For eight years, Megan Hess ran Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in the small town of Montrose, Colorado. She promised clients discounts on normally expensive cremations, a seeming kindness in a town where many are poor. But in the back of the funeral home, Megan’s elderly mother Shirley was actually dismembering the dead. And then Megan was selling the body parts — heads, torsos, legs — to companies that claimed to do medical research. 

The families who trusted Megan had no idea what she was really up to. When they came to pick up the ashes of their loved ones, they instead received a mixture of ashes of various people. They had no idea of their betrayal until some received a strange phone call from the FBI.

Megan and Shirley were body brokers, trading on a dark network where people buy and sell bodies. What exactly were the two women after? Who was really buying those stolen bodies, and why?