Jailed funeral boss's apology letter sparks fresh anger from grieving families

Robert Bush sat in a cell at Hull Crown Court on Friday, having just been sentenced to twenty years in prison. The disgraced funeral director had admitted to 67 offences—thirty of them counts of preventing lawful and decent burial, along with theft from a dozen charities. What emerged during the investigation was a business so fundamentally broken that it had become a repository for the dead: 35 bodies and more than 100 sets of ashes discovered when police raided Legacy Independent Funeral Directors on Hessle Road in March 2024, following a tip-off that would unravel months of negligence and deception.

From his cell, Bush composed a letter. It was meant to be an apology. "I recognise that what happened has caused distress, upset and uncertainty for many families," he wrote. "I am deeply sorry." He acknowledged that families had entrusted him with their most vulnerable moment. He said he accepted responsibility. He said there were no words to undo what had happened. The letter was careful, measured, almost rehearsed—the kind of statement a lawyer might draft for a man trying to salvage something from the wreckage of his own making.

When the families read it, they felt mocked. Jasmine Beverley's son, Sunny Beverley-Conlin, had been stillborn on May 13, 2022. Nearly two years later, on the floor of Bush's funeral parlour, police found the baby's remains in a brown paper bag. Beverley had been given a set of ashes by Bush the following March—ashes that may or may not have belonged to her son. Reading his apology, she felt only anger. "It reads as though he is apologising for our reaction and not his actions," she said. The letter, she explained, had severed something in her. She could no longer separate her memories of Sunny from the mismanagement of his funeral—the final act of love she had tried to give him. "This will haunt me for the rest of my life," she said.

Tristan Essex, whose grandmother Jessie Stockdale was among the 35 bodies found at the funeral home, called the letter "absolutely disgusted." He saw it as mockery, as Bush laughing in their faces. "Clearly, he is not sorry for the actions he chose, he's sorry for the consequences of his evil actions," Essex said. The letter, he believed, was not an apology at all. It was self-serving, focused on Bush's own regret rather than the families' suffering. Some wondered aloud whether it had been written by artificial intelligence—it felt that hollow, that disconnected from genuine remorse.

Prosecutors had described Bush's operation as "shambolic and chaotic." The offending was "appalling," they said, and it had caused "extreme emotional pain, anguish and upset." Those words, at least, seemed to land closer to the truth. A mother finding her stillborn child in a paper bag. Families receiving the cremated remains of strangers. The dead left unburied, uncremated, abandoned in a funeral home that had become a tomb. Bush's letter acknowledged none of this with any specificity. It remained abstract, general, the kind of apology that could apply to almost any failure. And in that abstraction, the families heard only indifference—or worse, contempt.