MONTROSE, Colo. — The Sunset Mesa Funeral Home case was always going to be different for the FBI agents who were involved in the investigation.
This case caused Colorado lawmakers to change state laws, requiring funeral home professionals to be licensed in Colorado. However, there have been fewer discussions about Sunset Mesa lately, as other Colorado funeral homes made national headlines.
“The suspicion was, 'Hey, they might be stealing bodies, taking bodies, against people’s wishes and selling them,'" Special Agent Busch told 9NEWS Investigates, in his first ever interview, "When you hear that, you think, 'Man, that's crazy.'"
Owner Megan Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, were convicted of crimes involving stealing bodies and illegally selling them. Both were also convicted for agreeing to cremate families' loved one, and instead, illegally selling parts or the whole bodies for profit. In those instances, the women would still return cremains to families, even though they were not ashes of their loved one.
Busch was just a year into his FBI tenure when he started investigating the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose. 9NEWS agreed not to use his first name, or show his face, to preserve his ability to work undercover. He led the investigation.
Busch was working out of the FBI's Grand Junction office with Special Agent Alex Zappe.
"I never thought we would be working a case like this as an FBI agent," Zappe said.
They said they knew quickly the investigation would be best handled by the FBI because of their lab resources and the fact victims were all over the country.
"The FBI is poised to do huge cases. That's what we do," Zappe said.
"No other search warrant that I've ever executed had on there as evidence that we're looking for body parts."
The investigation began in October 2017 because of a question from a journalist.
Both agents say they usually conduct search warrants farther along into investigations, so they know exactly what they are looking for. In this case, the FBI executed a search warrant of the funeral home just a few months into the investigation on Feb. 6, 2018.
“No other search warrant that I’ve ever executed had on there as evidence that we’re looking for body parts," Busch said.
“We’ve done a lot of search warrants at residences and businesses, but never have we done a search warrant in a mortuary," Zappe said.
When the FBI showed up to the funeral home, Hess was there, but Busch said it was clear she wasn't going to explain anything.
“She was scared. She was nervous," he said. "But, she also seemed like maybe defiant and annoyed by our presence."
He said Hess showed them around, knowing they would find things anyway.
“There was both a lack of records, which was evidence, but also [the] records that we saw were falsified and manipulated and so that was a good piece of evidence," Busch said.
"Shirley would figure out how to do things by YouTubing it."
Hess owned the business, and her mother, Koch, worked there. Hess was the public facing one, making sales to body brokers and interacting with most of the grieving families. Koch worked mostly behind the scenes.
"Dismembering bodies, packaging them, embalming them, things like that," Busch said.
The agents said she would use tools from the hardware store that anyone could buy. Koch had no formal training to work at a funeral home, let alone to dismember bodies.
"One of the former employees told us that Shirley would figure out how to do things by YouTubing it," Busch said.
On the day the FBI executed the search warrant at the funeral home, Koch wasn't there. Busch went to her house, and they sat down to talk on her couch.
“Her emotions kind of ranged from kind of a fake friendliness, to crying, to yelling during the interview at different times,” Busch said.
They spoke for a while with Koch expressing her innocence.
“Kind of unprompted, she explained that all the bodies were consented and none of them had infectious disease," he said.
When Busch confronted her about lying, he says her husband stopped the interview.
"She would cry, and then she would yell, and she would state her innocence that there was nothing ever wrong going on," Busch said. "They would never do that and eventually her husband seeing how frustrated she was and how animated she was and said, 'Okay, that’s it. We’re done. You guys gotta go.'"
"Mail Fraud? Why is mail fraud matching stealing bodies and selling them?"
On March 17, 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, the FBI arrested Koch and Hess. They were later convicted of mail fraud in 2022.
"Ultimately, Megan and her mother engaged in a scheme to defraud," Zappe said.
The agents explained there is no specific crime directly related their conduct, but Hess and Koch shipped bodies that contained infectious diseases, despite promising otherwise.
"Mail Fraud? Why is mail fraud matching stealing bodies and selling them?" Busch said. "Yeah, of course those don't match up. But that's part of what we need to do. We need to know our laws and how they affect different scenarios... This was the crime that carried the most weight and matched the elements of the crime and of the evidence we had."
The FBI never arrested anyone else. Victims have wondered if the people who bought bodies and body parts from Sunset Mesa should have known better, but the buyers were never charged.
"She defrauded all of the victims that were involved and all the families and those people that trusted her," Zappe said. "She defrauded them."
In January 2023, Hess and Koch were sentenced, but they appealed their sentence in July. That process continues to play out.
"It's like giving a death notification over and over and over..."
During the investigation, Busch and Zappe communicated with hundreds of victims. The FBI confirmed 560 victims in the case.
"It was a lot. We were also feeling like we were kind of giving death notifications to family members, which is something that is a difficult responsibility to kind of compartmentalize your emotions during that," Busch explained. "A lot of those conversations, we would shed tears with the family, and that was the most difficult, for me anyway. That was the most difficult part of the investigation was breaking that news to the family."
The agents allowed the families to decide how much information they wanted to know about their loved one. Some wanted to know as much as possible, while others wanted to know nothing.
"In this case, it was also okay to shed some tears with the victims and connect with them," Zappe said.
"Somebody murdered my dead husband."
Many families still do now know what happened to their loved one. However, Danielle McCarthy did get parts of her late husband back.
"I still have nightmares and I still have visions about that [dismemberment] being done to my husband," McCarthy told 9NEWS.
She said she feels extremely grateful for the work the FBI did in this case, but mostly for Agent Busch, who talked with her the most.
"There's an unending gratitude to all the players, but he stands out as the biggest player," McCarty said.
She said she's glad the agents did an interview with 9NEWS.
"Being able to hear from them and their perspective adds validation to what we went through," she said.
View a timeline of events in this case here:
If you want to see the timeline in a larger format to view the court documents, click here.