Robert Bush was described as ‘a monster’ who had put families ‘through hell for his own selfishness’. Photo / Humberside Police
When grandmother Jessie Stockdale died aged 87, her family expected her to be cared for and treated with the dignity she deserved.
But they were horrified to discover that her body had been left to decompose for months in a funeral home instead of being cremated.
She was among 30 bodies found at Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull.
Alongside the bodies, police found more than 160 sets of ashes, meaning grieving relatives will never know if the person they cremated was in fact their loved one.
On Thursday, funeral director Robert Bush, 48, pleaded guilty to 30 counts of preventing a lawful and decent burial.
The man who presided over Britain’s worst funeral home scandal covered his face with a balaclava as he walked into Hull Crown Court.
He showed no emotion when he entered his pleas and ignored the shouts of dozens of angry relatives as he left the building.
Stockdale’s grandson, Tristan Essex, 26, said Bush seemed like he “genuinely cared” after his grandmother died in December 2023.
He said he and his relatives had even been back to the business several times since they were told she had been cremated.
“The whole time my grandma was there in the back, just rotting,” Essex said. “It honestly makes me feel sick.”
Stockdale’s body was still wearing the ankle bracelet placed on her during a post-mortem examination when police raided the business in March 2024, but ultimately she had to be identified using DNA samples.
Police also discovered the body of Danny Middleton. Like Stockdale, he was still wearing a hospital wristband.
His stepdaughter, Michaela Baldwin, said there were red flags even before the discovery. At the funeral, his relatives had joked that the coffin was too small for Middleton, a large man who had been fond of Sunday roast dinners, she added, and a member of staff at the service – who was not Bush – seemed reluctant to speak to her.
She “got the sense something wasn’t quite right”, adding: “People say it’s just a body [but] that body represents that person’s life and what they’ve done in their life. We trust these people to do that with respect. It’s just pure and utter greed.”
Humberside Police launched an investigation into the funeral home after a report of “concern for care of the deceased” was made in March 2024.
A month after the investigation started, the force said it had received more than 2000 calls from families concerned about their loved ones’ ashes.
The court heard that about 240 victim impact statements from affected people would be submitted before Bush is sentenced in July.
These include families of the bodies that were kept at his site for months after they should have been cremated, ashes found there that could not be identified, and about 150 people who were sold fraudulent funeral plans.
Bush, formerly of Kirk Ella, East Yorkshire, but now of Otley, West Yorkshire, also pleaded guilty to theft from 12 charities, including the Salvation Army and Macmillan Cancer Support.
At a hearing in October, he admitted 30 counts of fraud by false representation relating to the same 30 people.
He also pleaded guilty to four “foetus allegations” of fraud, after giving the wrong ashes to women who believed they were the remains of their unborn babies.
Bush admitted a further charge of fraud covering the ashes of 57 people between 2017 and 2024, and one of fraudulent trading relating to funeral plans between 2012 and 2024.
Before the hearing, affected families described Bush as “a monster” who “put us all through hell for his own selfishness”.
Karen Dry, who trusted Bush with her parents’ funerals in 2016 and 2018, has organised monthly vigils for victims since the investigation started in 2024.
She said that she would never be sure whether the ashes she was given by Bush were actually her parents, leaving the “heartbreaking” possibility that they might not be together in death as they wanted.
“I’ve had people ringing me saying, ‘I had a tattoo done for my grandma, from her ashes’, and it turns out that the ashes that she’s now got tattooed are not her grandma’s,” she said.
Dry, with other affected families, is now campaigning for full regulation of the funeral industry and legislation “that stops funeral directors being unscrupulous”.
She said: “I think everybody assumes that there’s laws to protect the deceased.
“And there isn’t, not one. I find it shocking.”
Essex and Baldwin echoed her calls for regulation of the industry.
He said: “They control everything else we do, why can’t they do right by us when we die?”
A decision on regulating England’s funeral industry for the first time is expected to be made later this year following a series of scandals over the handling of human remains.
In August, it emerged that Amie Upton, a Leeds funeral director, had been banned from NHS maternity wards and mortuaries after keeping babies’ bodies at her home, seemingly alongside pets.
One mother said she had been left “screaming” after discovering her dead son had been put in a baby bouncer “watching cartoons” in Upton’s living room.
Calls for reform have been getting louder ever since the Fuller inquiry, launched after hospital electrician David Fuller was found to have abused the bodies of more than 100 deceased women and girls in NHS mortuaries in Kent.
It concluded that current arrangements in England’s funeral sector were “partial and ineffective” and recommended the creation of an independent regulator.
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