People Soup - Episode 1

Your local 9-1-1 dispatch gets a call from a nice young lady that lives out of town who says she hasn't heard from her grandma in a couple weeks and would love if some type of public servant stop by her house to say hello. The calls put out to the local boys in blue so they make their way over to Nana's house and knock on the door. Something smells kind of funny though and no one is coming to the door. Cops call granddaughter back, she gives them permission to force entry into the house. As soon as Nana's door is open a very distinct smell hits our officers like they ran into a brick wall. A really stinky brick wall. Turns out poor 93-year-old Betty had a cardiac emergency a couple weeks ago and just killed over in the living room. The power to the house had been shut off for lack of payment, it's the middle of the summer, 102 degrees outside and grandma Betty's six loving cats had eaten her eyeballs and other soft parts of her body as they do and other food sources are not available. She had melted into the carpet and has officially become people suit. Welcome to the first episode of Crime is Fun. The way crime is fun is going to work as each episode is going to have a theme with little digestible cases and stories relating to things have something to do with crime. There's really nothing linear about the storytelling in any given episode, just some fun little tidbits you can listen to while you're driving. Working out are dismembering your HOA president and their screams are just as annoying as the finds you've been receiving for parking your 81 toe to highlights with a mounted 50-cal machine gun in front of your house. Look at you, Kevin, you freaking potato. I don't encourage crime in any way, shape or form, but you know, dang well, listening to crime stories is kind of fun. Some might call that gallows humor or maybe even morbid curiosity. There's a little saying that I enjoy that is laugh so you don't cry. If you're a fan of laughing and not crying, you can listen to Crime is Fun on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or Pandora. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my content, hi, I'm Donut. I was with the past decade telling true crime stories. Before that, I spent a couple years in the Navy and then a couple years as a cop. My main YouTube channel Donut Operator, which I still post to a couple times a week, has amassed 1.8 billion views with most of those being analytical breakdowns of police shooting people or people shooting police. I've done a lot of crime and I've seen a lot of crime the past 10 years. So what am I doing now here on this new project? Crime is Fun. Well, what had happened was I was sitting at home a couple weeks ago and came up with a crazy idea. It was an idea that a white dude, military veteran with a beard has never ever thought of. I should start a podcast. Right, completely original idea. Before we get started, I just want to throw out there that this episode is kind of gross. I guess I could have said that before talking about an elderly woman's corpse juices soaking into the baseboards of her home. But whatever, if you're still here, that means you're a real one. Welcome to episode 1, People Soup. We're gonna start this off with a story that I went over several years ago on my main YouTube channel. This one is stuck with me for some time because it explains quite possibly the worst way to leave this plane of existence. This is a story of a traffic stop leading to a little bit of people soup. August 5, 2018, Lancaster, California. The temperature by noon has reached 102 degrees. According to police reports, a 35-year-old man by the name of Ramundo Rivera is pulled over by police for having a fake license plate. For whatever reason, he does not want to talk to the police so he takes off and crashes his car near a Winko supermarket. Ramundo still doesn't really want to talk to the police so he jumps out of the car and takes off on foot. Desperate to hide from the 5-0, Rivera scrambles out some stairs to the roof of the Winko supermarket. Ramundo spots a hollow brick pillar on the building's exterior. The pillar is about three feet wide and is positioned next to the front door of the store. Ramundo thinks to himself, "What a perfect place to hide from police." So he slides down into the pillar. You know the pictures of cavers who find a cave named Satan's booty hole of death with a 0% survival rate? Yeah, that's kind of the situation Ramundo had gotten himself into. The only difference is this cave is completely vertical with no way to climb out and it's well over 100 degrees. Ramundo is trapped inside of a brick oven, the shape of a tube. Deputies search the area but claim they lost track of them. Police reports filed later by the pursuing deputies state that the suspect escaped. Ramundo's family says otherwise though, we'll talk about that a bit more in a minute. His body temperature spikes and dehydration sets in pretty fast. Six days passed with Ramundo trapped inside of the brick column, needless to say the dehydration and heat exposure eventually killed him. Given how hot it was, decomposition worked pretty quickly. Nearly a week after Ramundo slid down into the column, a manager at the window was walking around and smelled something horrible. The manager sniffed around and inspected the column closely. Huh, that's weird, a dark brown liquid was leaking out of the base. He'd been over stuck his finger into whatever was leaking out and gave it a taste. Okay, that's not true. There's something leaking out of the base of the column that is so gross the news reports had to blur the image. Manager thinks, "Oh brown liquid stinks, it's got to be a sewage leak. It's definitely do-do, so he calls in a plumber." Plumber knocks a little hole in the column and discovers a very deceased guy in there. Firefighters show up, cut a big hole in the building and the Los Angeles County Coroner's office wearing hazmat suits pulled the melted body out. Los Angeles Sheriff's Department homicide bureau investigate, but no immediate foul play was attributed to the deputies involved. Case closed, right? Guy got in a bad spot running from the police? Well, not really yet. The story completely turns into an HBO crime drama. A good one though, like season one of True Detective, definitely not season three. Let's get forward six years to 2024. A woman who has only identified as Jane Doe and court documents files a lawsuit against her former boyfriend, Aaron Turner. Aaron Turner was a Los Angeles Sheriff deputy. According to Jane Doe, he was one of the deputies who was chasing Ray Mundo before the column incident. She had initiated a lawsuit against Deputy Tanner on the grounds of domestic abuse over the course of their relationship. She stated the ads strangled her several times to the point of passing out among some other heinous acts. You might be asking, "Well, what does a random lady suit a cop ex-boyfriend have to do with people suit leaking out of a California grocery store walls?" Well, in the lawsuit, Jane Doe stated that Deputy Tanner allegedly used to brag about the pursuit of Ray Mundo Rivera on that hot day, back in August of 2018. She claimed that Deputy Tanner and the other deputies knew Ray Mundo had squeezed down into the hidey hole, then they filed false police reports about him. The confession reportedly came as Tanner boasted about his power and impunity within the department. Jane Doe goes on to say that this guy is basically a violent, crazy person who was leader of a sheriff's deputy gang called the Rattlesnakes. Like I said, complete HBO documentary. The Rattlesnakes were accused of things like withholding backup from other deputies to endanger their lives, filing false police reports, making false arrests, framing individuals, stealing from residents destroying evidence, recklessly killing civilians, including children, and intimidating witnesses. Deputy Tanner ended up being fired from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. The family of Ray Mundo caught wind of the ex-girlfriends' lawsuit so they filed their own lawsuit in 2025. Ray Mundo's wife and his daughter sued the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, Deputy Tanner and the other cops who were involved in the pursuit leading to the horrifying death. Their lawsuit implied the same thing that the cops knew Ray Mundo was trapped and left him to die. As of February 2026, the suit is still ongoing. That story with one people soup. What if there were 300 people soups in one spot? Next up, more Gover Flow and Cartel Shadows. If you watched your listen to any of my content, you know I'm going to absolutely butcher any pronunciation of whatever happens south of Texas in this next part. Imagine the sweltering heat of late summer in Guadalajara, Mexico, specifically September of 2018. On the surface, it seems like your average Mexican town, people are walking to work, maybe having some lunch from a street vendor at a central square called Plaza de Armas. Tourists are visiting the beautiful landmarks like the Guadalajara Cathedral or the Basilica of our Lady of Zappapan. I probably messed those up so bad, but bear with me this is a cool story. Cool in a morbid sense, it's pretty bad. Like any populated area with hardworking people who follow the law, there are going to be other people who choose to take advantage of those hardworking people. That and there are groups of people who understand there is a much wanted supply and demand north of their border, mostly because Cucayena smells really good, according to other people. It turns out a lot of people really, really like drugs and where there are drugs, there is violence. One particularly violent group keeps filling up all the newspaper headlines, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG. As of filming this, they were all over the news last month. They have seized control of most of the state of Jalisco with Guadalajara being its capital city. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel was born from the fragmentation of the millennial cartel around 2009 to 2010. CJNG emerged as a ruthless splinter cell group after the death of Sinaloa affiliated leader Ignacio Nacho Coronal. At that time, they were led by Nemicio Asaguera Servantes. His alias was El Mencho. He was a former police officer turned crime kingpin. The group quickly rose to power through extreme public violence and insane spectacles of fear. For instance, in 2011, they announced their arrival as nothing coming cartel gang with the Vera Cruz massacre, they tortured and mutilated 35 people. Then they took the bodies to a busy underpass beside a shopping mall and dumped them out for everyone to find. CJNG was and is still doing some gnarly stuff to this day. We're talking mass executions, kidnappings, assassinations of politicians, judges and police, extortion of businesses, fuel theft, and the creation of clandestine graves filled with dismembered remains. They've even gone so far as to shoot down military helicopters. If I were you, I would hold off when looking up their homemade videos, these guys really like to cut people's heads off. In one of their latest videos, released in 2025, they tied a dude to a tree and used a flame thrower to cook ol' boy alive. Yeah, it's real like not safe for life material. By 2018, CJNG was fighting everyone in the area, remnants of the Sinaloa, Lasatis factions, and basically anyone who seemed like competition. All this chaos pushed the state of Jolisco's homicide rate to ridiculous levels. There was a national surge exceeding 16,000 murders in the first 8 months of 2018 alone. Bodies were arriving at the morgue faster than officials could process them. The Jolisco Institute of Forensic Science, the state's main forensic hub in Guadalajara, had been overwhelmed since at least 2016. Here's the thing that makes that kind of bad. Mexican law prohibits cremating unidentified or unclaimed homicide victims because evidence has to be preserved for investigations. That's two years. Two years' bodies were just piling up. There wasn't anywhere to put them. What happens next leads us to some crazy people soup. According to the 2020 census, the state of Jolisco's population was 8.3 million people. Like anywhere, those folks are dying every day. Old age, disease, car wrecks, whatever. You see the infrastructure could handle your normal everyday deaths. But when you toss in several thousand unexpected murders, the putting bodies somewhere infrastructure gets a little overwhelmed. Local authorities came up with the idea of using refrigerated trailers as temporary overflow storage. Like the type of 18-willers that haul around produce and ground beef to the local Walmart. The bodies, most exhumed from cartel, dug, mass graves, and many of them being dismembered just in parts, are stacked inside these refrigerated trucks that are cool just enough to slow decomposition are so authorities thought. On August 31st, 2018, local Guadalajara authorities loaded the truck with 273 unidentified corpses from the Central Mork to take them to a private warehouse in the rundown La Duraz-Nara neighborhood on Guadalajara's southern edges. They thought, "It's a crappy neighborhood. It's kind of stinks already. No one's gonna notice. Well turns out even the poor people have noses. The truck that's transferring nearly 300 bodies was rented by the local authorities from a company that normally transfers fruits, vegetables, ice cream, normal things that need refrigeration. The truck even has a picture of the goofy polar bear character on the outside. I'm not sure if you know this, but refrigerators can actually have too much stuff in them. The extra stuff inside makes the fridge use more energy and generates extra heat, leading to the things inside not being cool enough. Turns out the truck with the goofy cartoon polar bear on the outside of it wasn't built to keep 273 human bodies worth of rotting meat very cool for long. The truck sits at this rundown warehouse for two weeks. Complaints from locals start rolling in. At first they describe it as a faint, sickly, sweet rot being carried by the wind. That quickly turns into what they say is an overpowering wall of decay. Swarms of flies and dark fluids, people soup, leaking out of the back of the trailer. The trailer ends up attracting millions of bugs. Dogs are barking all night, the smell is getting into people's homes and the local schools. It eventually gets too much for neighbors to handle so they tell local officials, we know what's in it. It's ruining our lives due this has to go. So they take it about 25 miles south to Tlac Pak, then to the middle of a field, a little bit more south, and the city of Pludge, Muccoe, these are Niga, Slajo Mucco. Oh that wasn't so bad. Along the way to these places I can't pronounce for the life of me, the truck is leaving a nice big trail of dark black people soup behind it for everyone to enjoy. Turns out a truck full of corpses is not welcome anywhere, so the truck does circles around the city of Guadalajara for 10 days. The news picks up on everything happening and the story blows up nationwide, reporters are calling it truck of corpses or the mobile morgue or the death container. The governor starts placing blame on other officials, people in charge of the bodies start losing their jobs, promises start being made to the public for a 700 body capacity morgue. All the government agencies that were supposed to be handling the situation from the get-go finally came together and started processing what was left. I mean by this point, most of the evidence, if not all of the evidence was destroyed due to the bodies just melting together in the summer heat for weeks. Turns out there were two rolling morgues, the other one wasn't as reported on because the 100 it contained wasn't enough to overload the refrigeration unit leading the people soups spilling out everywhere. In the end, the investigation have a total of 322 total bodies to dig through. Only 47 to 48 of the bodies were ever identified due to the freaking melted inside of a truck. The remaining 200 plus bodies were buried in municipal cemeteries as unclaimed remains. I'd say that's about it for that one, not much more to say other than the Mexican cartels are still killing the hell out of people, especially the CJ and G who are at their peak strength at the moment. Of course, morgues are still overwhelmed, but at least we haven't heard of more tractor trailers sharing people soup with an entire city. Up next, let's talk about people soup for profit. Business is cutting corners to make some extra money as nothing new. Every single industry in the entire world does shady stuff for a little bit more profit. They might say crime is fine, you know what I'm saying? For instance, once upon a time, the aircraft manufacturer Boeing noticed that the 737 Max passenger airliner was looting his competitive edge, so instead of redesigning the entire aircraft to keep those silly little passengers safe, they instead opted to rush a very important piece of flight control software. The immediate result was two fatal crashes killing 346 people. Oh, what about the infamous Ford Pinto automobile, you guys might have heard this one before? In 1971 Ford was having trouble keeping up with the affordable subcompact car category due to imports like Volkswagen Beetle or many other Japanese models, so they came up with the Pinto. The difference between the Pinto and foreign competitors though is the Pinto's gas tank was basically in the rear bumper. This means in the event of a fender bender, your family of four is now a barbecue cookout in the middle of I-10. Burn, baby burn, quite literally. Of course, Ford quickly figured out this was a problem. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that it's a terrible design flaw to turn the rear bumper of your car into a claymore mine. They quickly recalled every single Pinto, issued an apology and gave credits for a new vehicle to families who purchased them. I'm just kidding, that didn't happen. Some soulless corporate demons got together and calculated that fixing the issue will cost $11 per car, which comes up to between $121 to $137 million. On the other hand, the expected, what they call "societal costs" will be about $49.5 million. Societal costs, meaning how much money they pay you out after your mom, dad, sister, brother, whoever burns to death in a fiery inferno. They decided to save the $70 million in which led to 27 to 190 burn deaths and 500 to 900 preventable burn fatalities/injuries. If you're a fan of the book/film fight club, the job of Edward Norton's character is coming up with these cost/loss calculations for auto companies. One of my favorite scenes is him explaining this on an airplane to a random lady sitting next to him. In this iconic scene, he says, "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles an hour. The rear differential locks up, the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now should we initiate a recall?" You take the number of vehicles in the field A, multiplied by the probable rate of failure B, then multiplied by the average out-of-course settlement C, A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do the recall. The woman next to him asks, "Which car company do you work for?" Edward Norton replies, "I'm a major one." Alright, I went down the doughnut hole in that one. Let's get back on track. People soup. For our next little true story, we're going to head over to Colorado. The homeless in pretty bad-ass snowboarding spots and really awful firearm laws. Montrose is a fairly medium-sized town with a population just a little over 20,000. It has a beautiful small town aesthetic, which offers great hiking, fishing, hunting and skiing. From the pictures, this place looks super pretty, but it has a dark side. Well, kinda. At least a small funeral home located there had a dark side. We're going to talk about the sunset Mesa funeral home, not to be confused with a 2001 black Mesa incident caused by the scientist Gordon Freeman. Remember, children don't ever insert a pure zen crystal into an anti-maspectrometer. It might rupture the space-time continuum. Sunset Mesa funeral home sounds like a pleasant place to hand a loved one's corpse over to, right? Not really. This funeral home was ran by mother-daughter team Megan Hess and Shirley Koch from 2010 to 2018. Megan, the daughter, was the primary owner. owner and operator of Sunset, Mesa, Funeral Home Directors, and donor services. Oh yeah, they ran a donor services business out of the same location. Surely, the mom worked behind the scenes performing dismemberments and embalming with Xero training whatsoever. I sh*t you not, she learned how to remove organs from YouTube tutorials and used hardware store tools. To be fair from personal experience, I do know that Saul's Alls do really good to cut through ball-like butter. Don't ask. If you couldn't figure it out by now, the whole story time you're listening to and are watching is about crime. Yep, old Megan and Shirley were doing some pretty illegal stuff with bodies behind the scenes, and they were getting away with it for years. The mom and daughter group being discovered all started in 2016 when the International Multimedia News Agency Reuters launched an investigation into the largely unregulated US body trade industry, aka Body Brokering. Yeah, I didn't know that was a big thing also, but it makes sense. A lot of people need body parts for medical research and training. Education purposes are private use. You. A guy by the name of John Schiffman along with some other reporters figured out one of the best courses of action for their investigation into bodies for cash was to interview people who had worked in the game before. During their research, they kept coming across former employees of Sunset Mesa Funeral home. All the former employees had similar stories about the owners doing some pretty uft-uft stuff, stuff like dismembering bodies without proper family consent, unauthorized dissection and sales, and deceptive marketing. The Funeral home even had an ad to cart button for body parts on their website at one point. One former employee stated that the mother pulled her aside one day to show her a gold tooth collection. Turns out mom had been ripping out people's gold teeth, saving them and selling them in batches. She had even bragged about taking the entire family to Disneyland with her gold tooth earnings. Reuters continued their research and discovered that there's not other businesses in the United States that houses a crematory, a body brokerage, and a funeral home under the same roof. The FBI also found that pretty odd and launched an investigation a couple weeks after the Reuters article was released. Imagine your Uncle Larry passes away after 98 glorious years, so you head on down to Sunset Mesa Funeral home to speak with Megan and Shirley. "Uncle Larry wasn't a very picky man, so he requested a simple cremation with his ashes coming back to you, a beloved family member. You shake hands with Megan, give her a thousand dollars, and work begins. By work I mean Shirley wills Uncle Larry into a room, pulls out her handy dandy reciprocating saw that she purchased at Home Depot down the road and starts a choppin." According to their Funeral home's price chart, which was sent out to medical training labs, the pelvis with upper legs is gonna fetch the biggest price of $1,200 bucks, so Larry gets cut in half. Next up, Larry's head, that goes for $500 bucks, his knees $250 a piece, feet $125 a piece, and we're left with the torso that they sell for $1,000. Oh crap, all Shirley has is some arms in the family's expecting an earnful of Larry. No worry, she just fills it up with unnicks concrete and gives it back to the family. Yeah, this is what they actually did, to 560 bodies over the years. To top it all off, the buyers thought they were receiving legally donated and disease-free parts. In reality, the parts were shipped with forced certificates, saying that they were disease-free, when in reality they contain pretty bad stuff like HIV or hepatitis. So there were medical students just cutting up these bodies that had HIV and hepatitis. After 8 years of desecrating bodies, the FBI came knocking at the front door of Sunset Mesa Funeral home. They found body parts, lack of documents, and falsified records. Former employees started seeing like canaries and gave formal statements. A month after the investigation was launched, the mother and daughter team was finally arrested. But not for cutting up people and selling their bodies. What? Yeah, this is freaking crazy. Turns out there were no federal laws against body brokering. The most of the feds could him them up for was Mel Fraud and Hazardous Material Transport. They ended up being indicted on three counts of legal Hazardous Materials Transport and six counts of Mel Fraud. Both women put guilty to those charges down to one count of Mel Fraud and aiding in a bedding. All other charges were dropped. In 2023, the mastermind behind the operation and the daughter, Megan Hess, got the maximum sentencing of 20 years. Charlie Cox, the butcher mom, got 15 years. They tried to appeal the sentencing several times since then, but so far the prosecution has told them hell no. What more can I say other than greed knows no bounds? If these crazy ladies figure out how to profit off the dead, you know Dan Wilson, other people figured it out too. This next story leads us right back to Colorado again. This time to one of the most beautiful spots in the entire United States. Colorado Springs. Man, what are they putting in the wack, heats back in Colorado? We're going to go back in time to 2017. John and Carrie Halford, a seemingly ordinary couple in their 40s, decided to tap into the growing trend of green funerals. My first thought was what's more green than bearing a body in the ground, but it turns out the green funeral thing is getting pretty common. What it basically means is no chemical embalming and using biodegradable containers like untreated wood or sometimes even linen or cotton. In that case, you get turned into people soup like really quick. The couple opened return to nature funeral home. Man, that sounds just as pleasant as the last one we talked about sunset mesa. The Hallford's promise affordable environmentally friendly services. The cremations are priced at around $1,500 to $2,000 with burials that honored Mother Nature. It sounded perfect for families on a budget or those wanting to go out and environmentally friendly way. John, the male half who had a misdemeanor on his record for pointing a gun, not much more than that, handled the behind-the-scenes grunt work. Carrie, the female half and more polished face of the operation, charmed clients with her empathetic pitch. You know, we're sorry for your loss. For two grand we'll wrap Nana in a cotton shawl and toss her in a hole. That's like it's green or something after all, right? Whatever they were pitching. They marketed themselves as compassionate caregivers in a time of grief. Fast forward two years to 2019, the body business is going good, so the Hallford's expanded by buying up a rundown building and the sleepy little rural town of Pinrose. It's about 40 miles south of Colorado Springs. They bought it for a still. It was just $200,000 and they turned it into their main storage and body processing site. During my research, I couldn't help but look up the address and see what the building at least looked like. It was 31 Werner Road. And holy crap, it looks like an old pizza hut. You know exactly what I'm talking about. That big red, weird, shaped roof. Something tells me there wasn't a pizza bar or an Ninja Turtle arcade cabinet inside of that building though. For the next four years from 2019 to 2023, the Hallford's took all sorts of bodies, adults, infants, even fetuses. They promised proper cremations or burials. Families handed over their loved ones trusting that return to nature would handle everything with dignity. But what actually happened inside the pizza hut of hars? There was no refrigeration. No proper storage. Bodies were stacked haphazardly on the floor. In piles, left to decompose in the sweltering heat. That's right. People soup, maggots sworn, bodily fluids leaks across the concrete. The place was an absolute biohazard. We're talking about 189 to 191 human remains. The exact count shifted slightly in reports, but the horror was the same. The deception ran deep with these two psychopaths. When families asked for ashes, the Hallford's handed over earns filled with not their loved ones. They did the same thing that the sunset mess of family home did and sometimes just gave the families a gritty mix of concrete dust. Other times, the cremated remains from who knows where. Mixed remains from strangers are nothing human at all. In at least two documented cases, they even sent the wrong bodies for burial, leaving families to mourn at grave sites that held strangers. How completely deranged you have to be to clock in the work, surrounded by the melting bodies of men, women, and children for four years. Like, did that stink not cling to them when they were home or bother them at all? I guess they felt that they had to do it because of the crippling debt they were in. Their funeral director licensed expired in November 2022, but they just kept operating. By May of 2023, they were evicted from the Colorado Springs office for owing $120,000 in back rent. To save money, they even stopped doing cremations entirely by July 2023. But the money kept rolling in, they pocketed fees from desperate families while the bodies piled up. Not only were they stealing from poor grieving families like many con artists, they took advantage of COVID. During the COVID-19 shenanigans, they scammed the federal government for nearly $900,000 in relief funds. They took advantage of paycheck protection program loans and economic industry disaster loans meant for struggling businesses. Instead of using the almost million dollars to keep things running ethically, you know, like actually burying and cremating people, they spent it all on fancy cars, lavish trips, and cryptocurrency. Mind you, they're doing all this while still tossing baby corpses into the people's soup pizza hut. Dude, can you imagine you're grieving the loss of a parent, a child, a spouse, and these monsters are treating your loved one like trash? It's not just negligence, it's a deliberate con. Victims like Derek Johnson scattered what he thought were his mother's ashes on a beautiful Maui beach, only to learn later that her body was rotting on the floor of their dilapidated rental property. Or Christina Page, who became a fierce advocate for the families, she described the betrayal as reopening wounds that never healed. As sentencing hearing, families called John a "monster," saying their relatives were treated like yesterday's trash, which, to be honest, they weren't 100% worth. The stench of death couldn't be hidden forever. They weren't trying to even hide it anymore. On October 6, 2023, neighbors in Penrose started complaining about a god-awful odor coming from 31 Werner Road. They said it was like rotten meat mixed with chemicals, an unmistakable odor if you've ever smelled it. The Fremont County Sheriff's Office rolled up for a welfare check. But what did they find inside? A scene from your worst zombie apocalypse flick. Deputies in the hazmat suits documented piles of bodies in various states of decomposition. The initial count was 115, but as they dug deeper, literally sifting through the mess, it climbed to 189 and then 191 in some court docks. Bugs were everywhere, fluids were pulling, it was so bad the EPA had to step in for cleanup. Words spread like wildfire, by October 13, the authorities began the grim task of removing the remains, transported into the El Paso County Coroner's Office. Identification was a painstaking process. Some fingerprints were possible, DNA tests for the rest. Families got the gut-wrenching call starting November 9. "Hey, we found your loved one, but not how you expected." The hallfirts, oh, they bolted. They rented an SUV and fled to Oklahoma, but they didn't get too far. On November 8, 2023, they were nabbed there and hauled back to Colorado. It's charges hit pretty hard. A lot harder than the last family of horrors we talked about. They got over 190 counts of abuse of a corpse, plus theft, forgery, and money laundering. The legal saga unfolded like a courtroom thriller, which it did turn into a mini-dock on a show called The Curious Case of the Funeral Home of Horrors, Streaming on Hulu, and HBO+. Illuminary hearings in January and February 2024 laid out the evidence containing photos of the horrors show and financial records showing the fraud. By April 2024, the feds laid down the hate with 15 counts of wire fraud for the COVID scam. The hallfirts posted bond initially, but it just kept getting worse for them. In the state case, out of El Paso County, under district attorney Michael Allen, things dried out with delays and arrangements. You got multiple jurisdictions, hundreds of bodies, thousands of victims with dozens of local, state, and federal laws being broken, not to even mention the civil suits from all the families. A class action lawsuit from the victims' families filed in November 2023 culminated into a massive $950 million dollar judgment in August of 2024. Of course, the hallfirts were broke as hell and couldn't pay a dime. It was more of a middle finger and a warning to others thinking about committing the same atrocities. Hey, you mess with our loved ones final resting place. He will come after you for a billion dollars. The plea deals came and went. John pled guilty to federal charges in September 2024 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison in order to pay $1 million in restitution. He filed for another appeal that July, but that really didn't go anywhere seeing as how he's a piece of shit. Carry filed a plea, but then withdrew it in March of 2025, then guilty in August of 2025. Our federal sentencing should be coming up on March 16th, 2026. So that was just the federal side, what about the state side? Well, the plea deal was rejected in November 2025 as too lenient. Probably because they're both pieces of shit. Finally, we got some guilty pleas in December of 2025. John faced the music first. On February 6th of 2026, he was sentenced to 40 years by a judge who called it not ordinary harm. Carry's turn comes April 24th of 2026, she's looking at 25 to 35 years. After all the nearly 200 bodies were removed and identified by twice grieving loved ones, the EPA demolished the building April of 2024. Up next, we have an explosive story out of Arizona, it's literally explosive. This one makes the previous crimes we've talked about look like parking tickets. There's twice the crazy stuff in 100 times the people's soup. This is part five, the Frankenstein Body Broker. In 2005, a former embalmer with no medical degree, bought a non-descript warehouse in Peoria, Arizona, just outside Phoenix. He had money on the mind and like our previous stories would do anything for a dollar. He used this warehouse to start a business called the Biological Resource Center. I mean, that sounds pretty official, right? It sounds like a government agency. I kid you not though, the founder of this place's name, the BRC, his name is Steven Gore. Yep, last name is Gore, G-O-R-E, you can't make that up. He marketed it as a compassionate alternative for families who couldn't afford traditional funerals. His pitch was donate your loved one body's to science, help advance medical research, train future doctors, and no cost to you. The pickup was free, transport was handled, and in your remaining ashes returned and earned to the family. For many low-income families, elderly donors, and even veterans, it sounded like a final act of generosity. Hey, don't want to be a monetary burden on your family while at the same time helping with medical research? Awesome. You probably already guessed from hearing the other stories, that's not what happened to the loved ones. Behind the scenes, the Biological Resource Center operated like a for-profit shop shop. Not like a stolen car shop shop, there were no health cats involved in this business. Bodies arrived to the BRC shop shop by the thousands. Actually, over 5,000 in total. They came from grieving relatives who signed huge consent forms to the live small print in moments of profound sorrow and grieving. You're not paying attention to the small print. You're sad that someone you love just died. The forms used vague language allowing dismemberment and distribution for research, education, or implantation. But donors frequently checks box explicitly for bidding military use, destructive testing or sells for profit. Mr. Gorin is team ignored the wishes of almost every single person. We'll talk about one of the most popular stories here in a second. They blew up grandma and not with a bazooka. Inside the warehouse, the reality was fricking gruesome. Technicians like lab workers, Sam Kazimi, you scowpals, pliers, and of course, saws-alls from the local Home Depot to carve up cadavers on stainless steel tables. The whole bodies were sold for 5,900 bucks. Individual parts fetched anywhere from $65 for a femoral artery, to over $3,000 for a torso. Unlike some of our previous for-profit body farms, BRC's inventory lists showed meticulous tracking. Heads, shoulders, legs, spines, even fingernails shipped nationwide, and sometimes outside of the country. Some parts went to medical schools or device companies, sometimes they were sold to contractors working for the US military to simulate blast injuries from IEDs and war zones. Yeah, grandma. At least 20 donors remains, including veterans who had opted out of such use, ended up shredded an explosion test. Imagine you make a home after an IED blast, or your body is shipped home after an IED blast, and then they sell your body to be blown up in an IED blast. Let's talk about the time they blew up grandma, not with a rocket launcher. This time with an improvised explosive device. In January of 2013, a 74-year-old grandmother by the name of Doris Stoffer, who had been battling Alzheimer's past quietly at home. Her son, Jim Stoffer, greaves, but he sees an opportunity for her legacy by donating her body to science, specifically for research in Alzheimer's. Jim ends up finding the biological resource center. He speaks with some representatives at the center and basically sells his mom's body to Steven Gore, specifically for Alzheimer's research. On the consent form, Jim checks no to military experiments, blast testing, or destructive use. He hands over their remains trusting they'll honor her final wish. Months pass without word, Jim assumes her body is aiding Alzheimer's studies. Maybe they carefully pulled her brain out to analyze the tissue in a lab, to hopefully get closer to cure for this terrible mind-eating disease. Without consent, though, Steven Gore sells Doris's intact body to the US Army for about $6,000. Her body was transported to her remote testing site. Her remains are strapped to a chair with sensors and an explosive detonates beneath her, simulating an improvised explosive blast, the kind that mames and kills, soldiers and warzons. The experiment completely shreds the body. They collected data on fragmentation patterns, shockwaves and trauma effects. There was no research on Alzheimer's though, just a big explosion for some military R&D. Three years later, 2016, a Reuters reporter calls Jim during their probe into the body brokers thing, the same Reuters investigation we talked about earlier. The reporter tells Jim the truth. His mother's body wasn't studied, it was blown up pieces. Jim tells journalists every time I dream about my mom, I told you she was a real quiet person. This person in my dream was angry, but for Jim, no sum restores peace. From a law enforcement perspective, it's evidence nightmare, chain of custody shattered, families violated twice, biohazards shipped without checks, when greed overrides respect the dead become data points and the living carry the scars. Let me tell you about how gross and unethical the BRC was before we get into them finally be embusted. Employees worked in blood-soaked scrubs amid the constant stench of decay. Many sometimes sat unrefrigerated for hours during transport. Disease or contaminated specimens, once carrying hepatitis or HIV, were knowingly shipped without warning to the buyers. Just to make a couple of extra bucks on weekends, the facility even hosted dissection classes for college students. All I can think of is a reciprocating saw, just throwing hepatitis blood around a small room packed full of people, gross. We operated this absolute freak show for years until March 23rd 2014. BRC eventually went down due to federal investigators getting a search warrant during a completely different Michigan named Arthur Rathburn had a company called International Biological Incorporated. Sounds pretty official again, right? He had been running it for 20 years, they see even guy had a legitimate business background. He was well respected in the medical community, he was a former University of Michigan-Morgett in it, a licensed funeral director, was published on embombing techniques and lectured across the US on anatomy. So he didn't exactly hold as many bodies and storage like BRC and Phoenix did, but like all the others, he did really shady stuff to make a couple of extra thousand dollars. A couple of examples, he rented out a head and neck infected with Hepatitis B to a dental seminar in Cambridge, Massachusetts on March 2011. Then again, the same head with Hepatitis to a bone-grafting seminar in San Diego months later. He rented eight human heads that were packed in trash bags inside camping coolers in 2012. Some of the heads were sold from donors who died of sepsis and are pneumonia. He sold a cadaver infected with both HIV and Hepatitis B to an anesthesiology conference in Washington, DC, for over $55,000. He bought discounted infected body parts from suppliers like Biological Resource Center, like paying $5,000 for a cadaver, beginning a $3,500 credit because it was diseased. Wrathburn was talented when it came to whatever you want to call his business, but it was also a slimy, evil, used body salesman. Buying the parts from BRC and Phoenix eventually got them both in trouble. Due to the diseased head's International Biological Incorporated, bought from Phoenix-based BRC, over 50 FBI agents and full hazmat suits and respirators stormed the BRC Phoenix warehouse. What they found was worse than anyone could imagine. It was worse than the pizza hut of Hards we were just talking about. The feds found 10 tons of frozen human remains inside of four different chest freezers. 10 tons. To be exact, agents cataloged 1,755 body parts. That was broken down into 281 heads, 241 shoulders, 337 legs, 97 spines, and countless limbs, torsos, organs. Many were unlabelled and just thrown together, potted up like butcher scraps, one bag held fragments of at least 36 different people. There were buckets overflowing severed arms, legs, and heads. One cooler was packed with only male genitalia. Yeah, a bag of ticks. There were torsos, stripped of limbs, and genitals. There were diseased heads stacked carelessly. Worst of all, former FBI agent Mark Quiner later testified to witnessing a large male torsos with its head removed in a smaller woman's head crudely sewn on in a grotesque Frankenstein manner hanging on the wall like some trophy. The whole thing was so disturbing that some agents needed counseling afterwards. 40 seized everything under Arizona forfeiture laws, which was 142 body bags hauled to a secure site. The Raid shut, BRC down, thank god, permanently. Steven Gore faced federal charges but pled guilty in 2015 to a single felony, conducting an illegal enterprise by shipping contaminated and unauthorized tissue. His punishment was just one year deferred jail time because of good behavior and four years of probation. No trafficking charges stuck because whole body cells weren't explicitly federal crimes. The family's did fight back in civil court, though, does ensued Gore, BRC affiliates, and related funeral homes for fraud, emotional distress, and desecration. In a landmark 2019 trial, a jury awarded $58.5 million to 10 of the plaintiffs. That's one of Arizona's largest verdicts ever. Though Gore had few assets, he assigned rights against his insurer to the victims. Appeals dragged on but by 2022, the full award was reinstated. And as of late 2025, families continue pursuing justice through bad faith insurance claims. Their remains themselves sat limbo for nearly three years. They were disputed property worth over a million dollars on paper. They were eventually cremated in mass in 2017 and returned to requesting families. As you guys have seen, people go to great links for a little bit of money. It seems like no matter how old a corpse still worth something. That brings us to our next and final case. This one is pretty recent too. Part 6 Horror in the Basement January 2026 Mount Moriah's cemetery sits on about 200 acres, straggling Yean and Borough in Delaware County in southwest Philadelphia. Founded in 1855, it's one of the largest historical burial grounds in the area. It's all to an estimated 150,000 graves, including revolutionary war veterans, civil war veterans, and even ties to Betsy Rose. But over the decades, neglect took hold. Large sections of overgrown, unfinced in places, mausoleums crumbling, underground vaults forgotten. Volunteers from an organization called the Friends of Mount Moriah do what they can, but it's impossible to watch every corner of 200 acres 24/7. This vulnerability became a target for a particular thief starting around November, 2025. The first reported break-in was the Hunter Family Mausoleum. Center blocks were smashed, marble flooring destroyed, and crypts pried open. Investigators later linked it to a pattern. There was at least 26 mausoleums in underground burial vaults hit over the next two months. The suspect was 34-year-old Jonathan Christ Gerlock from Yafrata in Lancaster County, about 70 miles west of the cemetery. For above-ground mausoleums, he'd use a crowbar to smash stone slabs, center blocks, and marble. For the deep underground vaults, sometimes 10-12 feet down, he'd actually repel in there using a rope tied to a tree branch. In one vault, he left a broken wooden pallet as a makeshift step to climb out. There were tool marks, debris, and rope all left behind like a signature. He worked at night sometimes, leaving monster energy drink cans and cigarette butts, which of course were later used for DNA and fingerprints. You dumbass. Its targets were older burials from 1800s and early 1900s where remains were more likely mummified or skeletal. He didn't just take a bone here and there. He stole complete sets of skulls, long bones, torsos, mummified hands and feet, and even entire infants in some cases. He took jewelry, clothing, even ashes, anything of value or interest. Sometimes he just destroyed stuff. One family mausoleum, the Jonathan Pritchard family, erected in 1912, he damaged 9 crypts, including the remains of Mary Pritchard's stegelman who died in 1940. An investigation kicked off though after a tip came in. Yeen Borough Police and Delaware County detectives started piecing it together. A licensed plate reader had caught this guy's rap for and near the cemetery multiple times during the burglary window and cell phone peeing placed him there repeatedly. Police were pretty sure that they had their men so surveillance ramped up. On the night of January 6th, 2026 at around 8 p.m. detectives patrolling the cemetery spotted the rap for. Detectives looked in the back of his rap for and this dude actually had bones and skulls just sitting there. After they found the vehicle, they set up surveillance and not too long. After that, Girlock emerged from the grounds carrying a crowbar, a burlap sack and other tools. Doctors moved in and they found exactly what they were looking for inside of the sack he was carrying. The mummified corpses of two small children, three skulls and assorted loose bones. Of course, he was arrested on the spot. The next day, the search warrant hit his home in the 100 block of Washington Avenue, Yafrata and an additional nearby storage unit. What they found even shocked veteran cops, Delaware DA Tanner Rouse called it "a horror movie come to life." Yeen Police Chief Harry Guilin Marco, who had 30 plus years on the job said it was probably one of the most horrific things he'd ever seen. In the basement, detectives found more than 100 human skulls, long bones, mummified hands and feet. They found two decomposing torsos, one that saw a pacemaker attached and other skeletal items. Some skulls were on shelves, others were pieced together like puzzles, some hanging from the ceiling. If I could imagine it, it probably looked like that scene from the horror film Jeepers Creepers. The guy had rented a storage unit and inside that, cops found eight additional corpses or body parts, plus jewelry and clothing from graves. In the end, they found well over 100 sets of human remains. During the interrogation, Girlok broke down and spilled the beans, though. He admitted to ceiling approximately 30 sets of bones, specifically from Mount Mariah. He even walked police through the cemetery and pointed out exactly which graves and moscow leaps he'd hit. Dude even confessed to selling some remains online. He did this through a social media group for human bones and skull collectors. One tipster said he'd been in Chicago selling a skull. His own pose showed him posing with skulls. In one picture, he had a caption about riding a Harley and slinging skulls. One buyer messaged him and thanked him for mailing items, including a possible teen and referenced a human skin bag, whatever the hell that is. He now faces nearly 575 criminal charges. This includes over 100 counts of abuse of a corpse, over 100 counts of receiving stolen property. 26 counts of burglary, 26 counts of criminal trespass, 26 counts of intentional desecration of a public monument, slash venerated objects, slash historic burial place, plus a bunch of theft, criminal mischief and more. He's being held in Delaware County Prison on a $1 million cash bill. The preliminary hearing was his preliminary hearing set for January 20, 2026, but as of mid-February, there haven't been any major updates. The case is still active and investigators are still identifying human remains. He's been a little bit in trouble, though, seeing how many of them are between 100 and 150 years old. Well folks, that wraps up our first episode of Crime is Fun. I hope you enjoyed this episode all about people soup, and I really hope that you return for more crime, because it's pretty fun. Next time we're going to go down the donut hole of Pokemon. That's right, there is Pokemon Crime. Catch that next week on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Pods, Pandora or wherever your favorite place to listen is. (upbeat music)