A former Colorado funeral home owner pleaded guilty to secretly dissecting corpses and selling body parts without consent from mourning relatives.

Megan Hess, 45, who operated the Sunset Mesa funeral home in Montrose and a human body parts business called Donor Services from the same building — admitted in federal court to defrauding at least a dozen families who had paid to have their late loved ones cremated.

According to court records, instead of cremating the bodies, she harvested heads, spines, arms and legs and then sold them.

Prosecutors are calling for Hess, who had previously pleaded not guilty, to be sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison. She has been out on bail since her arrest in 2020.

 faces up to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty on Tuesday to defrauding the families of dead people whose bodies she dissected and sold without permission.

Hess and her mother uses the non-profit donor services organization called Sunset Mesa Funeral Foundation, a “body-broker service” operating out of the funeral home selling body parts to third parties, mostly for surgical training and other educational purposes.