Funeral director sentenced for burying 35 bodies improperly, stealing charity funds

Robert Bush stood before Hull Crown Court on a July afternoon to answer for what he had done in the basement of his funeral home. The 48-year-old funeral director from Otley had admitted to 67 offences—thirty counts of preventing lawful and decent burial, thirty-five counts of fraud by false representation, one count of fraudulently running a business, and theft from charity collections. The numbers were staggering, but they meant something only when you attached them to the people they had harmed.

In March 2024, police arrived at Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull and found thirty-five bodies and more than one hundred sets of ashes stored improperly on the premises. Some had been there for a year. One of those bodies belonged to Peter Moody, a sixty-five-year-old former dock worker who had been discovered three months after his family believed they had laid him to rest. His daughter Joanne Moody, forty-eight, described the discovery as something that had "crucified" her. She would sit in the public gallery at sentencing, one of many families seeking some measure of justice for what Bush had done to them.

Bush had built a reputation as a caring undertaker, the kind of man who seemed genuinely invested in helping families through their darkest moments. He had overseen more than two thousand funerals across his career at various funeral homes. Emma Hardy, the MP for Hull West and Haltemprice, would later say that he had "tried to act like he cared, like he was their friend." What he had actually done was exploit people at their most vulnerable. He had sold funeral plans through fraudulent means, pocketing money that was supposed to go toward services. He had stolen from charity collections held at funerals—money meant for the Salvation Army, Macmillan Cancer Support, and local causes like the Hull Fishing Heritage Centre, which supports former trawlermen and their families.

For the Moody family, the trauma unfolded in stages. The first funeral, conducted by Bush, had been rushed. Joanne Moody remembered how he had hurried them out as soon as the curtains closed on her father's casket, leaving them unable to grieve together. Six months later, in June 2024, after Bush's crimes were exposed, they held a second funeral. They had to say goodbye twice. Joanne still could not bring herself to delete her father's number from her mobile phone. "He was always only a phone call away," she said, "and I miss him so much."

Jerry Thompson, chairman of the Hull Fishing Heritage Centre, spoke of the betrayal in simpler terms. Bush had turned his position into "a licence to print money," Thompson said. "I do not know how he can sleep at night." The charity had been robbed of funds meant to support people who had lost everything else—their livelihoods, their community, their way of life.

When Bush entered his final guilty pleas in April, he was granted conditional bail, a decision that provoked anguish among the families he had wronged. But as the sentencing date arrived, Joanne Moody said she would "sleep easier" knowing he would face consequences. The guilty pleas had brought her some peace, though she acknowledged she could never fully recover from what had happened. "My dad was a person," she said, "he was not just a number or a statistic." She wanted people to remember him as the dedicated family man who loved fishing, Hull FC, and his grandchildren—not as one of thirty-five bodies discovered in a funeral home basement. Now, finally, she could begin to remember him that way.