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

🗓️ 12 May 2023

⏱️ 45 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 Scamp.
0:04.0	We're talking about hundreds of people from that small town in Western Colorado
0:10.0	who never do what was really going on in that house of horrors that Megan Hess was running out of her funeral home.
0:17.0	And it wasn't until I got home back home and it did it did keep plaguing me you know what really happened did they
0:25.3	mix up his body did they lose his body little did I know what really happened
0:31.0	it really the horror the nightmare was yet to come.
0:35.0	Welcome back to the perfect scam.
0:40.0	I'm your host Bob Sullivan.
0:42.0	It's very hard to talk about end of life. I'm your host Bob Sullivan.
0:42.8	It's very hard to talk about end of life issues,
0:45.8	but it's incredibly important.
0:48.0	We all want our final wishes respected.
0:50.9	We all want our loved ones to receive care and respect during this incredibly sensitive time.
0:57.2	Today's story takes on this difficult subject, but it's the kind of thing we should all try to talk more about.
1:04.1	And this is the kind of story we can all learn from.
1:08.0	It's about a family that endured a terrible miscarriage of those end-of-life wishes, but who had the courage to learn the truth
1:15.8	and see it through, putting an end to a heinous crime and preventing perhaps
1:20.9	countless other tragedies. So let's get started. Meet
1:26.4	Diana McBride, stepdaughter of a man who has a great nickname.
1:31.9	This story has to do with a man whose name is Cactus and I'm dying to ask you where he got the name.
1:38.0	So yes, the story involves my stepdad whose name is Gerald Hollenbach, but most of his life he went by the name of Cactus.
1:48.0	I think it was a name he got when he got out of the Marines.
	...

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