A FUNERAL director who deceived families who had paid him to bury or cremate their relatives has been jailed for 20 years after giving some families the ashes of other people instead.
In one case, the parents of a stillborn baby were given ashes that experts said belonged to a young adult, while their baby's body was later found by police in a brown paper bag.
Robert Bush, who ran Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, northern England, admitted a series of offences after prosecutors said he had breached the trust of grieving families "on an almost industrial scale".
Bush's actions came to light in 2024 while he was on holiday, when a casual worker told other funeral directors that bodies had been left at the premises for years, describing it as "a horror scene", prosecutor Chris Paxton said.
Police later found 35 bodies at the site, many of them uncovered and in different stages of decomposition after being "simply abandoned ... for nature to take its course", Paxton said.
Sentencing Bush on Friday, Judge Nicholas Hilliard said only the relatives of those whose bodies were found at the premises could be certain what had happened to them.
"The awful truth is that anyone whose loved one went through Legacy at any time when it was operating can now have no confidence as to how they were treated or as to whose ashes they have," the judge added.
Bush, 48, admitted 30 counts of preventing a lawful and decent burial and theft in April. The theft charges related to money families had donated to 12 charities. He had previously pleaded guilty to more than 30 charges of fraud by false representation and fraudulent trading over a period of nearly 12 years.
Hilliard said Bush had "caused anguish and pain on a scale beyond comprehension ... I don't think that I have ever known offences affect so many people and so many people so deeply".
During a week-long hearing at Hull Crown Court, dozens of victim impact statements were read by, or on behalf of, relatives of the deceased.
One woman said her 94-year-old father's body had been left at Legacy for almost a year. She told the court that she had placed some of the ashes Bush had given her into lockets for herself and her mother.
"I now feel violated that I have had some unknown person's ashes so close to me," she said in her statement.
Detective Superintendent Alan Curtis of Humberside Police said: "What happened at Legacy Funeral Directors is the unthinkable, and the details have shocked the entire country."
