United States v. Hess, 2024 WL 3262159 (10th Cir. 2024)
Grave robbing was legal in the United Kingdom up until the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832. Digging up the dead was one way to obtain bodies for medical doctors to dissect for teaching and research. The famous duo of William Burke and William Hare started as grave robbers, selling corpses to a surgeon who ran a school of anatomy in Edinburgh, Scotland. They pivoted their business model to soliciting tenants for a lodging house, plying them with liquor and then smothering them. Smothering provided corpses unmarred by the violence of clubs, knives, or musket balls.
Lest anyone think the medical schools in the UK were unique in their methods for obtaining anatomical specimens, Baltimore, Maryland, was a grave robber’s mecca. The prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Medicine gave a school janitor the duty of finding cadavers. By day, William Hartley cleaned classrooms and scrubbed toilets. By night, he and his wife cruised through graveyards in a horse-drawn carriage in search of fresh graves. He was even known to raid the city morgue. If you want to know more about America’s macabre medical school history, consult Michael Sappol’s book, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America.
Perhaps inspired by history, Megan Hess and her mother Shirley Koch operated a funeral home in Montrose, Colorado, with a side hustle of discount cremations. Mr. Koch, Shirley’s husband, ran the crematorium, but he doesn’t figure in the criminal case. Shirley Koch dismembered bodies and collected gold teeth. She used part of her gold booty to fund a trip for the entire family to Disneyland. Incidentally, Colorado law does not prohibit the harvesting and sale of gold teeth from dead bodies.
After Reuters journalists interviewed former employees, federal agents began investigating Hess and Ms. Koch. They were eventually convicted of mail fraud for fraudulently obtaining, selling and shipping dead bodies and body parts to medical research and body-broker companies. The trial court sentenced Hess to 20 years and Koch to 15 years. By one estimation, Hess had made over a million dollars by selling body parts from over 600 alleged victims under false pretenses. Hess and Koch appealed their sentences, arguing the court overstated loss calculations and unfairly applied sentencing enhancements.
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The appellate court agreed with some of their arguments. The 10th Circuit found the trial court should have offset the actual losses suffered by the next-of-kin victims with the value of legitimate services (the discount cremations) provided. The court also rejected application of a “large-number-of-vulnerable-victims” enhancement and the “sophisticated-means” enhancement to Koch’s sentence.
The appellate court sent the case back to the trial court for recalculation of sentences. In 19th-century Scotland, Burke was hanged (and subsequently dissected!) for body snatching; Hare testified against him and then disappeared, never to be heard from again. If there is any hero in the 21st-century story of Hess and Koch, it is the federal agents who spent countless hours tracking down body parts, notifying researchers that body parts certified as disease-free could be infected with HIV and other pathogens, and helping survivors recover what they could from the greedy grave robbers.
(Thanks to the Xiphos reader who sent this bizarre court case to me!)
