Archive Episode: Colorado Funeral Home Body Brokering Scheme, Part 1

The Perfect Scam

AARP

True Crime, Aarp, Fraud, Society & Culture, Scam, Crime, Bobsullivan

4.5 • 980 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Planning a loved one’s burial or cremation is a difficult experience under the best of circumstances. When Diana’s stepfather, Cactus, gets sick during the early stages of Alzheimer’s and sees a billboard advertising simple cremations for $695 at Sunset Mesa Funeral Home, he requests that his family cremate him and not spend a lot of money. But when Cactus dies and his cremains go missing under mysterious circumstances, it sets off a series of events that not only exacerbates the family’s grief, but also tips off a lengthy investigation by Reuters journalists that rocks a small community in western Colorado and exposes the dark, unregulated side of the body trade industry.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This week on The Perfect Scam.
0:05.0	I mean, we're talking about hundreds of people from that small town in western Colorado who never knew what was really going on in that house of horrors that Megan Hess was running out of her funeral home.
0:18.1	And it wasn't until I got home back home, and it did keep plaguing me, you know, what
0:25.4	really happened?
0:26.3	Did they mix up his body?
0:28.0	Did they lose his body?
0:30.0	Little did I know what really happened.
0:32.6	Really, the horror, the nightmare was yet to come.
0:39.0	Welcome back to The Perfect Scam.
0:41.0	I'm your host, Bob Sullivan.
0:43.5	When Diana McBride's stepfather dies,
0:46.1	he went by the name Cactus.
0:48.0	Her mom quickly moves to have Cactus cremated.
0:50.8	So quickly, Diana can't even get from her California home to her mom in Colorado
0:55.3	before the cremation. So Diana learns on the phone from her mom that the funeral home
1:01.6	can't find her stepdad's remains. A tense phone call doesn't clear things up, so when
1:07.3	the director hand delivers cactus to mom a few days later,
1:13.3	Diana isn't quite sure things are settled.
1:18.2	But she decides to let it go, let her mom grieve without adding to her troubles.
1:23.1	Then one day, a few months later, a reporter from Reuters calls to say he's investigating the illicit human body parts trade,
1:27.1	and indeed, the nightmare was yet to come.
1:31.7	This is part one of a two-part series we've plucked from our archives while we work on all new episodes of the perfect scam for you.
	...

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