September 18, 2025 • 43 mins
The now former Pueblo County Colorado Coroner, Brian Cotter, has been replaced after an inspection of his Funeral Home found 20 decomposing bodies behind a hidden door. The bodies were supposed to have been cremated. Cotter told inspectors he gave grieving families "fake ashes". Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take a look at Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, Colorado as well as similar cases where hundreds of bodies that were supposed to be buried or cremated ended up being desecrated while their loved ones became victims of fraud.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction
00:44.66 Hiding a crime behind a closed door
04:54.49 Pueblo County has a new Coroner
09:05.34 Smell of human decomposition
14:03.03 Why were the bodies not buried or cremated?
20:07.57 Somebody had to know something was wrong
25:03.44 Some families would never get over the trauma
29:48.35 Storing bodies without embalming
34:19.74 North Georgia, 300 bodies, not buried, not cremated
39:28.65 This is happening more often lately
42:36.80 Conclusion
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Bus with Joseph Scott more closed doors. Closed doors
imply that you're not welcome, that perhaps something is being hidden,
something might be being protected, or in some cases, that
(00:29):
could be hide in a crime. Today, we're going to
have a discussion about a crime. As a matter of fact,
it's not just one, it's several, and you can count
them each individual crime and apply a name to it,
(00:52):
because what we're going to talk about today involves the
desecration of human remains. As of this recording, we know
of at least twenty in Pueblo, Colorado. Coming to you
from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University. I'm Joseph
(01:14):
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags Dave. I'm going to
throw a name out to you real quick and just imagine,
imagine a day in this guy's life. This guy's name
is Gregory Gregg, and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly,
doctor Gregg. If I'm not pronouncing it correctly, forgive me.
(01:37):
But I want to give you a tip of the
cap right now because Gregory is he has a doctorate
as a nurse practitioner, which means he's a d n P.
And you know he's worked as a nurse practitioner for
quite some time. I think he'd been a nurse for
(02:00):
a while and then he went back got his d
and P. And you know, with a DNP you can
be an instructor. You know a lot about medicine. As
a matter of fact, you probably know more medicine than
most practicing physicians do because so much of the onus
is on all of our nurses out there and everything
they have to do. Some of the great unsung heroes
(02:22):
in America as far as I'm concerned. But the reason
Gregory's story is so very important is that it blends
in with the story we've been seeing pop up in
the news now for I don't know, I guess about
a month, and it involves the corner of Pueblo, Colorado,
which is down in the southeastern part of the state.
(02:44):
You and I just got back from Colorado.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I just looked it up just so you know. I
looked it up because I thought, you know, back in
the day when there would be like mail order scams,
you know what the envelopes, it was Peblo, Colorado, that's
where they were based out of. And so I found
out where it was looking it up on the map.
I'm like, well, we were just in Denver. This is
one hundred and ten miles to the south.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Maybe aout to give you another piece of trivia that
i'd heard many years ago about Pueblo, and I didn't
know this, it was said at one point in time
they had the most federal employees of any city per
capita west of the Mississippi River. I think a lot
of a lot of federal workers were concentrated there for
(03:31):
some reason. I'd forgive me for those residents and Pueblo
that are listening to me, maybe you can educate me.
But it's certainly an interesting environment. And to make it
all the more interesting, they've been touched by this problem
that seems to be raging in Colorado right now with
funeral homes and corners.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
You know, we actually started this while back when we
were talking about another story of that was happening with
the funeral home and them selling body parts. And we'll
get into that in a minute. But Joe, I don't
quite understand why. I don't understand why we're not hearing
more of this. And the reason is I looked into
it because there's no regulation, Joe, they don't regulate this
(04:16):
in Colorado. I'm actually looking over this case and I'm
going what did they charge them with? Because if you
don't regulate the industry, people are going to do whatever
they can get away with to make as much money
as they can.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
And the cats and that's why we've landed landed on
this general and this nurse practitioner Gregory, you know, Dave
On right now, you and I are speaking on Wednesday.
Last night, on Tuesday night, the Pueblo County Commissioners actually
appointed doctor Gregory Gregg as the interim corner for Pueblo County, Colorado.
(04:58):
And Joe why they had to do that?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Tell me why they had to do that?
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Well, it's because the other one, the other corner that
they had, who was a funeral home director and had
been the corner for a while I think, and comes
from a family of funeral directors, they arrested him, and
they arrested him because of something that they found hidden
behind a faux door or faux wall. I've heard a
(05:26):
couple of things here. You actually have inspectors, which I
find interesting since there is really no oversight with with
corners off. I think that I think that these inspectors
were a result of these other cases that we have covered,
because I think the people in Colorado finally said, you know,
(05:48):
it's probably about time that we that we get a
we get a handle in this situation. So inspectors wind
up coming to the funeral home. They're in Pueblo where
the corner where the guy he's not just funeral director,
he's actually the corner of Pueppla and he's apparently begging.
He's begging these inspectors. Look, don't don't go behind that wall,
(06:11):
don't go behind that door. And they could they could, actually,
they could actually smell a foul odor coming from behind
the wall. Dave, Now, I got to tell you, I
don't like funeral homes. I don't like them. I've never
liked them. I've spent a lot of time in them.
I've done autopsies, and funeral homes are assisted with autopsies.
(06:32):
In funeral homes. I've had to go collect bodies at
funeral homes. I've had to go collect cremains, you name it,
I've done it relatively. I actually had a body that
was missing jewelry, and I went out with the police
because they they'd issued a search warrant at the funeral
(06:54):
home because we knew that they had picked up the
jewelry along with the body, and it turned out that
one of the workers had had stolen the jewelry, and
you know, they were of course, they were accusing us,
the Medical Examiner's office, for having we had sign receipts
and all that stuff. So and I've been in crematories,
you know, over over the years for a variety of
(07:15):
different reasons. I still take my students at Jacksville State.
I still take them to crematories because I want them
to see the process, just so that they understand how
all this works. And I don't like going in there.
There's just something about it that just puts me on
one of those people. It just puts me off for
some reason. The sooner I can get out, the better
(07:36):
I am. But if you're if you're an inspector, would
state first off, you have to know what you're looking at.
You cannot. It's like it's like these people I think
that get these jobs, these these governmental favor jobs, they
get where they're a building inspector and they have no
history in actually contracting or being a cond They've never
(07:58):
you know, nailed two pieces of wood gap in their lives.
If you're going to inspect something relative to the funeral industry,
I think you've probably got to know something about the
funeral industry because you don't know what you're looking at. However,
I can tell you this, it doesn't take a rocket
scientist to be able to detect decay. Decay specifically as
(08:19):
it applies to human remains.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Well, you know, you and I have done so many
shows together and with others that we've done shows about
the smell of human decomposition. We've done it a couple
of times this week on different shows, and it's a
very distinct smell, and it's distinct because we're not usually
around the composing bodies. You've actually mentioned that the human body,
(08:47):
the decomposing body, doesn't smell any different than other animals
that are decomposing. Is that that's true, right?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
It's true with me. I mean, you'll have a variety
of opinions about that. I think think many people that
say that it smells so distinct, Well, it's distinct to
you because you it might be the first time you
smell the decomposing body, or you you're not super saturated
in it, like I am. Maybe maybe I've developed a
(09:16):
callous to it. You know, where you know DCOMP smells
like DCOMP smells like DCOMP. It's kind of like charter remains.
If I have a human remain that has burned, there
are people that say, well, there is a distinctive odor
relative to burned human remains. Got to tell you, Dave,
(09:37):
And I'm going to try real I'm going to be
very careful with what I'm about to say. Let's see,
how can I do this. Human remains that have been
burned to me, smell no different than any other species
that's out there that has been exposed to And that's
(10:00):
as far as I'm going to go with. I'm not
going to make any draw any other kind of comparisons
here because it'll really put people off. But for me,
you know, I can you know when I smell burned flesh,
it's burned flesh decomp same way. I think that people
want to say that it smells different, and you know,
(10:23):
but for me, you know, whether it's a decomposing deer
or a dog, I really don't draw a delinear. And look,
I've been locked up in coolers with not locked up,
but having to work inside of cooler, surrounded by decomposing dead.
It's part of what you do, so you get kind
(10:45):
of you get kind of a callous built up to it,
I think, and kind of a quick aside there there was.
And forgive me if I've mentioned this before, but it
kind of gives you an insight. In the medical legal world.
We used to show each other courtesy at the Medical
Examiner's office if we had if we had worked a
(11:09):
dcomp like one of our colleagues had, and like they
had to go to court, or they were going to
go to lunch, they were going to meet somebody, we
would smell each other and we would literally and it
was very common for us to say to one another,
can you come smell me? And I know that sounds
(11:30):
very odd to somebody that's outside, but you don't know,
like when you're going out in public, let's just let's
just put it too. I'll put it to you this way.
If you got in public and you're wearing like a
corner's badge or a medical examiner jacket or something identifies
you that works with a corner and you come walking
by and you smell of decomposing flesh, what kind of
(11:54):
reflection is that you know, on your office, you know,
because you'll go out and you'll kind of broadcast this
to everybody else that's there. They're thinking that you're not
taking due care. I think there's a lot you can
learn from that. I think there's a lot you can
learn about a person who is a funeral director that
(12:16):
takes care of the dead, and generationally dig this generationally
is taking care of the dead. His family had funeral
homes all over the Midwest or all over the Great
Plain States. I know they mentioned, you know, like Kansas
and these other places where his family. It's not like
it's not like not that this would be an excuse.
It's not like he just dropped out of the ceiling
(12:38):
into the funeral industry. It's like he's been around it
his entire life. You should know better. But when they
got through that door, Dave, the inspectors they're in Pueblo,
when they made their way in with this guy on
the outside saying, don't go back there, don't go back there, Dave.
(12:59):
They found it at least twenty decomposing remains that were
in that room. And after they had found them, after
they had observed them, this man who has now been
charged made a startling comment to them that really resonated,
(13:25):
and it's actually very similar to even an older case
under the same circumstances. So what do you do? What
(13:47):
do you do if you own and operate a funeral
home and you know you you have somebody asking you,
and they're going to ask, why are why are these
dead bodies in here? Why are they not disposed of?
Why why are they back here in this room? Why
(14:09):
haven't you done something with them? Because you have to
do something with them. Either cremate them or you bury them.
That's really the only two choices in the funeral industry.
Because this isn't this isn't even a matter of trying
to uh uh you know, like you're you're gonna which
(14:29):
is another case that we had that we covered Dave
out of Colorado. You're you know where they were taking
off parts of the body and selling them, you know,
for medical experimentation.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
I want to get back to where you started with this,
that you only have two jobs, you know, but the
main one is taking care of the family and the
body that is their loved one. Now, when you've got
inspectors that show up, they're not there for fun We've
got a state that is totally lacking in regulation. You
don't don't have to have any kind of anything, it seems.
(15:03):
I was trying to find the laws Joe, and in Colorado,
if you don't require a funeral home director having I
don't know. Don't you have a top ten things that
are expected? I mean, don't they have a school? Isn't
(15:24):
there somethingsure? I mean, isn't there something?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And yeah, I mean Barbara Barbers have licenses, right, yeah,
and so you and this is this is the big thing.
You know, who handles licensure. But and I don't know
that it's necessarily about the licensure of a funeral director
slash mortician as much as it is the regulation of
the physical plant that that you're in dwelling in. And Dave.
(15:50):
This guy, this guy, this man that now has you know,
been arrested and has been charged on a variety a
variety of things and clear.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
His name is Brian Cotter, and Brian Carter owns Davis
Mortuary in Pueblo, Colorado, And he was the Pueblo County,
Colorado coroner. He was on payroll as the county coroner.
Joseph Scott Moore.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, elected official. Yes, well he you know the service
that he provided. I'm going to get to the corner
bit here because again this is this is I don't
know it's it will I think that it will. Really
it will resonate with particularly our friends out there because
(16:39):
of what we talk about relative to representing the dead, Dave,
our advocacy, if you will, for the dead. Cotter also
provided crematory okay, which means that you could go to
him and you could either do a standard burial, you
(16:59):
know where they going to do the embalming. They're going
to sell you the casket. Maybe you already have a plot.
They're going to, you know, drop the crypt in the ground,
which you see these things going down the road all
the time on flatbeds. It looks like a big concrete box.
They drop that in the ground. Then they put the
coffin slash casket in there and then put the cap
on it and pour the dirt or you cremate. Well,
(17:24):
the big reveal with him is that they're asking him
about these bodies back in the room, Dave, and he says, well,
you know, I may have given some families. I may
have given some families ashes that weren't really their loved ones.
(17:45):
What Yeah, so you're not cremating the bodies. What you're
doing is you're going out and I don't know, maybe
you're getting bits of burned wood, cloth, gravel, anything else
and put it into an urn. As this family, this
family that has trusted you with the most precious thing
(18:07):
that they have, dude, you know, with a loved one,
and you're leaving them to ride in the back room,
and you're giving us, you're giving us and look, you know,
if you have a family member that has c remains
in their home or maybe a friend, you go there
and it's generally placed in a place of honor, you know,
(18:28):
maybe on a mantelpiece or somewhere, and it's there to
be seen and remembered, I think by most families. Can
you imagine finding out, Dave, that you don't have your
grandma's remains. You have a bunch of old burned up
sticks or charcoal or something like that that somebody has
(18:50):
essentially given you back into medically sealed you know, earn
that they probably charge you too much money for in
the first plays, and you've got this thing displayed on
your mantelpiece there and then all of a sudden, it
would Can you imagine how gutting that would be if
(19:11):
that was your loved one up there and you find
this out. And this is what these families are finding
out about this guy. They just assumed that they had
their loved ones remains and they didn't. They were rotting
back in this room, David.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Well, the thing that gets me, Joe is I'm back
to this is the county coroner. He's a person in
a trusted position. Oh boy, he sought that position out.
And he's the owner of this Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, Colorado.
So you've got a person who is dedicated and you
mentioned before this is a family business, something that was
(19:44):
part of his life generationally, and I would expect that
somebody in this position not just would know better, we
all know better. There's not one person right this minute
that thinks for a second, you can open up a building,
call it a mortuary and take people's money, go dig
up dirt, put it in a box, and stack the
bodies in the back.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
The fact that it's the inspectors showed up means they
were thinking there was a problem, Joe. Somewhere, somebody said
something's not right. Now. I don't know who it was,
but you only had twenty bodies. They're only fucking twenty.
That's not a lot, not compared to another story we have.
So you get twenty, but they stink and they're back here.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Well, let me tell you what else is straws into
question day because I wanted to return back to this.
You mentioned corner. Okay, if you you know, you have
those things that are seen and unseen, right, and so
those things that are seen relative to this violation of
(20:47):
law and where you're deceiving people, you're lying to people,
this sort of thing, and this is out the sunlight
has has been blasted on to the situation. What about
all the other things that may be unseen? Because if
you're in a position where you are the corner, Dave,
(21:09):
there is a title that is given to the corner
from county to county. You know what that title is.
It's actually the official certifier of death. And so if
you're the certifier of death, that means that you are
given special authority under the law to go out and
(21:29):
perform examinations or appoint someone to do examinations, like you know,
pathologists and other physicians that can do you know, autopsies
on cases you're actually making determinations about manner and cause
of death. Dave, you're signing death certificates. How how do
(21:50):
I know that you can be trusted with those circumstances
when so much rest upon your conclusions as the principal
death investigator in a county where families are sitting back
and let's say you've got a case that might be undetermined.
(22:11):
The family thinks that it's accident, and you are trying
to weigh this out in your brain. You're trying to
apply maybe a scientific methodology to this to understand what
the forensic pathologist is telling you from the autops of
your own and you fail in that duty, Well, now
you might have a family that's going without money because
(22:32):
insurance didn't pay out. You know, can you be trusted
in these bigger things? I think that's what it you know,
for me at least, that's one of the things that
comes down to. Also, you know, you just think about,
you know, the corners on the tip of the spear
when it comes to public health, because they're the first
person that can recognize patterns if you have some kind
of disease outbreak or anything that's going on in a community.
(22:55):
Maybe you see, maybe because you're the first person at
the scene, you're suddenly seeing an uptick. And then numbers
of death rated are numbers of deaths that are related
to fentanyl. But yet you're not on top of it.
You're distracted, or you're doing something else, or you've decided
that it's not as important because you're the primary investigator
(23:15):
of deaths, all deaths. It's not just homicides, it's all deaths.
That's how broadness is, and unfortunately it spreads out from there.
It impacts everybody. You know that you know, the this
idea of you know, you're kind of sitting out there.
You know, death is a very personal, one on one
kind of thing. When families have a death, not everybody
(23:37):
in the community is aware of it. You're suffering silently,
you know, you know the what do they say about
the British way? You know, you do things in silence,
and you're there alone with death. Now, if you're there
alone with death, the one person you're going to constantly
two people you're gonna have contact with, is going to
be the corner and you're going to be the funeral director.
(23:58):
This guy's wearing both hats this community, so do you.
I hope that I'm laying this out accurately. It's just
the consequences of these actions are so far reaching. I
would imagine Dave, that's simply based upon this this bit,
the state attorney General and probably certainly the DA for
(24:22):
Pueblo County has got to be looking into cases that
he is handled as the corner.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Dave going to have to And you have to, Man,
You've put that in such a way, Joe, that I
didn't consider. I was looking at this merely from okay
level one. Why are you stashing bodies in the back
when your job is to get rid of it, to
bury them or cremate them. That's your job, and you
(24:49):
chose to not do your job. You took money and
did not do your job. That's one thing. Some of
us are feeling different about the dead than others. I
get that for some families this would be something that
you would never be able to make amends. Others know
they're going to be less severe. But let's go with
the extreme. Let's go with those that you're not going
(25:10):
to There's nothing you can say or do to change
what you have done. There is nothing this is that bad.
And I'm thinking somebody in this profession, you've got at
least twenty bodies, twenty dead bodies, and the best you
could think to do was to keep them in a
back room where anybody coming into your building is going
(25:33):
to smell it. And again, now back to my original
question with you about the odor, the smell of human decomposition. Well,
the reason people say it is something you'll never forget
is because the average person is not around decomposition. We're
not around dogs, cats. We have it, we take care
of it, We get rid of it. You know, we don't.
(25:54):
We don't have a dead animal around us for any
length of time because of the odor. We get rid
of them. Where when you deal with the dead body
as you do, where you're having to examine and spend
time with it, that's a different scenario. Now you're talking
to somebody here that actually, rather than do the job
he was paid to do, he stashed them and knew
(26:16):
it was wrong. It's not like there was a slip
of consciousness that he has some mental issue going on.
He knew it was wrong. He tried to hide it,
He disguised it behind a fake wall, fake door, whatever
it was. By the way, it was made of a cardboard,
so I'm guessing, yeah, it's a cardboard something, which if
you're trying to cover up something that ain't help, that's
not happening. If my dog was in there, you'd smell it.
(26:39):
But that's why I think this is so frustrating, Joe,
is those of us we have so little control in
our life that when our loved one dies, we feel
like we owe it to them to preserve their memory.
And this is the only way we can is what
we do. They're no longer here to defend themselves. They
can't fix this. It's our job, whether you know, it's
(27:01):
our loved one, and it's my job to take care
of my loved one. And you I invested my heart
in this, and you dropped the ball man. But beyond that,
you took money. Yeah, you took money, and you stashed
my You stashed Granny in the back and took the
family's last money. They had to have it. They had
(27:23):
to have a yard sale to pay you to cremate
the body, and you did, and you gave them some
rocks and her body is still here. I mean, Joe,
that goes about as bad as it gets.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
It does go really bad really quickly. And I got
to tell you, Dave, and my opinion if because this
is a fraud case and we're going to get into
another case it's very similar to this, but this is
a fraud case, and I would think that on at
(27:57):
least some level, the Feds would probably have an interest
in this. If there's any kind of wire fraud involved
in this or anything like this, you know, you could
be looking at federal time. And it was only I
guess it was a year ago, Dave that I think
it was what's it called the Sunshine I can't remember
(28:19):
the Sunshine funeral mortuary place in Colorado, and these this
woman I know in that particular case went up on
federal charges based upon what she had been doing with remains.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Yeah, means it was Meghan has and Shirley Cot. Those
dude defrauded family members, dismembered bodies, and then sold them
illegally the body parts. I remember when you brought that
to me, I'm like, come on, man, this is like,
come on, this can't be real. Yeah, I really think
I thought, you know what, they're fake news sites and
they look real, and I thought this. Come on, there's
(28:58):
there's a legitimate answer this, and there wasn't. Just like
there is not a legitimate answer for the County corner
owning a funeral home and stacking bodies in the back
or stashing them. We don't know exactly how he kept
the bodies, do.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
We No, No, we don't. And here's another piece to this.
I'm not saying that embalm bodies. Let me see, how
can I phrase this. I'm not saying that embalm bodies
don't decay, and don't think they do. Okay, you're merely
slowing down the inevitable. Okay, it's kind of you know,
(29:32):
from dust, We came from dust. We will return. I
don't care how many chemicals you have in your body. Now.
I've done exhamations on bodies that where I remember one
case in particularly, we pulled a guy on the ground
that had been in there for sixteen years, and except
for a little mold on his face, he looked pristine,
absolutely pristine, didn't have a foul od or about any marinething.
(29:54):
My question is this, it's kind of a baseline thing
that if you're storing bodies in a non refrigerated area,
you would think, at least think that they would be
embalmed and preserved. My question is, not only are you
not cremating the bodies, are you telling me that you
didn't spend however many bucks it was on the embalming
(30:20):
fluid that it would take to embalm these bodies and
preserve them. Because that's what we're hearing, Dave, is that
the smell almost knocked them down. You know, when they
get in there, they're smelling the smell. So you're telling
me that you actually had non preserved human remains in
this environment. They haven't been embalmed. It's just a question.
(30:43):
I'm just asking. I think it's a legitimate question. Did
you not embalm the But that's like, that's like funeral
director one oh one. You know, you're I'm not talking
about lighting the fire in the crematory or you know,
you know, doing all the stuff you have to do.
I'm merely talking about going to the embalming room and
setting things up in order to start the profusion of
(31:05):
the body. You didn't do that. I'm trying to understand
here because it just doesn't make sense. But you know,
in this world of the dead, there's a lot of
things that we don't understand, just like maybe a funeral
director and one location in state of Colorado who actually
(31:30):
dismembers bodies and sells us parts for medical experiments. Or
maybe a case from back in two thousand and two
in state of Georgia where it wasn't twenty bodies, it
was three hundred. They've had a friend of mine that
(32:02):
was a forensic anthropologist, and this individual worked with me
in Atlanta at the Emmy's office and for a time
they were the state forensic anthropologist for Georgia. And he
(32:26):
told me a story that first off, it it chilled me,
but it also broke my heart. And I want to
relate this to you right now. The year was twenty two,
A lot of stuff going on the news back then.
(32:47):
I remember, you know, the world was changing rapidly. And
this case pops up in Lafayette, Georgia, not Louisiana, but
Love Georgia. People in Georgia called Lafayette, but it's Lafayette.
I'm from Louisiana, so I'll call Lafayette. There was a
(33:08):
report that bodies had been found. Now, anytime, you know,
I hear a news report and that says that body
has been found. You got my interest, all right? I
want to know when you're saying bodies, I mean body
will catch my attention. You start saying plural, and then
all of a sudden the numbers start trickling out. Well,
this friend of mine had told me he had been
(33:31):
summoned up there to this location, and it was on
private property. A house had a small nineteen sixties mid
sixties brick ranch house on it with a pond in
the front, nothing pretentious or over the top. And then
(33:52):
there was these buildings out back of it, big piece
of property surrounded by pine forest, and they were finding
stacks and stacks and stacks of human remains in various
stages of decay. My friend said that he was walking
(34:15):
along with two state law enforcement agents abreast through the woods,
and they'd look just ahead of them and there's a
piece of plywood laying on the pine needle floor beneath.
I think these were like pulpwood pines, you know, where
they're planted in rows, and they'd reached some level of maturity.
(34:38):
There's a piece of plywood, and he said he saw
what appeared to be a baby doll, and as they
approached it was not a baby doll. It was a
baby and still had the little id bracelet around the
ankle the newborns that are placed on newborns still had
(35:02):
a little diaper on the body, and this baby had
been placed out there. It turned out that it was
these remains were one of the three hundred plus perhaps
remains that were allegedly being taken care of by Ray
(35:23):
Brant Marsh, who ran Tri State Crematory in Georgia and
Tri State. It's Tri State because it approximates Tennessee, Alabama,
and Georgia's right at the confluence of those three states
up there. So they had business. And this is important
to understand. This guy did business with funeral homes from
(35:45):
the Tri State area. The reason he did business with
these funeral homes is because not every funeral home has
a crematory. It's a big deal to have a crematory.
It's a lot of work, all right. There's all these
certifications you have to get through and so forth and
so on. Eint nunces out of this world. Well, he
had a crematory, and so what he would do He
(36:05):
worked as I guess you'd call it a subcontractor. He would,
you know, he would be paid by the funeral home.
That was part of the cost. They would bring the
body to him, he would embalm the bodies, send them
out with an urn, and they would go forth. Well.
For a number of reasons, apparently his crematory no longer work.
(36:27):
There was even evidence, Dave, that he had attempted to
hook the crematory up to propane gas tanks to make
it work. And of course, as you well know, propane
don't burn nothing like natural gas, all right, And to
operate a crematory, it is a constant job, and you
(36:49):
have to have sufficient fuel, and it's generally natural gas
that you're going to have to have because you're gonna
have to get tempts up to about eighteen hundred degrees
fahrenheit in order to render down human remain. And he
didn't have it. He just didn't have it. But what
he did have were do you remember how I mentioned
just a second ago about the concrete cryps that you
(37:10):
see going down the road. You know, they're like concrete boxes.
If you ever see these things on the back flatbed truck,
you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. And they go
out to grave sites and they lower these things into
the ground and the body within that's casket. It goes
into that container and then the lid is put on
the top of it. Brother Dave, he had multiple of
(37:31):
these things out at the site. And what he would
do is he would take bodies that he would be
contracted to cremate. He pick them up from funeral homes.
They'd be brought to him, and he would take them
and layer them inside of these crips, just throwing them
on top of one another. You had bodies of laying
(37:53):
around on the ground. There were just there were remains.
I remember talking to people at the time. They said
that they they really couldn't take take the full measure
of what they were seeing because, you know, unlike this
recent case in Colorado, this is these are three hundred bodies.
(38:15):
Three hundred There are civil war battles, skirmishes that didn't
result in three hundred deaths. So you've got three hundred
bodies laying all about this property. What you know? And
I'm actually just kind of speaking out loud here because
I don't know how I didn't go to the scene
there in that particular case, had friends up there. But
(38:37):
it's like, how does your brain even begin to absorb this,
you know, to kind of take it in what you're seeing.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Just think about it for just a minute, Joe, You've
got three hundred bodies. That means three hundred people have
paid to have that body cremated. They've paid the full
rate that you charge. It's not like you didn't get paid,
you didn't do the job. He got the money to
do the job, and as you mentioned, he tried to
(39:06):
operate it with propane and just goes to show you
we're not dealing with the mental giant here. It's not
like your back barbecue. You know that you can just
work it with something else. But the bottom line here,
he was paid three hundred times or more, and rather
than do the job that he swore to do and
promised his communities, Laurel, he opted to steal the money.
(39:29):
I mean, it's no different than if I just put
on a suit and coat and tell everybody Dave's crematoria
is open. Give me your money. I'll put it right
here and I'll take care of your loved one. I'll
go out in the back scoop up some sand in here.
I mean, that's just beyond anything I can even I
just for the love cannot understand some people and either
(39:51):
fact that he's not the only that's not even okay.
Three hundred in Georgia. We got another one in Colorado.
It's one hundred and ninety. He's stacking them up in
an old building.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
This is within the last two years. There's even another
one that I know that I think that people probably
remember this, this kind of burst on the scene where
we had there was a guy's Let me see, how
can I explain this? This is again, this is in Colorado.
(40:22):
We've got a fellow who who had abandoned the funeral
home had been closed down for a while. He has
a residence just in the Denver area where they find
a hearst day the dig this, they find a hers
there there is a woman's body inside the hearse and
(40:47):
deposited throughout this guy's house or boxes of crewmaines that
were never turned over to families and there he's literally
got them in the cross spaces. You know, Look, I
know that life can be a bit overwhelming sometimes, but
you you look at the choices that individuals make when
(41:10):
it comes to the care, the care of the deceased
and not simply the care of the deceased. You know,
you'd mentioned we were talking about well, let's just take
the guy back with the twenty the top of the show. Yeah,
all right, Codder.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Yeah, Brian Cotter, Davis Martory, Publo, Colorado.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Pueblo, Colorado. They used to the zip code after that too.
But anyway, the just think about the one family member
that is exchanging funds. That one family member has probably
got multiple other family members that are related to the deceased.
So the impact of this thing is not merely the
(41:54):
one person that has paid the money. You're talking about
something that is so scarring to a family that when
Thanksgiving rolls around, Christmas rolls around, and you're sitting around
the table and you're staring at each other, there will
be this abiding sadness that will inhabit your soul forever
(42:19):
because you remember that loved one sitting at the table
breaking bread with you. And you're blaming yourself because you
chose this person to help you when you were the weakest,
and they failed, not just as a corner, not just
(42:40):
as a funeral director, but I submit to you that
they failed as a fellow human being. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags, no
Body Bus with Joseph Scott more closed doors. Closed doors
imply that you're not welcome, that perhaps something is being hidden,
something might be being protected, or in some cases, that
(00:29):
could be hide in a crime. Today, we're going to
have a discussion about a crime. As a matter of fact,
it's not just one, it's several, and you can count
them each individual crime and apply a name to it,
(00:52):
because what we're going to talk about today involves the
desecration of human remains. As of this recording, we know
of at least twenty in Pueblo, Colorado. Coming to you
from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University. I'm Joseph
(01:14):
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags Dave. I'm going to
throw a name out to you real quick and just imagine,
imagine a day in this guy's life. This guy's name
is Gregory Gregg, and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly,
doctor Gregg. If I'm not pronouncing it correctly, forgive me.
(01:37):
But I want to give you a tip of the
cap right now because Gregory is he has a doctorate
as a nurse practitioner, which means he's a d n P.
And you know he's worked as a nurse practitioner for
quite some time. I think he'd been a nurse for
(02:00):
a while and then he went back got his d
and P. And you know, with a DNP you can
be an instructor. You know a lot about medicine. As
a matter of fact, you probably know more medicine than
most practicing physicians do because so much of the onus
is on all of our nurses out there and everything
they have to do. Some of the great unsung heroes
(02:22):
in America as far as I'm concerned. But the reason
Gregory's story is so very important is that it blends
in with the story we've been seeing pop up in
the news now for I don't know, I guess about
a month, and it involves the corner of Pueblo, Colorado,
which is down in the southeastern part of the state.
(02:44):
You and I just got back from Colorado.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I just looked it up just so you know. I
looked it up because I thought, you know, back in
the day when there would be like mail order scams,
you know what the envelopes, it was Peblo, Colorado, that's
where they were based out of. And so I found
out where it was looking it up on the map.
I'm like, well, we were just in Denver. This is
one hundred and ten miles to the south.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Maybe aout to give you another piece of trivia that
i'd heard many years ago about Pueblo, and I didn't
know this, it was said at one point in time
they had the most federal employees of any city per
capita west of the Mississippi River. I think a lot
of a lot of federal workers were concentrated there for
(03:31):
some reason. I'd forgive me for those residents and Pueblo
that are listening to me, maybe you can educate me.
But it's certainly an interesting environment. And to make it
all the more interesting, they've been touched by this problem
that seems to be raging in Colorado right now with
funeral homes and corners.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
You know, we actually started this while back when we
were talking about another story of that was happening with
the funeral home and them selling body parts. And we'll
get into that in a minute. But Joe, I don't
quite understand why. I don't understand why we're not hearing
more of this. And the reason is I looked into
it because there's no regulation, Joe, they don't regulate this
(04:16):
in Colorado. I'm actually looking over this case and I'm
going what did they charge them with? Because if you
don't regulate the industry, people are going to do whatever
they can get away with to make as much money
as they can.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
And the cats and that's why we've landed landed on
this general and this nurse practitioner Gregory, you know, Dave
On right now, you and I are speaking on Wednesday.
Last night, on Tuesday night, the Pueblo County Commissioners actually
appointed doctor Gregory Gregg as the interim corner for Pueblo County, Colorado.
(04:58):
And Joe why they had to do that?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Tell me why they had to do that?
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Well, it's because the other one, the other corner that
they had, who was a funeral home director and had
been the corner for a while I think, and comes
from a family of funeral directors, they arrested him, and
they arrested him because of something that they found hidden
behind a faux door or faux wall. I've heard a
(05:26):
couple of things here. You actually have inspectors, which I
find interesting since there is really no oversight with with
corners off. I think that I think that these inspectors
were a result of these other cases that we have covered,
because I think the people in Colorado finally said, you know,
(05:48):
it's probably about time that we that we get a
we get a handle in this situation. So inspectors wind
up coming to the funeral home. They're in Pueblo where
the corner where the guy he's not just funeral director,
he's actually the corner of Pueppla and he's apparently begging.
He's begging these inspectors. Look, don't don't go behind that wall,
(06:11):
don't go behind that door. And they could they could, actually,
they could actually smell a foul odor coming from behind
the wall. Dave, Now, I got to tell you, I
don't like funeral homes. I don't like them. I've never
liked them. I've spent a lot of time in them.
I've done autopsies, and funeral homes are assisted with autopsies.
(06:32):
In funeral homes. I've had to go collect bodies at
funeral homes. I've had to go collect cremains, you name it,
I've done it relatively. I actually had a body that
was missing jewelry, and I went out with the police
because they they'd issued a search warrant at the funeral
(06:54):
home because we knew that they had picked up the
jewelry along with the body, and it turned out that
one of the workers had had stolen the jewelry, and
you know, they were of course, they were accusing us,
the Medical Examiner's office, for having we had sign receipts
and all that stuff. So and I've been in crematories,
you know, over over the years for a variety of
(07:15):
different reasons. I still take my students at Jacksville State.
I still take them to crematories because I want them
to see the process, just so that they understand how
all this works. And I don't like going in there.
There's just something about it that just puts me on
one of those people. It just puts me off for
some reason. The sooner I can get out, the better
(07:36):
I am. But if you're if you're an inspector, would
state first off, you have to know what you're looking at.
You cannot. It's like it's like these people I think
that get these jobs, these these governmental favor jobs, they
get where they're a building inspector and they have no
history in actually contracting or being a cond They've never
(07:58):
you know, nailed two pieces of wood gap in their lives.
If you're going to inspect something relative to the funeral industry,
I think you've probably got to know something about the
funeral industry because you don't know what you're looking at. However,
I can tell you this, it doesn't take a rocket
scientist to be able to detect decay. Decay specifically as
(08:19):
it applies to human remains.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Well, you know, you and I have done so many
shows together and with others that we've done shows about
the smell of human decomposition. We've done it a couple
of times this week on different shows, and it's a
very distinct smell, and it's distinct because we're not usually
around the composing bodies. You've actually mentioned that the human body,
(08:47):
the decomposing body, doesn't smell any different than other animals
that are decomposing. Is that that's true, right?
Speaker 1 (08:54):
It's true with me. I mean, you'll have a variety
of opinions about that. I think think many people that
say that it smells so distinct, Well, it's distinct to
you because you it might be the first time you
smell the decomposing body, or you you're not super saturated
in it, like I am. Maybe maybe I've developed a
(09:16):
callous to it. You know, where you know DCOMP smells
like DCOMP smells like DCOMP. It's kind of like charter remains.
If I have a human remain that has burned, there
are people that say, well, there is a distinctive odor
relative to burned human remains. Got to tell you, Dave,
(09:37):
And I'm going to try real I'm going to be
very careful with what I'm about to say. Let's see,
how can I do this. Human remains that have been
burned to me, smell no different than any other species
that's out there that has been exposed to And that's
(10:00):
as far as I'm going to go with. I'm not
going to make any draw any other kind of comparisons
here because it'll really put people off. But for me,
you know, I can you know when I smell burned flesh,
it's burned flesh decomp same way. I think that people
want to say that it smells different, and you know,
(10:23):
but for me, you know, whether it's a decomposing deer
or a dog, I really don't draw a delinear. And look,
I've been locked up in coolers with not locked up,
but having to work inside of cooler, surrounded by decomposing dead.
It's part of what you do, so you get kind
(10:45):
of you get kind of a callous built up to it,
I think, and kind of a quick aside there there was.
And forgive me if I've mentioned this before, but it
kind of gives you an insight. In the medical legal world.
We used to show each other courtesy at the Medical
Examiner's office if we had if we had worked a
(11:09):
dcomp like one of our colleagues had, and like they
had to go to court, or they were going to
go to lunch, they were going to meet somebody, we
would smell each other and we would literally and it
was very common for us to say to one another,
can you come smell me? And I know that sounds
(11:30):
very odd to somebody that's outside, but you don't know,
like when you're going out in public, let's just let's
just put it too. I'll put it to you this way.
If you got in public and you're wearing like a
corner's badge or a medical examiner jacket or something identifies
you that works with a corner and you come walking
by and you smell of decomposing flesh, what kind of
(11:54):
reflection is that you know, on your office, you know,
because you'll go out and you'll kind of broadcast this
to everybody else that's there. They're thinking that you're not
taking due care. I think there's a lot you can
learn from that. I think there's a lot you can
learn about a person who is a funeral director that
(12:16):
takes care of the dead, and generationally dig this generationally
is taking care of the dead. His family had funeral
homes all over the Midwest or all over the Great
Plain States. I know they mentioned, you know, like Kansas
and these other places where his family. It's not like
it's not like not that this would be an excuse.
It's not like he just dropped out of the ceiling
(12:38):
into the funeral industry. It's like he's been around it
his entire life. You should know better. But when they
got through that door, Dave, the inspectors they're in Pueblo,
when they made their way in with this guy on
the outside saying, don't go back there, don't go back there, Dave.
(12:59):
They found it at least twenty decomposing remains that were
in that room. And after they had found them, after
they had observed them, this man who has now been
charged made a startling comment to them that really resonated,
(13:25):
and it's actually very similar to even an older case
under the same circumstances. So what do you do? What
(13:47):
do you do if you own and operate a funeral
home and you know you you have somebody asking you,
and they're going to ask, why are why are these
dead bodies in here? Why are they not disposed of?
Why why are they back here in this room? Why
(14:09):
haven't you done something with them? Because you have to
do something with them. Either cremate them or you bury them.
That's really the only two choices in the funeral industry.
Because this isn't this isn't even a matter of trying
to uh uh you know, like you're you're gonna which
(14:29):
is another case that we had that we covered Dave
out of Colorado. You're you know where they were taking
off parts of the body and selling them, you know,
for medical experimentation.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
I want to get back to where you started with this,
that you only have two jobs, you know, but the
main one is taking care of the family and the
body that is their loved one. Now, when you've got
inspectors that show up, they're not there for fun We've
got a state that is totally lacking in regulation. You
don't don't have to have any kind of anything, it seems.
(15:03):
I was trying to find the laws Joe, and in Colorado,
if you don't require a funeral home director having I
don't know. Don't you have a top ten things that
are expected? I mean, don't they have a school? Isn't
(15:24):
there somethingsure? I mean, isn't there something?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And yeah, I mean Barbara Barbers have licenses, right, yeah,
and so you and this is this is the big thing.
You know, who handles licensure. But and I don't know
that it's necessarily about the licensure of a funeral director
slash mortician as much as it is the regulation of
the physical plant that that you're in dwelling in. And Dave.
(15:50):
This guy, this guy, this man that now has you know,
been arrested and has been charged on a variety a
variety of things and clear.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
His name is Brian Cotter, and Brian Carter owns Davis
Mortuary in Pueblo, Colorado, And he was the Pueblo County,
Colorado coroner. He was on payroll as the county coroner.
Joseph Scott Moore.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, elected official. Yes, well he you know the service
that he provided. I'm going to get to the corner
bit here because again this is this is I don't
know it's it will I think that it will. Really
it will resonate with particularly our friends out there because
(16:39):
of what we talk about relative to representing the dead, Dave,
our advocacy, if you will, for the dead. Cotter also
provided crematory okay, which means that you could go to
him and you could either do a standard burial, you
(16:59):
know where they going to do the embalming. They're going
to sell you the casket. Maybe you already have a plot.
They're going to, you know, drop the crypt in the ground,
which you see these things going down the road all
the time on flatbeds. It looks like a big concrete box.
They drop that in the ground. Then they put the
coffin slash casket in there and then put the cap
on it and pour the dirt or you cremate. Well,
(17:24):
the big reveal with him is that they're asking him
about these bodies back in the room, Dave, and he says, well,
you know, I may have given some families. I may
have given some families ashes that weren't really their loved ones.
(17:45):
What Yeah, so you're not cremating the bodies. What you're
doing is you're going out and I don't know, maybe
you're getting bits of burned wood, cloth, gravel, anything else
and put it into an urn. As this family, this
family that has trusted you with the most precious thing
(18:07):
that they have, dude, you know, with a loved one,
and you're leaving them to ride in the back room,
and you're giving us, you're giving us and look, you know,
if you have a family member that has c remains
in their home or maybe a friend, you go there
and it's generally placed in a place of honor, you know,
(18:28):
maybe on a mantelpiece or somewhere, and it's there to
be seen and remembered, I think by most families. Can
you imagine finding out, Dave, that you don't have your
grandma's remains. You have a bunch of old burned up
sticks or charcoal or something like that that somebody has
(18:50):
essentially given you back into medically sealed you know, earn
that they probably charge you too much money for in
the first plays, and you've got this thing displayed on
your mantelpiece there and then all of a sudden, it
would Can you imagine how gutting that would be if
(19:11):
that was your loved one up there and you find
this out. And this is what these families are finding
out about this guy. They just assumed that they had
their loved ones remains and they didn't. They were rotting
back in this room, David.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Well, the thing that gets me, Joe is I'm back
to this is the county coroner. He's a person in
a trusted position. Oh boy, he sought that position out.
And he's the owner of this Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, Colorado.
So you've got a person who is dedicated and you
mentioned before this is a family business, something that was
(19:44):
part of his life generationally, and I would expect that
somebody in this position not just would know better, we
all know better. There's not one person right this minute
that thinks for a second, you can open up a building,
call it a mortuary and take people's money, go dig
up dirt, put it in a box, and stack the
bodies in the back.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
The fact that it's the inspectors showed up means they
were thinking there was a problem, Joe. Somewhere, somebody said
something's not right. Now. I don't know who it was,
but you only had twenty bodies. They're only fucking twenty.
That's not a lot, not compared to another story we have.
So you get twenty, but they stink and they're back here.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Well, let me tell you what else is straws into
question day because I wanted to return back to this.
You mentioned corner. Okay, if you you know, you have
those things that are seen and unseen, right, and so
those things that are seen relative to this violation of
(20:47):
law and where you're deceiving people, you're lying to people,
this sort of thing, and this is out the sunlight
has has been blasted on to the situation. What about
all the other things that may be unseen? Because if
you're in a position where you are the corner, Dave,
(21:09):
there is a title that is given to the corner
from county to county. You know what that title is.
It's actually the official certifier of death. And so if
you're the certifier of death, that means that you are
given special authority under the law to go out and
(21:29):
perform examinations or appoint someone to do examinations, like you know,
pathologists and other physicians that can do you know, autopsies
on cases you're actually making determinations about manner and cause
of death. Dave, you're signing death certificates. How how do
(21:50):
I know that you can be trusted with those circumstances
when so much rest upon your conclusions as the principal
death investigator in a county where families are sitting back
and let's say you've got a case that might be undetermined.
(22:11):
The family thinks that it's accident, and you are trying
to weigh this out in your brain. You're trying to
apply maybe a scientific methodology to this to understand what
the forensic pathologist is telling you from the autops of
your own and you fail in that duty, Well, now
you might have a family that's going without money because
(22:32):
insurance didn't pay out. You know, can you be trusted
in these bigger things? I think that's what it you know,
for me at least, that's one of the things that
comes down to. Also, you know, you just think about,
you know, the corners on the tip of the spear
when it comes to public health, because they're the first
person that can recognize patterns if you have some kind
of disease outbreak or anything that's going on in a community.
(22:55):
Maybe you see, maybe because you're the first person at
the scene, you're suddenly seeing an uptick. And then numbers
of death rated are numbers of deaths that are related
to fentanyl. But yet you're not on top of it.
You're distracted, or you're doing something else, or you've decided
that it's not as important because you're the primary investigator
(23:15):
of deaths, all deaths. It's not just homicides, it's all deaths.
That's how broadness is, and unfortunately it spreads out from there.
It impacts everybody. You know that you know, the this
idea of you know, you're kind of sitting out there.
You know, death is a very personal, one on one
kind of thing. When families have a death, not everybody
(23:37):
in the community is aware of it. You're suffering silently,
you know, you know the what do they say about
the British way? You know, you do things in silence,
and you're there alone with death. Now, if you're there
alone with death, the one person you're going to constantly
two people you're gonna have contact with, is going to
be the corner and you're going to be the funeral director.
(23:58):
This guy's wearing both hats this community, so do you.
I hope that I'm laying this out accurately. It's just
the consequences of these actions are so far reaching. I
would imagine Dave, that's simply based upon this this bit,
the state attorney General and probably certainly the DA for
(24:22):
Pueblo County has got to be looking into cases that
he is handled as the corner.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Dave going to have to And you have to, Man,
You've put that in such a way, Joe, that I
didn't consider. I was looking at this merely from okay
level one. Why are you stashing bodies in the back
when your job is to get rid of it, to
bury them or cremate them. That's your job, and you
(24:49):
chose to not do your job. You took money and
did not do your job. That's one thing. Some of
us are feeling different about the dead than others. I
get that for some families this would be something that
you would never be able to make amends. Others know
they're going to be less severe. But let's go with
the extreme. Let's go with those that you're not going
(25:10):
to There's nothing you can say or do to change
what you have done. There is nothing this is that bad.
And I'm thinking somebody in this profession, you've got at
least twenty bodies, twenty dead bodies, and the best you
could think to do was to keep them in a
back room where anybody coming into your building is going
(25:33):
to smell it. And again, now back to my original
question with you about the odor, the smell of human decomposition. Well,
the reason people say it is something you'll never forget
is because the average person is not around decomposition. We're
not around dogs, cats. We have it, we take care
of it, We get rid of it. You know, we don't.
(25:54):
We don't have a dead animal around us for any
length of time because of the odor. We get rid
of them. Where when you deal with the dead body
as you do, where you're having to examine and spend
time with it, that's a different scenario. Now you're talking
to somebody here that actually, rather than do the job
he was paid to do, he stashed them and knew
(26:16):
it was wrong. It's not like there was a slip
of consciousness that he has some mental issue going on.
He knew it was wrong. He tried to hide it,
He disguised it behind a fake wall, fake door, whatever
it was. By the way, it was made of a cardboard,
so I'm guessing, yeah, it's a cardboard something, which if
you're trying to cover up something that ain't help, that's
not happening. If my dog was in there, you'd smell it.
(26:39):
But that's why I think this is so frustrating, Joe,
is those of us we have so little control in
our life that when our loved one dies, we feel
like we owe it to them to preserve their memory.
And this is the only way we can is what
we do. They're no longer here to defend themselves. They
can't fix this. It's our job, whether you know, it's
(27:01):
our loved one, and it's my job to take care
of my loved one. And you I invested my heart
in this, and you dropped the ball man. But beyond that,
you took money. Yeah, you took money, and you stashed
my You stashed Granny in the back and took the
family's last money. They had to have it. They had
(27:23):
to have a yard sale to pay you to cremate
the body, and you did, and you gave them some
rocks and her body is still here. I mean, Joe,
that goes about as bad as it gets.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
It does go really bad really quickly. And I got
to tell you, Dave, and my opinion if because this
is a fraud case and we're going to get into
another case it's very similar to this, but this is
a fraud case, and I would think that on at
(27:57):
least some level, the Feds would probably have an interest
in this. If there's any kind of wire fraud involved
in this or anything like this, you know, you could
be looking at federal time. And it was only I
guess it was a year ago, Dave that I think
it was what's it called the Sunshine I can't remember
(28:19):
the Sunshine funeral mortuary place in Colorado, and these this
woman I know in that particular case went up on
federal charges based upon what she had been doing with remains.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Yeah, means it was Meghan has and Shirley Cot. Those
dude defrauded family members, dismembered bodies, and then sold them
illegally the body parts. I remember when you brought that
to me, I'm like, come on, man, this is like,
come on, this can't be real. Yeah, I really think
I thought, you know what, they're fake news sites and
they look real, and I thought this. Come on, there's
(28:58):
there's a legitimate answer this, and there wasn't. Just like
there is not a legitimate answer for the County corner
owning a funeral home and stacking bodies in the back
or stashing them. We don't know exactly how he kept
the bodies, do.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
We No, No, we don't. And here's another piece to this.
I'm not saying that embalm bodies. Let me see, how
can I phrase this. I'm not saying that embalm bodies
don't decay, and don't think they do. Okay, you're merely
slowing down the inevitable. Okay, it's kind of you know,
(29:32):
from dust, We came from dust. We will return. I
don't care how many chemicals you have in your body. Now.
I've done exhamations on bodies that where I remember one
case in particularly, we pulled a guy on the ground
that had been in there for sixteen years, and except
for a little mold on his face, he looked pristine,
absolutely pristine, didn't have a foul od or about any marinething.
(29:54):
My question is this, it's kind of a baseline thing
that if you're storing bodies in a non refrigerated area,
you would think, at least think that they would be
embalmed and preserved. My question is, not only are you
not cremating the bodies, are you telling me that you
didn't spend however many bucks it was on the embalming
(30:20):
fluid that it would take to embalm these bodies and
preserve them. Because that's what we're hearing, Dave, is that
the smell almost knocked them down. You know, when they
get in there, they're smelling the smell. So you're telling
me that you actually had non preserved human remains in
this environment. They haven't been embalmed. It's just a question.
(30:43):
I'm just asking. I think it's a legitimate question. Did
you not embalm the But that's like, that's like funeral
director one oh one. You know, you're I'm not talking
about lighting the fire in the crematory or you know,
you know, doing all the stuff you have to do.
I'm merely talking about going to the embalming room and
setting things up in order to start the profusion of
(31:05):
the body. You didn't do that. I'm trying to understand
here because it just doesn't make sense. But you know,
in this world of the dead, there's a lot of
things that we don't understand, just like maybe a funeral
director and one location in state of Colorado who actually
(31:30):
dismembers bodies and sells us parts for medical experiments. Or
maybe a case from back in two thousand and two
in state of Georgia where it wasn't twenty bodies, it
was three hundred. They've had a friend of mine that
(32:02):
was a forensic anthropologist, and this individual worked with me
in Atlanta at the Emmy's office and for a time
they were the state forensic anthropologist for Georgia. And he
(32:26):
told me a story that first off, it it chilled me,
but it also broke my heart. And I want to
relate this to you right now. The year was twenty two,
A lot of stuff going on the news back then.
(32:47):
I remember, you know, the world was changing rapidly. And
this case pops up in Lafayette, Georgia, not Louisiana, but
Love Georgia. People in Georgia called Lafayette, but it's Lafayette.
I'm from Louisiana, so I'll call Lafayette. There was a
(33:08):
report that bodies had been found. Now, anytime, you know,
I hear a news report and that says that body
has been found. You got my interest, all right? I
want to know when you're saying bodies, I mean body
will catch my attention. You start saying plural, and then
all of a sudden the numbers start trickling out. Well,
this friend of mine had told me he had been
(33:31):
summoned up there to this location, and it was on
private property. A house had a small nineteen sixties mid
sixties brick ranch house on it with a pond in
the front, nothing pretentious or over the top. And then
(33:52):
there was these buildings out back of it, big piece
of property surrounded by pine forest, and they were finding
stacks and stacks and stacks of human remains in various
stages of decay. My friend said that he was walking
(34:15):
along with two state law enforcement agents abreast through the woods,
and they'd look just ahead of them and there's a
piece of plywood laying on the pine needle floor beneath.
I think these were like pulpwood pines, you know, where
they're planted in rows, and they'd reached some level of maturity.
(34:38):
There's a piece of plywood, and he said he saw
what appeared to be a baby doll, and as they
approached it was not a baby doll. It was a
baby and still had the little id bracelet around the
ankle the newborns that are placed on newborns still had
(35:02):
a little diaper on the body, and this baby had
been placed out there. It turned out that it was
these remains were one of the three hundred plus perhaps
remains that were allegedly being taken care of by Ray
(35:23):
Brant Marsh, who ran Tri State Crematory in Georgia and
Tri State. It's Tri State because it approximates Tennessee, Alabama,
and Georgia's right at the confluence of those three states
up there. So they had business. And this is important
to understand. This guy did business with funeral homes from
(35:45):
the Tri State area. The reason he did business with
these funeral homes is because not every funeral home has
a crematory. It's a big deal to have a crematory.
It's a lot of work, all right. There's all these
certifications you have to get through and so forth and
so on. Eint nunces out of this world. Well, he
had a crematory, and so what he would do He
(36:05):
worked as I guess you'd call it a subcontractor. He would,
you know, he would be paid by the funeral home.
That was part of the cost. They would bring the
body to him, he would embalm the bodies, send them
out with an urn, and they would go forth. Well.
For a number of reasons, apparently his crematory no longer work.
(36:27):
There was even evidence, Dave, that he had attempted to
hook the crematory up to propane gas tanks to make
it work. And of course, as you well know, propane
don't burn nothing like natural gas, all right, And to
operate a crematory, it is a constant job, and you
(36:49):
have to have sufficient fuel, and it's generally natural gas
that you're going to have to have because you're gonna
have to get tempts up to about eighteen hundred degrees
fahrenheit in order to render down human remain. And he
didn't have it. He just didn't have it. But what
he did have were do you remember how I mentioned
just a second ago about the concrete cryps that you
(37:10):
see going down the road. You know, they're like concrete boxes.
If you ever see these things on the back flatbed truck,
you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. And they go
out to grave sites and they lower these things into
the ground and the body within that's casket. It goes
into that container and then the lid is put on
the top of it. Brother Dave, he had multiple of
(37:31):
these things out at the site. And what he would
do is he would take bodies that he would be
contracted to cremate. He pick them up from funeral homes.
They'd be brought to him, and he would take them
and layer them inside of these crips, just throwing them
on top of one another. You had bodies of laying
(37:53):
around on the ground. There were just there were remains.
I remember talking to people at the time. They said
that they they really couldn't take take the full measure
of what they were seeing because, you know, unlike this
recent case in Colorado, this is these are three hundred bodies.
(38:15):
Three hundred There are civil war battles, skirmishes that didn't
result in three hundred deaths. So you've got three hundred
bodies laying all about this property. What you know? And
I'm actually just kind of speaking out loud here because
I don't know how I didn't go to the scene
there in that particular case, had friends up there. But
(38:37):
it's like, how does your brain even begin to absorb this,
you know, to kind of take it in what you're seeing.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Just think about it for just a minute, Joe, You've
got three hundred bodies. That means three hundred people have
paid to have that body cremated. They've paid the full
rate that you charge. It's not like you didn't get paid,
you didn't do the job. He got the money to
do the job, and as you mentioned, he tried to
(39:06):
operate it with propane and just goes to show you
we're not dealing with the mental giant here. It's not
like your back barbecue. You know that you can just
work it with something else. But the bottom line here,
he was paid three hundred times or more, and rather
than do the job that he swore to do and
promised his communities, Laurel, he opted to steal the money.
(39:29):
I mean, it's no different than if I just put
on a suit and coat and tell everybody Dave's crematoria
is open. Give me your money. I'll put it right
here and I'll take care of your loved one. I'll
go out in the back scoop up some sand in here.
I mean, that's just beyond anything I can even I
just for the love cannot understand some people and either
(39:51):
fact that he's not the only that's not even okay.
Three hundred in Georgia. We got another one in Colorado.
It's one hundred and ninety. He's stacking them up in
an old building.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
This is within the last two years. There's even another
one that I know that I think that people probably
remember this, this kind of burst on the scene where
we had there was a guy's Let me see, how
can I explain this? This is again, this is in Colorado.
(40:22):
We've got a fellow who who had abandoned the funeral
home had been closed down for a while. He has
a residence just in the Denver area where they find
a hearst day the dig this, they find a hers
there there is a woman's body inside the hearse and
(40:47):
deposited throughout this guy's house or boxes of crewmaines that
were never turned over to families and there he's literally
got them in the cross spaces. You know, Look, I
know that life can be a bit overwhelming sometimes, but
you you look at the choices that individuals make when
(41:10):
it comes to the care, the care of the deceased
and not simply the care of the deceased. You know,
you'd mentioned we were talking about well, let's just take
the guy back with the twenty the top of the show. Yeah,
all right, Codder.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Yeah, Brian Cotter, Davis Martory, Publo, Colorado.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Pueblo, Colorado. They used to the zip code after that too.
But anyway, the just think about the one family member
that is exchanging funds. That one family member has probably
got multiple other family members that are related to the deceased.
So the impact of this thing is not merely the
(41:54):
one person that has paid the money. You're talking about
something that is so scarring to a family that when
Thanksgiving rolls around, Christmas rolls around, and you're sitting around
the table and you're staring at each other, there will
be this abiding sadness that will inhabit your soul forever
(42:19):
because you remember that loved one sitting at the table
breaking bread with you. And you're blaming yourself because you
chose this person to help you when you were the weakest,
and they failed, not just as a corner, not just
(42:40):
as a funeral director, but I submit to you that
they failed as a fellow human being. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags, no
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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