Funeral director Robert Bush, 48, breached his customers’ trust ‘on an industrial scale’ for 12 years.
The Government vowed to formally regulate the funeral sector as grieving families criticised the 20-year prison sentence handed to crooked funeral director Robert Bush.
Bush, 48, breached his customers’ trust “on an industrial scale” for 12 years by hoarding bodies for months, giving relatives the wrong ashes, selling fake funeral plans and stealing charity donations collected at his services.
On Friday he was jailed for two decades by a judge who said he had “never known offences affect so many people so deeply”.
Many of the family members who packed the public gallery in court said the sentence was not long enough, with one saying it was “atrocious”.
Joanne Moody, whose father Peter Moody was one of 31 bodies found at Legacy, said: “It’s a joke, he’s going to be out in 10 years.
“There’s no justice for any of us…we’re not going to get closure.”
Michaela Baldwin, whose stepfather Danny Middleton’s body was also found at the site, said he should have got “at least 30 years – one for each body”.
After the sentencing on Friday, the Department of Health and Social Care said it would formally regulate the sector “following the harrowing case in Hull”.
Health and Social Care Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “In the wake of this horrific case, we will now bring forward comprehensive proposals to ensure respect and dignity for the deceased in every setting, including proper regulation of the funeral sector.”
As he sentenced Bush for 67 offences, including 30 counts of preventing a lawful burial, Mr Justice Hillard said the prison term could not “put right the harm the defendant has done”.
The judge said that no one who had ever used Legacy could ever be sure that they had received the right ashes, causing “anguish and pain on a scale beyond comprehension”.
He went on to say Bush was “so preoccupied with his own enrichment that he behaved in a shocking and disgraceful way towards the deceased entrusted to his care, and his behaviour towards their living relatives was characterised by dishonesty, deception and heartlessness”.
The judge said: “If he could re-use a coffin someone had already paid for, he would do so.
“If it was cheaper to keep someone in non-refrigerated conditions, he would do that too.”
Speaking of the families who received the wrong ashes, or none, the judge said: “How betrayed they feel – husbands and wives, partners, parents, children, grandchildren – now discovering they are left with nothing or, in some cases we heard, an empty plastic bag or a teaspoonful of ashes the police managed to recover.”
Over four days, Bush, 48, looked emotionless in the dock as statements from more than 200 victims were read in court, with many who chose to read them in person breaking down in tears.
One woman who was given the wrong ashes for her husband told the defendant he had fooled people in Hull with his mild manner, when in fact he was a “cruel conman who used people’s grief to fund his lifestyle”.
The court heard Bush’s offending came to light in March 2024 when he was on holiday with his daughter in Arizona and asked two directors of another funeral firm to help with a body recovery while he was away.
A casual worker at Legacy told the two men “out of the blue” that bodies had been at the site “for years”.
Police were called and searched the site, uncovering a “shocking” scene where decomposing bodies had been left on the racks of a cold storage area, with the remains of a foetus contained in a paper bag on the floor.
The court heard the rest of the site was in a “lamentable state”, with ashes kept in mouldy boxes and even strewn across the floor, photographs left out of coffins and jewellery not returned to families.
The investigation found that 31 bodies, including that of unborn baby Sunny Beverley-Conlin, should have been cremated months earlier, and most of their families had already been given ashes.
Relatives of people whose bodies were discovered described their disgust at learning what had happened, with one daughter saying the image reminded her of Auschwitz.
Officers were able to identify another 57 families who had either been given the wrong ashes or no ashes, but the court heard there was also a large quantity of unlabelled ashes at the site, and no one who used Legacy during that time could ever know for sure if they had the right ones.
The details behind Bush’s widespread practice of giving out the wrong ashes are still largely unknown, and he refused to answer questions about it when asked by police.
Detective Superintendent Al Curtis said there was evidence that he was mixing up ashes and using a communal store to give out to families when they asked for their loved ones back.
The court heard of several cases when Bush gave a client the wrong ashes, but collected the right ones from the crematorium as little as two days later.
In his police interviews he said: “I’ve never given ashes back that weren’t ashes”, but refused to go into any further detail.
He also said that all the ashes were human, although an urn given to Lucy Ness – one of four women given the wrong ashes for their unborn babies by Bush – was found to contain what are thought to be animal remains.
In one police interview, Bush said he had developed a cash flow problem because “people did not always pay” and had debts of around £90,000.
He said his plan had been to generate more business and clear the backlog within two to three months, but had never managed to “catch up”.
Despite his debts, the court heard that Bush was “profligate” in his personal spending, and over seven years, while he was defrauding customers, he spent £42,000 on holidays and £21,000 on motorcycle racing.
The court heard that many of his customers were on limited budgets, with one woman describing how she had paid for her mother’s funeral partly through an online fundraising page.
Bush often appeared to be helpful towards people looking for more affordable options, offering discounts and telling them it would be cheaper to use his on-site chapel.
Brooke Atkinson, who had been estranged from her father before he died, said Bush “could sense they hadn’t arranged a funeral” and accused him of “picking the most vulnerable of society”.
The court also heard from some of the 226 pensioners who said they had been “conned” out of what little savings they had after being sold fake funeral plans by Bush.
He pleaded guilty to 30 counts of preventing a lawful and decent burial and 30 counts of fraud by false representation relating to bodies found at the site, four “foetus allegations” of fraud, where he presented ashes to women falsely saying that they were “the remains of their unborn”, a further charge of fraud covering the ashes of 57 people between 2017 and 2024, fraudulent trading relating to funeral plans between 2012 and 2024 and theft from 12 charities.
