A grieving relative has told the Mirror how she was left ‘devastated’ after discovering the ashes they’d had turned into a tattoo may turn out to belong to a stranger
Horrified victims of ‘Frankenstein funeral director’ Robert Bush fear they’ve had the wrong ashes made into tattoos.
On Thursday, a judge at Hull crown court, told Bush, 48, to expect jail after he admitted 30 charges of denying a lawful burial and one charge of stealing charity collection money.
Last October, he admitted 36 fraud charges, including one of selling fake funeral policies to 172 people. He will now be sentenced for all 67 charges on July 27th.
The shamed boss of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, was granted conditional bail by the court to the shock of his victims who said it was a “kick in the teeth”.
READ MORE: Funeral director Robert Bush’s ‘cruel’ betrayal exposed as he admits to stashing away 30 bodiesREAD MORE: Love affair with 40ft fridge saw bodies stockpiled and grieving families conned
After his guilty plea it emerged some people are worried the tattoo they had made out of the ashes they received are not those of their loved one with a victim said to be “devastated” fearing she had a stranger on her arm.
Karen Dry, 57, who arranged vigils for all the families since the raids, said she had spoken to a victim who had tattoos created out of the ashes.
“I have no idea how they get their head around that; if that was me I’d want that chopping out. They are devastated,” she told The Mirror
“We know that there’s at least a couple of people where they’ve received ashes and had tattoos. They’ve mixed the ash into the ink for the tattoo, only to then find out they have the wrong ashes. So they find out later on it’s not grandma they’ve got on their arm, it’s a complete stranger.
“So now they are walking around with ashes and they have no idea who they belong to. It’s shocking, the level of cruelty is just awful. They will never find out who that is on their arm as you can’t test DNA ashes.”
Bush, who owed money to the council, crematoriums and florists, started making his own coffins and even arranging his own flowers as he was black-listed by firms.
Half a tonne of human ashes were found at Legacy after police raided in March 2024, along with 35 bodies.
His crimes only came to light after he flew to America and looked shocked when he was arrested on the American Airlines plane at Heathrow.
Despite his debts, Bush had flown to Los Angeles in March 2024 to watch motorcycle racing. He owned expensive super bikes himself.
A former Legacy worker told of how his boss was finally exposed
Former Legacy worker, Patrick Moore, told BBC Look North: “I was looking after things for about four days. He said ‘if anybody comes just don’t answer the door’ simple as that – that is what I got. ‘Don’t answer the door’. I used to drive the hearse, do the limos, pick the bodies up, go to the morgue, basically I was general dogsbody.”
Mr Moore said he borrowed a stretcher borrowed from another funeral service to pick up a lady’s body from a local nursing home. Two men who came to retrieve the stretcher saw inside.
“While I was talking to one of them, the other one went in the fridge and then seen; ‘it shouldn’t be like this’. “
One of them called the police and shortly afterwards Mr Moore went to the police himself Asked what his concerns had been before he went to the police, he said: “Just the state of everything…when I was working with Rob I could see there was something wrong here. It was just getting worse and worse. If you mentioned anything he would always have an answer for you.”
But he said he never saw him mixing ashes and didn’t know about the bodies. “I think he was living beyond his means, he had put his laptop in one of these places for a couple of days to get some money.
“Anything he could sell, he would sell it. Every time the phone rang he was real ‘jumpety’. He would be getting phone calls and threats to be cut off and that for his electric. He was making his own coffins upstairs.”
One of Bush’s adverts said: “Walk in Fridge/Mortuary/Cooler. Buyer to dismantle and remove. 12ft x 9ft working but unit runs cool not cold, so probably needs a re-gas. Need gone asap.”
Kevin Curreri, managing director of Kenyon International Emergency Services, told the BBC, the scene that met his crisis staff was an “unforgivable scene of entirely human making”.
Curreri’s six-strong team found itself deployed to Hull tasked with helping reunite affected families with sentimental items collected by Bush.
Bush had kept more than 1,000 items, including love letters, football shirts, baby clothes and treasured possessions belonging to the dead and their families.
Curreri, a former police officer, said Bush’s “intentional negligence” was “pretty difficult to comprehend”. He described how possessions had been either “thrown” into corners or bagged with rubbish, rather than being placed in the coffins of loved ones ahead of burials or cremations. “It was like a hoarder’s house with garbage bags everywhere… a mess,” Mr Curreri told the BBC.
Despite having previously worked on major incidents, including the Grenfell Tower fire and the Manchester Arena bombing, both in 2017, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Mr Curreri admitted his team was shocked by what they encountered in Hull.
According to Curreri, human remains and personal possessions had been treated “so disrespectfully” that it showed “a pretty significant breach of trust”. He added: “We see a lot and it was something that stood out as pretty horrific.”
Mr Curreri’s company was appointed by Hull City Council in April 2024 following the removal of the bodies and ashes, when the scene had been released by police.
