Debbie Tucker says she's not responsible for any of the 170 cremains found in the basement of the funeral home she formerly owned with her late husband.
Though she operated Montrose Valley Funeral Home for four years after Frank Tucker died, none of the cremains that didn't meet their final disposition and have a name and date to identify them are from the time period she was in charge.
However, she doesn't dispute the fact that cremains accumulated in the basement during the time she owned the place with Frank and he trusted another person to run the business for him — a woman who now operates a funeral home in Montrose.
The site of the Tuckers' former business, at 505 S. Second St., is where a new funeral director found the cremains and decided to publicize their existence to reunite them with families or help give them a proper final resting place. Fifty of the 170 cremains did not have any identification, and some were in plastic bags or jars.
Dates on the cremated remains indicate that one-third of them accumulated during Frank and Debbie Tucker's ownership of Montrose Valley Funeral Home. No one knows whose tenure is to blame for the 50 others without identifying information.
Though Debbie is adamant that she played a limited role in the business until her husband died, she doesn't dispute that the cremains that accumulated when Frank ran the business were a problem and that he had a checkered past and colorful history.
Frank, a deposed district attorney who was convicted and imprisoned for embezzlement, was a larger-than-life figure with a booming voice and charismatic personality. He bought the funeral home in 1987, and came to the mortuary business through his mother's family, which owned a funeral home in Leadville called Moynahan-O'Malia. He also ran a funeral home called Tucker Fairlawn in Glenwood Springs before coming to Montrose.
The way Debbie tells the story indicates she was along for the ride in a crazy roller coaster of Frank's tumultuous life and business dealings fraught with financial instability.
"Frank was the kind of person, you either loved him or you hated him," she said, describing her involvement with the funeral home as limited.
Debbie said Frank jokingly referred to her as the "little woman" and engaged her help with funeral services, meeting and greeting, having people sign guestbook registers and making sure pallbearers knew where to stand.
Frank Tucker's tenure as funeral home director was rocky, to say the least. He was sued the first year he bought the place by a family that claimed their 17-year-old daughter who was killed in a car accident was improperly embalmed and that her open-casket funeral was a disaster.
During Frank's tenure, the business was investigated for tax evasion and Grand Junction attorney Joe Coleman, a friend of the Tuckers, became involved in saving the business from liquidation, which is how Coleman eventually acquired the building. The Tuckers were also investigated for fraud and reached a settlement with the state after being investigated for selling pre-need contracts without a license. A permanent injunction from a Denver District Court judge prohibited them from continuing the practice.
In 2002, Frank hired Megan Hess, who managed the funeral home as he dealt with health problems.
"She was running it more and more as he got sicker and sicker," Debbie said. "She was the lynchpin."
Debbie said Megan's duties as manager included arranging funerals, handling families, and making sure the services were carried out.
Frank died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer in January 2006. Debbie, who was widowed with three children at the time, didn't take over management of the funeral home until June, and at that time she fired Hess. She continued to run the business until June 2012, and said she's proud of how she ran the funeral home.
The question remains unanswered as to who is responsible for the wishes that were not fulfilled with the cremains that sat in the funeral home basement. While it's not uncommon for funeral homes to have unclaimed cremains that family members leave at the business, some of these situations had clear specifications for what family members wanted carried out for their loved ones' remains, which never happened.
Who is responsible for the cremains of Brandon Szocinski? In 2003, his family picked up what they believed were his remains in a wooden box, only to find out that the box contained something else — something that may or may not be human cremains but resembles kitty litter — and his clearly labeled ashes sat in the basement of the funeral home for 14 years after his death. His mother, Ann, remembers Megan Hess handling her son's arrangements. When asked about the Szocinski remains, Hess said Debbie is responsible for the situation, since she was the co-owner of the business at the time.
"The person who has the answer to all this is the person who handled the arrangements," said Debbie, noting that she never trusted Hess, but that she regrets her late husband's decision to trust Hess with their business.
"I don't know how Megan operated except for the fallout I dealt with after she was gone," Debbie said, declining to elaborate.
Hess currently owns Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors Foundation, Inc., as well as Colorado Cremation and Donor Services, Inc. in Montrose and Delta Funeral Home.
The Office of Funeral Home and Crematory Registration has received three complaints concerning Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors that are currently under investigation and not available for review, according to Department of Regulatory Agencies spokeswoman Cory Everett.
A complaint filed against Colorado Cremation last year with the state, obtained by The Daily Sentinel through a Colorado Open Records Act request, gave a detailed report of a family's difficulty obtaining cremains from Hess' business.
Complainant Sherri Rigdon listed the nature of the complaint as "unethical treatment of a deceased person" and "mental anguish to surviving relatives" in addition to "poor communication" and "substandard practice." Rigdon, who lives in New Mexico, had Colorado Cremation handle her mother's remains in September after she died. Her account details the difficulties the family had in picking up her mother's cremains, which wasn't possible until 17 days after her death. According to the complaint, employees blamed the delay on a doctor allegedly signing a death certificate in the wrong place and a secretary losing or misplacing an insurance claim file. The state dismissed the claim for administrative reasons after Rigdon failed to respond to several requests for additional paperwork as evidence.
