Four women were given the wrong ashes for their unborn babies by fraudulent funeral director Robert Bush, leaving them traumatised.
The 48-year-old had kept 31 decomposing bodies at the site in Hull, and had falsely told their families that they had been cremated before giving them the ashes of a stranger.
In emotional scenes, one woman said she wonders if her baby’s remains were “disposed of like a piece of litter”, after she was given the wrong ashes following a miscarriage.
Katie Woolston and her partner were handed their child’s ashes on 14 September 2023, yet hospital records showed that Bush had not collected the remains until later that same day.
The body of Jasmine Beverley’s baby Sunny Beverley-Conlin was also found in a paper bag on the floor of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors, almost two years after he was “born sleeping” on May 13 2022.
Meanwhile, Stacey Foster and her partner Peter Cooke had jewellery made out of their son Tommy’s ashes, only to find out they were the wrong ones.
The couple lost Tommy at just over 17 weeks in August 2023.
Hull Crown Court heard over 12 years, Bush breached the trust placed in him by grieving families “on an almost industrial scale”, by keeping bodies for months after they should have been cremated, giving out the wrong ashes, taking money for funeral plans without making any of the arrangements and stealing charity donations collected at services.
One grieving daughter said the horrors at Bush’s funeral home made her think of “bodies found in Auschwitz”, while another described him as a “cruel conman” who had destroyed families.
He was found with half a tonne of ashes, with some families forced to wait seven weeks for DNA tests to identify their loved ones.
Tina Thomas, whose father Jim Porter, 80, was recovered from Legacy Independent Funeral Directors with his hospital identification bands still on, had noticed at his funeral that his coffin did not look big enough.
She said: “When the police told me there was a possibility that Dad was still at Legacy, I was devastated.
“I had nightmares and thoughts of bodies just piled up came into my mind.
“The only way I can describe it is like seeing images of the bodies found in Auschwitz during the war.”
Another woman described Bush as “pure evil” after he gave her the wrong ashes of her brother Paul Hemingway, which her children then had made into jewellery.
Valerie Coates described to Hull Crown Court her devastation at realising she had not been given her husband Ron’s ashes, despite holding a celebration attended by more than 100 people.
She said: “I try to wear a brave smile, but my close friends and family know that I am tortured by thoughts of how Ron’s poor body was mistreated – and the cruel realisation that the beautiful urn I cherished, and talked to every day, did not contain his ashes after all.”
She said: “We had made a pact, Ron and I, a promise to each other, that our ashes would eventually be together.
“Robert Bush has made that impossible and I shall never know what actually happened to Ron’s ashes.”
The grandson of Susan Stone, 77, whose body was also found at Legacy, said that his grandfather was “destroyed” by the discovery.
One woman said she feels she has let her mother down after her ashes “can’t be located anywhere”.
In a victim personal statement, Claire Edwards said: “I am so angry that I placed trust in Bush from the start, and that he has let us down as a family, and I feel that I personally have let my mum down.
“I feel guilty about what happened with my mum’s funeral arrangements and that I am unable to place my mum’s ashes with my late dad’s ashes – which were hers/our wishes.”
His crimes were discovered by chance, when he was on holiday in Arizona and contacted Gary Pickering and Steve Emmerson, directors of Evergreen Funeral Directors, asking them to assist with a body recovery while he was away.
Patrick Moore – a casual worker for Legacy – helped the two men collect the body from the care home, but said Bush had told him “not to bring anyone back to Legacy or help put a body into the fridge area”.
After becoming suspicious that operations at Legacy were not as they should be, the two men persuaded Mr Moore to let them into Legacy’s site on Hessle Road, which was described as a “horror scene”.
They flagged down a passing police car after discovering bodies “uncovered and in varying states of decomposition”, with the funeral home described as “dirty and unkempt” and a human foetus discovered in a brown bag.
Bush committed fraud concerning the ashes of 57 people between 2017 and 2024, Hull Crown Court has heard.
The total value of this fraud is around £86,868 with 46 victims identified where ashes have been wrongly returned to families, and an additional 11 families where no ashes have ever been returned, prosecutor Chris Paxton KC said.
He added that the “lack of book keeping” by Bush was “quite profound”, making it “very difficult to follow” the number of funerals overseen by the him during this time.
Bush has admitted 67 offences, including preventing a lawful and decent burial, fraudulent trading, fraud by false representation and theft from well-known charities.
This includes four “foetus allegations” of fraud where he presented ashes to women, falsely saying they were “the remains of their unborn”.
