'
"It's good to let them go," she said. "I just feel like I did right by these people."
Families scatter ashes, seek to bring dignity to unidentified remains after funeral home sold remains of their loved ones
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