To not understand the Hull funeral directors story?

[GameOfJones]

I've just seen an update to the news story and it sounds absolutely terrible.

35 bodies now identified at the funeral directors, some of whom have relatives that believed they had already been cremated and had been given their ashes. It sounds so upsetting.

What I can't understand is what on Earth was going on? I sort of get they may have been taking the money to cremate bodies then not actually doing so.....but then what the heck were they planning to do with the bodies they had in storage?

Storing ashes isn't unusual.
The undertakers receive them back from the crematorium, and will let you know when they're ready for collection. It's usually only a couple of days after the cremation. But you do have to go and get them yourself.

From what I've heard, it's quite normal for ashes to never be collected. People just don't know what to do with them.
Certainly, walking out of the undertakers with my dad under my arm was one of life's weirder experiences! And then mentally debating with myself whether it was okay to put "him" in the boot, or not!

One thing is certain what has happened is abhorrent to every sane person.

Second thing is that someone is going to jail for a very long time.

Third thing how the hell did they think they would get away with it.

I wasnt really following the story but I read that it started when a family was asked by the funeral parlour(?) to identify their loved one's body long after they'd received the ashes. Why did the funeral parlour dob themselves in like that?

I work occasionally for an undertaker friend assisting with embalming, so I'll try and unpick it.

Bone does not burn completely in the cremation furnace, it is raked out solid and put in a cremulator, a machine that pulverises it to grey powdery material, not dis-similar to crushed cat litter.

I suspect for whatever reason they had run short of cash, and could not afford the cremation fees, or messed up admin wise and didn't have the right green slips for the bodies (you need a green slip to book a cremation, they are issued by the registrar)

So the bodies were being stored, not in a fridge, just in the building - which would have been a horrible pong and mess.

I'm guessing they were bulking out what ash they had with something else

This of course would leave a surplus of bodies to get rid of, and presumably they had no plan for that as they were still there, some from January.

Being used to the smell of putrefaction, it must have been awful.

I wouldn’t think so, funeral directors are in a position of trust and need their good reputation for their business to continue, I’d imagine this is just one incompetent person who’s buried their head in the sand and it’s got out of control.

They were probably intending to send them to the crematorium ‘eventually’ but could never quite get the fees together and it’s spiralled.

My Mother was given a direct cremation (arranged by her elderly husband under the control of my awful half brother who took the cheapest route &, I presume, kept the monies she'd saved for a traditional funeral).
Anyway, she was collected, driven 200miles to a 'central hub', cremated (unattended) at some point over 'a 72 hour window' then her ashes were posted back in plastic bag inside a cardboard box.
I'm not saying all direct cremations are this awful but this one was. I hope the ashes are from my Mother but really who knows? The more 'direct' & removed it is, the less chance you would have of ever finding out if anything had gone wrong. It's awful.

The COOP funeral place gave me my husbands ashes in a large gift bag in a tasteful mid/dark blue 😂

It sounds as if the owners got overwhelmed with rising costs, financial difficulties and put their heads in the sand. Maybe being unable to pay crematorium fees led to them not getting bodies cremated, keeping them in their fridges but giving out ashes to families (from uncollected bodies?). Families are obviously very unhappy about this, no-one knows if they got the correct ashes and some are wondering if the jewellery they had made from ashes is the rightful remains. Doubtful anyone will get answers to this. I have thought about paying in advance for my direct cremation, but decided against it as what would happen if the Funeral Directors went into liquidation.

We got my dad’s ashes in a gift bag too. It was just after Christmas and when the guy came in with it my adult son and I looked at each other and laughed. It just felt so ridiculous. Then my mum cried when she felt the weight of the bag, as it was heavier than you thought. Sad thing is my dad ashes are sitting in my mums wardrobe (they were in the dining room for a year where we put them when we got back). Not sure why my mum doesn’t want to scatter them, and we haven’t pushed it and it’s been 5yrs this December. I know my mum wants to be buried so I may bury my dads ashes with her so I’ve got a place to visit tonight my dad might be angry as they didn’t have the best marriage! Maybe I’ll scatter them one day in a place he enjoyed

All I can think of is:
70 people die and relatives book a non attended cremation. Funeral Director holds a service on their premises. Say they charge £1600 per funeral.
35 people are cremated. Ashes returned and divided between the 70 families.
35 bodies not cremated so FD gets £1600x35 for doing nothing except storing bodies.
Looks like they had cash flow problems, hit on this as quick fix and then looked at how they could go on storing bodies…
Probably a person they hired in as a Páll bearer or similar worker blew the whistle.
Alternative theory is someone at the crem was in on it and 2 bodies per coffin therefore halving costs. But I think this is unlikely.

With the big firms that's how it works, we offer Direct Cremation and Direct Burial, both are exactly the same as a trad funeral but without the service, the cremations go through the local crematorium as an attended one does.

Our price is the same as the big direct cremation firms, but a personal service, it really is best to deal with a local, small, independent undertakers.

The bag and box is standard, how all ashes are returned to us, we will then decant into an urn if the customer wants it, many do this themselves because good quality funery urns can be had very cheap on eBay and amazon - or if they plan to scatter quickly many people don't want to buy the urn.

Agree about where are the standards. I just can't imagine how the relatives must feel, it's so dreadful - and at a time when people are at their most vulnerable. Just wicked.

What I'm struggling to understand is surely there must have been more than just the two people mentioned who were involved? I thought funeral directors would have a team of people, so how come it's only just coming to light - it must have been going on for who knows how long? So hard to comprehend (a) how and why this began and (b) how the hell they thought this could ever continue?

The pre-paid plans we sell are underwritten by an insurance company, so in the unlikely event my firm (it is unlikely as they’re a huge organisation) goes under, your money is safe/protected.
We also sell plans specifically for direct (unattended) cremations.

I think it’s not just been a case of accidentally not having the funds, they’ve been even more vindictive. I have a friend who lives in Hull. Her friend had 4 relatives buried by legacy. She’s now working with the police to check they’ve correctly been managed. To add insult to injury , her dad has terminal cancer and has found out that the pre-paid plot and funeral plan he’s taken out, don’t exist. The press have got her details and are hounding the family for a story. The scum.

I attended 3 family funerals within a year and this isn't what happened at all.

We didn't view the bodies - which were taken straight from either the hospital or home without us seeing them to the funeral home. We were asked if we wanted to see our uncle, but we declined. My mother had always said she didn't want people looking at her when she was dead, so we would have respected her wishes in any case, but in fact when she and my father died, it was during the pandemic, so we couldn't have viewed them anyway.

Uncle's funeral was a couple of weeks after his death because he had to be transported to another city for burial and it took time to arrange. Parents had to have 2 or 3 weeks before funerals because of covid regulations. We just had a service at the chapel of rest at the crematorium - no church (well they were closed anyway when my parents died, and Uncle wasn't a church goer).

It had never occurred to me before now that there was a possibility the bodies in the coffins weren't theirs, or that there wasn't a body in the coffin (it was carried by the funeral home employees, not family).

@PropertyManager
Yes, I understand that. As I stated, I wasn't given any say in the matter.
My comment was largely that the more removed the process is from the family the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong (or for there to be fears that it might: it removes trust)

I dont suppose they did think they would get away with it, my guess is that they ended up in a financial mess and the whole thing ended up in a total horror show

Maybe I'm being too generous but I don't think anyone sets out with a plan to end up with increasing numbers of decomposing bodies

It's possibly a relief to them that they've been found out

I agree it's abhorrent but I'm not convinced the subsequent prison sentence will put them away for "a very long time". Sentencing rules apply.

They were presumably taking on work they couldn't accommodate through sheer greed. Promising things they could not fulfill. So they didn't have enough staff, fridges, ovens (sorry it's horrible but dk what they call them?) So the bodies were building up, ashes were getting mixed up, they then did sham ceremonies with reused coffins and didn't even screw the name badges on properly. Maybe they weren't paying their bills. I have no idea how they thought they would get away with it. It could have been going on for years. The previous owners of one of their sites was also doing it. Horrendous.

I don't really understand why people think empty coffins were cremated? I'm not sure what that would achieve as the funeral directors would have had to pay a cremyfee which it seems they didn't have funds for. What am I missing?

Isn't it more likely they mismanaged the business so the bodies for direct cremation built up with the intentions to create them once they'd turned things around. Unfortunately rather than turning around the money problems escalated.

Perhaps the ashes sent to relatives whose loved ones were not actually cremated were ashes which no-one had collected from previous cremations.

They were raided at 3am weren’t they. Someone on another thread speculated that perhaps they’d been removing bodies from the premises. Pure speculation but I wonder if further bodies will be uncovered.

As someone else said you’d rather have identifiable remains wouldn’t you and know. Rather than the anonymity of ashes.

just awful all round, I feel for everyone involved so much.

I'm wondering about their business model because – obviously oversimplifying but – I thought usually service based businesses have it easier than product based businesses in terms of cash flow?

Like the cost of providing the service (cremation fee etc) is accounted for within the money the customer hands you. Obviously, there are big fixed costs like rental and employee wages, especially if the business has over expanded, but to not be able to afford that small amount of cremation fee each time your hundreds of customers hand you over a grand each?

Unless the cremation fee is actually quite high and the funeral parlour's profit margin per customer is very thin?

Or maybe it's malicious to speculate this but I'm just asking from a business curiosity standpoint, I wonder if there was other personal family debt or expenses involved?

Or an unsuspecting burglar got a bit more than they bargained for and did the right thing.

Absolutely there is potential for mistakes, the more bodies you are handling, the more chance of a mistake - we also check with the family the day before cremation that they are happy to proceed un attended, sometimes people change their minds, or want to view the body one last time, we will always do that free of charge if they ask - that kind of thing isn't possible with the big direct operations.

However, saying that, I've never heard of an issue before this, this outfit seem to have been completely incompetent and fraudulent - funeral directing is a sound and frankly pretty simple business model, there is no real reason they couldn't have done it right and turned a comfortable profit.

Whatever they were up to was going to go very wrong, having 35 extra bodies with no paperwork is inexcusable (1 is inexcusable!) and I'm not sure how they were planning to get out of the mess they had made.

Maybe that's how they were rumbled in the end. The smell. It must have been quite bad.