The Commerce of Corpses: The Lies People Tell

Share this article

We think that our ideas and imaginations all create original concepts and plots and even inventions, but believing in the reality of the commerce of corpses was something “The Lies People Tell” author, Hugo Lunny, was amazed actually existed.

History and headlines teem with stories of corpses turned into commodities – an unsettling truth rarely discussed in polite society. In 19th-century Edinburgh, notorious killers William Burke and William Hare murdered more than a dozen people and “sold their bodies to the city’s medical demonstrators”. Burke and Hare’s scheme was macabre but not unique: it simply bypassed the “resurrection men” (grave-robbers) who usually exhumed fresh cadavers for anatomical research. The Enlightenment’s zeal for science fueled an entire underground market. As one exhibition curator notes, the tradesmen who “hoisted bodies from the ground for sale” did so because unscrupulous anatomists were “willing to accept bodies… without asking awkward questions about provenance”. In other words, even an era famed for reason was mired in a disreputable market whose “invisible hand” of capitalism Adam Smith himself might have recognized.

Fast-forward two centuries, and the commerce in human remains shows an eerie continuity. Today’s deals occur in fluorescent-lit funeral parlors and behind bureaucratic facades instead of cobblestone lanes, but the pattern is similar: unregulated markets meet human demand, and bones or ashes change hands without consent. In Colorado in early 2023, for example, the mother-and-daughter operators of Sunset Mesa Funeral Home admitted that for nearly a decade they “stole the bodies or body parts of hundreds of victims, and then sold those remains” via a private “body broker” service. Federal prosecutors reported that the women routinely represented to grieving families that loved ones would be cremated – only to cut them open, harvest organs and limbs, and ship the parts off to buyers. The husbands, wives and parents who trusted Sunset Mesa received wooden urns filled with concrete instead of ashes. In court, the U.S. attorney condemned the scheme as “horrific and morbid and driven by greed,” noting that the pair had “mutilated” hundreds of people’s loved ones “to sell them for profit.”

That Colorado case was triggered by a Reuters investigation into the booming U.S. tissue trade, which concluded the market in cadaver parts is “virtually unregulated.” Indeed, under federal law it is illegal to sell human organs for transplant, but basic body parts – skulls, bones, skin – can legally be peddled for medical research or education. Prosecutors noted with dismay that Hess’s buyers believed they were obtaining tissue legally, unaware it had been fraudulently obtained. The loophole incentivizes exactly this kind of abuse. Colorado’s chief justice later observed that for decades the state had “nearly unregulated” its funeral industry, allowing such schemes to flourish. Likewise, Georgia’s infamous Tri-State Crematory affair (2002) saw hundreds of bodies dumped on a business’s grounds while families were handed bags of cement instead of ashes. Investigators ultimately unearthed over 300 corpses in the woods and vaults of Tri-State, the owner having secretly failed to cremate bodies entrusted to him.

For more information on The Lies People Tell check out the production’s official page.

Across the U.S., similar outrages have surfaced: an Atlanta-area funeral director (and would-be coroner) was found hoarding 18 decomposed bodies in a walk-in cooler; a Kansas “Return to Nature” funeral home hid 200 corpses and paid out families in concrete; a Little Rock mortuary tech (Candace Chapman Scott) admitted stealing and shipping fetal remains and body parts – everything from a baby’s heart to skulls – to buyers on Facebook. These families were promised respectful burials, but instead had their loved ones “betrayed”, as one DOJ official put it, by criminals “engag[ing] in the trafficking of stolen human bodies and body parts”. Often the only clue is a vaguely worded death certificate or a bag of muddy ash that smells wrong. One Arkansas mother learned her child’s urn did not contain her son’s ashes – the feds had to recover the actual infant’s body in another state.

And the problem is by no means limited to North America. In China, funeral home workers were recently detained for stealing a young woman’s ashes and trying to sell them to pay for a “ghost marriage” – a traditional, illegal union of dead spouses. The ashes of a popular influencer were almost peddled for some ¥50,000 (about $8,000). In Mexico’s borderlands, police uncovered a clandestine crematorium loaded with nearly 400 uncremated corpses – bodies that families believed had been properly cremated for a fee. Rights activists noted how funeral businesses there sometimes “operate at a very low level with little professionalism,” leaving victims’ kin to wonder whether the ashes in their urns really belonged to their loved ones.

In wealthy countries with robust media, the pattern is remarkably similar. A high-profile British inquiry this year lambasted England’s unlicensed funeral trade as a “free-for-all”. The inquiry, prompted by the David Fuller case (a hospital worker who sexually abused corpses), found that anybody can set up a mortuary and even store bodies in a garage if they like. In Hull, police investigating one funeral home found 35 bodies and urns of ashes abandoned in unlocked rooms. The interim report catalogued horrific lapses – corpses “left to decompose,” bodies unattended in buildings, misidentification of the deceased – and warned that nothing short of licensing laws would stop “poor practice in the funeral sector.”

Even places known for order have shocks. In Australia, a 2019 Four Corners exposé showed that some funeral directors were skimping on space and dignity: corpses were stacked “top-to-toe” on cold-room shelves; doctors were dragged into parking lots to verify bodies because of bizarre state rules; and coffins sometimes held actual trash dumped as a convenience. One veteran embalmer told reporters he had seen clothing hangers and waste inside coffins, and even whole bodies shoved into beds intended for two. The public outcry led to calls for strict standards, but the roots of the problem are evident: an industry that is hidden from view and culturally taboo operates under intense cost pressure and almost no regulation.

In South Africa and much of the Global South, tragedies can be even more stark. In Gauteng province in 2024, authorities found that a woman’s body had been given to the wrong family by the state morgue. The daughter’s remains lay misidentified and unrefrigerated for months – “her flesh was on the body bag,” her anguished sister said. Officials later exhumed the coffin and buried her as a pauper. In one case a family’s loved one was cremated by mistake rather than buried, despite the family’s instructions. In parliament, lawmakers were moved to demand oversight of mortuaries to prevent such “indignities and trauma”, noting that mistaken identities and grave mix-ups had become disturbingly routine.

Don’t forget to check out “The Lies People Tell” Behind The Screenplay page for more information on the writing inspiration and process.

These cases around the world share stark throughlines. First is greed and demand: whenever bodies are a tradable asset, whether as cadavers for research, “silent teachers” in medical schools, or even exotic memorial services, some entrepreneur will find a way to profit. Burke and Hare’s era saw mortal bodies listed as items for sale in a ledger; modern America sees funeral homes and brokers charging more for a body “with custom tissue” than for a simple burial. Second is regulatory vacuum: almost universally, society has neglected strict oversight of the death business. An inquiry chair in England put it bluntly: “Anyone can set themselves up as a funeral director… That cannot be right.” Similarly, Colorado only enacted burial-industry licensing after years of scandals. Where there is no licensing board or inspection, unscrupulous morticians can operate in secret, flouting the trust of grieving families. Third is cultural silence: death is a taboo subject in most cultures, and grieving relatives are often too distraught or trusting to scrutinize funeral arrangements. As Fox News once reported from Georgia’s Tri-State saga, a local pastor could only lament: “How would you explain what happened back here? … I think it could be summed up in one word — sin.” This is more than criminal negligence; it is a moral failing of the living to protect the rights of the dead.

These horrors will persist so long as the corpses’ guardianship falls into murky hands. We bury the truth as we bury our dead, reluctant to demand transparency or accountability. The investigative canon is full of euphemisms and discomfort – “body broker services,” “donor programs,” “lost ashes” – but the reality is stark: people are violating the dead for profit. A final insult of hypocrisy: societies that venerate life, reason and compassion, yet let death become a slaughterhouse of commerce. Ross Douthat might observe that our modern indifference to death’s rituals has opened space for a kind of necrophilia in plain sight.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that no society is immune. Anywhere money meets mortality, someone may seize on the liminal zone between mourning and the market. Until law and culture adjust — until we treat the enterprise of death with as much care and skepticism as we treat the care of the living — new scandals will emerge. History’s lesson, from Burke and Hare to a Juárez crematory, is chillingly consistent: when corpses become commodities, the living’s avarice can rewrite the sacred.

Share this article