In this chilling episode of Infamous, Vanessa speaks with Ashley Fantz—the journalist behind the podcast Body Brokers—and dives into the hidden world of body brokering, a disturbing industry where human remains are bought and sold for profit. Through her investigation into the shocking story of a mother-daughter-run funeral home in Colorado, Ashley uncovered a reality that forces us to ask: what really happens to our bodies after death? To learn more about the South Florida Willed Body Program, visit https://med.miami.edu/programs/sofab/body-donation Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. To connect with Infamous's creative team, plus access behind the scenes content, join the community at Campsidemedia.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is body brokering?
I'm Natalie Brogamed, and welcome back to Infamous, a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Campsite Media. I just wanted to take a moment to say that this episode deals with heavy subject matter, including funerals and the processing of human bodies. It is quite disturbing, especially if you're in the process of grief. Please listen with care.
So if you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time thinking about the mind-body-soul connection. Am I spending too long on my phone? Am I too in my head and not enough in my body? Am I developing a spiritual practice that nourishes said soul? And it's one of the eternal questions that all religions deal with. What happens to our souls after death?
But perhaps the question we really should be asking is what happens to our bodies? One gruesome possible answer is body dealing. Yes, you heard that right. Body dealing. This is a shady economy where body parts after death are bought and sold for money. It's a surprisingly unregulated industry, and I was shocked to discover one thing in particular.
The US is a massive, huge exporter of human body parts. Today, we're diving into the world of body dealing, also known as body brokering, at a funeral home in Montrose, Colorado, where one woman and her mother ran a stunning scheme.
They offered steep discounts on cremations and gave families bogus ashes while they secretly dismembered the bodies and sold them to medical companies claiming to do research. It's a shocking story, and one I knew nothing about, but feels really important to understand, even if it's kind of difficult to think about. I'll let Vanessa take it from here.
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Chapter 2: Why is the body brokering industry unregulated?
We have an amazing journalist with us, Ashley Fantz. She is the podcaster of a serial show that if you haven't listened to it yet, you have to listen to it. And it's called Body Brokers. If any of you have lost a loved one, I'm sure you have experienced going to a funeral home or being presented with different kinds of caskets, wondering how much money you should spend there.
You know, in the case of my father, he was cremated. We can get into that because it's a funny and also disturbing story. But you don't know what really happens to your loved one's body. So tell us, Ashley, about how you began the reporting.
I found out it was like the plot twist. I never saw coming for sure. But I was diagnosed with a deadly congenital heart defect that typically kills people in their teens and early 20s. And it's a very rare defect. It's called anomalous right coronary artery.
How did you find out you had that? Did you have a heart attack?
No, thank God I didn't. Even though doctors remarked to me, like one doctor really threw me because I became a guinea pig for all of their tests because it's such a rare defect. But one cardiologist said to me, I don't even understand why you're still alive. And I said, well, while you puzzle on that, I'm going to get another doctor because I don't want to be talked to that way.
I've always been a distance runner, but I never had any symptoms while I was exercising. I really didn't have any symptoms. But one night I was giving my toddler a bath And I started having really intense chest pain, which sent me to the ER. And I was fine. I think I actually just probably had gas. And so that's what caused me to go see a cardiologist.
You know, in your 40s, as a woman, you learn to be very aggressive with doctors who otherwise would blow you off and say, oh, it's anxiety or whatever. Sure.
And that's how they discovered it. Thank God. I mean, it sounds like you really snatched victory there from the jaws of defeat because it could have just put you in that casket.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I have an awesome scar that runs down my chest. And I love to talk to people about not only what happened to me, but also get conversations going about death. So I'm a real hit at parties. And
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Chapter 3: What shocking practices occurred at the Montrose funeral home?
And instead of cremating people, they were giving people a mixture of a variety of people's cremains that they kept in a Home Depot tub and were dismembering bodies and selling them. And so I was interested, although that sounds very horror show and it is very horror show. I was like, well, I started thinking, what is a body worth spiritually, monetarily? I really wanted to explore that.
What's fascinating is the component body parts, they are worth something, right? How much are they worth?
Yeah, I think the important thing to keep in mind is that body brokering is legal in the United States. But it's highly unregulated. So to back up lying to your funeral clients or your cremation clients and saying that you're cremating their loved ones and giving them ashes. Meanwhile, you're actually dismembering bodies and selling body parts. That is fraud. That's illegal. Okay.
But the actual selling is okay. Yes. It's legal in this country. It's highly unregulated, which is why a lot of this criminality bubbles up in that world. The United States is the largest exporter of body parts to the rest of the world. And how much individual body parts are worth, an arm, a leg, a head, you're worth more in parts than you are in as a whole.
So I could sell your body, your entire body, Vanessa, to a medical device company or some other body broker who's going to sell it to someone else, or it could get sold to the DoD for explosives, experiments, or tests, I should say.
The Department of Defense wants actual bodies?
Yeah, there have been alumni of certain universities will say, okay, I want to give back to my university by donating my body after death. And so that person's assumption is this body is going to be used by the medical students to learn and perhaps find a cure, etc. But then those bodies can be resold to other places, which has happened where the DOD has purchased bodies. Wow.
So as Adam said to me when we were talking about this, this is a whole other thing to be afraid of in life. You never think to yourself, wow, what would happen to my body after death if I did not keep a – I mean, it doesn't even matter if you keep a close eye on it. It's essentially an unregulated trade. It's called a red market sometimes, right? Where there's tons of agents and sellers.
And you particularly wrote about a case in Montrose, Colorado, which is sort of like the flatlands, right? Near the Rockies, very near Telluride, a big ski town. Yeah. where an incredible cast of characters, and particularly some female characters, were doing this in an unregulated way. Like, tell us about that.
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Chapter 4: How did the investigation into body brokering begin?
So there was all kinds of ways that people who worked in this funeral home sort of justified what they were hearing. And also, you know, you have to be pretty crazy to think, what if they're chopping up bodies and selling them in the back? Like that didn't occur to people.
But to your point about Megan, I mean, Megan was sort of like, if Tammy Faye was really big into 1990s makeup and had like the glamour shot hairdo,
that escapes the frame i mean i think people admired her i know they did because they told me that she was you know a girl boss and that she ran her own business and it was incredible but at least one employee two employees talked to me and said look she was terrorizing whenever you questioned her she made sure that she laid you out flat
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Listen to The Big Flop wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Infamous from Campside Media.
There was something off about that place. It's just I knew in every fiber of my being that something was off. When we figured out what was going on, it was truly a house of horrors. So how did this idea to do this even start?
What I was able to report was was that early on in her early 20s, she didn't go to college. She went to work for a funeral home in the same town for a guy who was as shady as shady can be. And at his funeral home many years later, there would be cremains just left abandoned in the that guy.
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Chapter 5: What happened during the FBI raid on the funeral home?
And it turns out that it definitely wasn't that man. It was a mixture of a variety of cremains. There were watch parts, like trash. There was trash in the, like, burned trash in the cremains. So the Reuters reporter just kept digging and digging and digging. And he ended up having a conversation with an FBI agent who's in our podcast who handles a dragnet of cases like this.
And so that's a lot of moving parts, Vanessa. Sorry to make this complicated, but that's kind of when the walls started coming in on Megan.
Then what happens next?
Well, there is a search warrant that served on the funeral home. And this was in February of 2018. Megan's at the funeral home. FBI comes in. We all like to call serving of a search warrant a raid. So maybe for shorthand, we'll call it an FBI raid. So they go in and they, you know, get all documents that they can possibly get, and they start to build a case.
Well, building a case takes a long, long time. And they perpetrated this crime for nearly a decade. And so there were close to 500 families were victimized. So imagine the task that the FBI had ahead of them in contacting people. And so what do you say when you get someone's voicemail? Well, some of the voicemails that were left for...
survivors of this crime for the families were, it was just, some of them told me they thought it was a joke, and they didn't call the number. You know, like, what is FBI? It's not my dad and my urn. What? That's ridiculous. So the survivors were asked to bring their ashes, if they still had them, to a community college where they could be tested.
Okay, in Colorado. So they did that, and they found, I guess, almost none of them were the real victims.
That's right. That's right.
That's right. And what have they done with all the money that they got from this brokering? Did they buy? Did they have, you know, Lamborghinis in the backyard?
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences for the families affected?
I mean, maybe I shouldn't say this, Vanessa, but the odds of them getting out of prison, that's just not, that's not a thing. Prosecutors will not allow that. They'll recharge them and go through the whole thing.
But they might get less.
Yes.
They might get a reduction in sentence. Potentially. Potentially.
This is Infamous from Campside Media.
What I said about my dad at the beginning, what happened to me and my family is my father got very, very sick with cancer, died quickly after his diagnosis. And I'm Greek Orthodox, and in Greek Orthodoxy... You're supposed to bury the body, right?
But my father had always said, even though he didn't leave a plan for his remains really written down, he had always said he wanted to be cremated and scattered in the ocean. And so we had this under-the-radar conversation with somebody at the Greek church who said, well, listen, in these situations—
The Greek church has deemed that because in Greece, in parts of Greece, like Athens, there are so many bodies buried and there's so little room left, they're okay within the country of Greece for you to have your body cremated. So you just say you're repatriating to Greece, go to this particular funeral home with a Greek American guy, and you can get your cremation and do what you want to do.
And you can also have the funeral in the church, right? So that's what we did. But I, you know, received the ashes back and I'm sure like everybody, particularly after you've listened to this podcast, who has received a box of ashes back from a funeral home, it's hard not to hold those ashes and go, is this my father? Right.
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Chapter 7: How did the body brokers profit from their actions?
But if you're unable to watch a loved one be cremated, and I'm not sure that I could ever watch my mom be cremated. I mean, you know, you can get you can appoint a family representative who is less emotionally invested or would be hurt to to watch the body go in.
There's also a way to know, and anyone can look this up and learn more about this, but there should be sort of a metal plate that doesn't burn, that has a serial number and various other identifying information that goes in with the body that needs to come out with the body that can stay in the cremains. So again, I totally get it.
You don't want to sift through cremains, but you can have a family friend look in there and say, oh, I see this metal piece in there. So there's kind of ways to protect against this. But Congress has had the opportunity time and time again to regulate body brokering, and they haven't done it.
Even though the U.S. is, you said, the biggest exporter of body parts. And remind me, what is happening with them? I mean, I understand the idea that a medical school, you know, in Belgium wants a real skeleton to have to, you know, not a plastic one, right?
On its face, there's nothing like working on a real human body to learn not just anatomy, but if you're a medical device company and let's say you want to throw a conference to show off or a training session to show off your new jaw implant.
And let's say surgeons, dental surgeons, or whoever is going to be putting that jaw implant in, they want to work on real human heads and you want to be able to provide them with real human heads. So there's one aspect of that. Then there's people who are donating their bodies to universities and And then there's also brokers who buy and sell bodies because they seem to have body fetishes.
So there's one broker who I came across who was buying and selling with body. Like, he collected human skin. He was using human skin as currency to purchase, let's say, a finger or a leg or whatever. And, you know, Vanessa, when I... I've spent... I mean, I'm so old. I'm 48. I've been doing investigative reporting and reporting almost exclusively on trauma and violence for 20 whatever years.
And the victims that I interviewed for this podcast were traumatized in a way I have never, ever come across, ever.
Right, because it's an abstraction almost, right? Like it's an abstraction. What was it that they were so – that they couldn't wrap their heads around it or nightmares or like just the whole.
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