Mum's horror as funeral director Robert bush gave her animal remains instead of her baby's

Mum's horror as funeral director Robert bush gave her animal remains instead of her baby's Devastated mum Lucy Ness is now joining forces with three other bereaved mums to call for action and regulate the funeral industry as Robert Bush of Legacy Independent Funeral Directors faces sentencing A mum has told of her horror after discovering she was given animal ashes instead of her baby's remains. She has now joined forces with three other bereaved mums who suffered the unbearable heartache of losing a child before being further tortured by cruel funeral director Robert Bush. These mums told of their devastation in court this week at his sentencing hearing. Several have said they will never know where their babies ended up, fearing they have been dumped in a bin. They told how they were left feeling 'hurt' and ‘insulted’ as their children - who died before reaching 24 weeks - were treated the same as a stolen credit card by the law. One mum told of the pain of knowing the disgraced undertaker had her child longer than she did after discovering her child's body was stored in Legacy for two years before being found by police in a paper bag. They have now spoken to The Mirror to try and get the law changed, to protect other mums in the future. 'I was given animal ashes - I will never know what happened to my baby' Lucy Ness, 28, had just received more shocking and agonising news from the police when we spoke to her earlier this month. The ashes she was given were not only fake, they belonged to some kind of animal. “I found out this morning that I will never know what happened to my baby’s ashes,” she told us. “Police had an expert in, who opened up the ashes I was given. They told me when they cremate a baby they grind them with their hands but when animals are cremated there are lumps with bones. People bring animals in to be cremated with loved ones. He’d handed me back animal ashes! “It’s sickening, to think if my baby was even scattered or just tossed in the bin with no care. I’d like to know why”? It’s what everyone wants to know, why? What did he do with my baby?” She explained during Covid lockdown in 2021, her delight to find out she was pregnant after being warned she may never be able to have children because she had polycystic ovaries. She said: “We were over the moon, we’d told the family and everyone was so excited. I was finally going to become a mum and I started buying baby things, it was a shock but a very nice shock.” But tragically she lost her baby at 11 weeks and five days, just before her 12 week scan in April 2021. She recalled: “A friend of a friend recommended Legacy, which they’d used, so I phoned and spoke to Robert and went to his shop. He told me: ‘I promise you I will take care of the baby, you can put your trust in me. The baby will be fine and the baby is with me’. He told me when I came to collect the ashes ‘ring me when you get to the front and I will let you in as I’m always working out the back’. "He rang me to say the ashes were ready as he’d cremated them on May 10, I picked them up on May 11. They were in a white urn, a box with a teddy bear on the front. I could not get into it at all, it was glued shut. I left the baby’s ashes downstairs on a bookshelf, next to a scan photo we had.” She continued: "A few years later the police then came knocking. It turned out the baby got cremated on the 10th at 4pm because there is a certificate from the crematorium but he didn’t pick up my ashes until the 13th. I’d picked them up on May 11th, so there was no way they were mine. The officer came round and said they thought they were my ashes at first but when they started digging deeper they realised he didn’t pick mine up until after I received some ashes. It’s bizarre." Lucy said: “A baby is a baby no matter what. The law needs to be changed to stop any other funeral director doing this. It affected a lot of people. The full city is affected by it, it’s mind blowing.” Since then Lucy went on to have a ‘little miracle’ with a baby boy called Vinnie. “Never in a million years did I think I would ever become a mum," she said. “I am not the person I was before all this. It has changed me mentally massively but I have to push it to the side because Vinnie needs me. What have you done to my baby’s ashes. I think I would even be prepared to meet him to ask him that question. But he probably doesn’t even know what he’s done with them.” “I just feel numb all the time thinking about it. I like to think he is with someone else and is being loved and cared for," she added. 'All I can think is he put my baby in the bin' Katie Woolston, 28, had gone to Legacy after her fourth miscarriage and now also fears her child was dumped in a bin by Bush. The mum, who now has a daughter called Betsy aged 21 months, said Bush had cremated two of her miscarriages but police found no record the second one had ever been cremated. She is haunted by one question and wants to ask Bush: ‘Where did you put my baby?’ And she told of her devastation that the law does not recognise a baby before 24 weeks. “It makes you feel like it wasn't a baby, it wasn't going to be the start of life. They are classed as nothing. It was going to be a baby, that’s the hardest thing," she said. “It was exciting, you start making plans wondering what hair colour they will have, what sort of personality they will have. “Before Betsy all I was experiencing was loss. Even after Betsy I’ve had two miscarriages. I was in such a dark place. The charges Robert Bush faced were basically like he’d stolen my purse or phone from me. I don’t know where he’s put my baby's remains. There’s no evidence he ever cremated them at all. To me all I can think about is he’s put it in the bin. That’s the only possible way he’s got rid of my baby’s remains. It tears me to pieces.” But she said the ashes she was given had given her ‘comfort’. She explained: “We loved having ashes because it made us feel close. They were still loved whoever they belonged to. I would like to ask him (Bush) where my baby did go, that’s the one question that goes through my mind ‘where did you put my baby?’ I think about it all the time but I’m never going to know. It is torturous.” Katie told how she was pregnant with Betsy when the police came to her house to break the news. She said: “I was heavily pregnant when the police came to my house. I was under a bereavement midwife. My bereavement midwife came with the police when they told me the news. I didn’t expect to find out our baby was never cremated at all. I thought at least they were in someone else's house being loved. It actually broke my heart. It’s just awful and horrendous.” And of Bush she said: “He must have some sort of evil in him. When you went to see him he would say is ‘bless you’. I would never have dreamt he could have done something like this.” In a message to the Government: “If this was somebody’s baby before 24 weeks would you think this charge was acceptable? Was it acceptable to treat my unborn baby with so much disrespect and disregard for my feelings and the heartbreak I am already going through?” 'Bush had my son longer than I did - he had him two years, I had him two days' Jasmine Beverley, 40, who lives with her partner and four children, had already picked out a school for her son and imagined what he would be like when tragedy struck. She was just about to have her 20 week scan when she suffered a miscarriage in May 2022. She had previously used Legacy, who did a funeral plan, after her dad Jack died suddenly in 2013, aged 57. So she trusted him again when her precious son, Sunny Beverley-Conlin, died. They received his ashes and held his intimate funeral. But two years later news of the scandal erupted and to the family’s horror they discovered these ashes did not belong to her son after all. Police later found their son's body, still at the funeral home, left on the floor of a cooler in a brown paper bag, that looked like a police evidence envelope. Her son had been in storage at the Hull premises for two years, the longest of all those who were secretly kept. The mum, who has four children aged 12, nine, six and two years old, told The Mirror: “It was shocking they’d had Sunny longer than I did. He had him for two years and I had him for two days. ” Jasmine explained how her husband had worked at their local crematorium from the age of 16 and had known Rob for quite a long time, so when her dad Jack died they didn’t hesitate about asking him to do the funeral. She said: “When we lost Sunny I said to my husband ‘I don’t want to use anybody but Rob’. We all liked him, he was really nice. But now I have got to live with the fact that man had my son longer than I did.” When news emerged of the Legacy scandal, Jasmine contacted the police initially thinking it might involve her dad. When she was on the phone to officers she also asked about her son, giving the police all his details. She added: “But I didn’t believe in my wildest dreams it would involve my son. He’s a parent himself so doing that to another parent is heartbreaking. “But later that day, the news changed to 34 to 35 victims and my mum pointed at the screen as police left the premises holding a parcel bag and then said; ‘That’s Sunny!’ After my call they had done another sweep of the building. My son was the one who had been in there the longest out of all the deceased and he was the last one out. “I got a pit in my stomach, I didn’t know for certain but something in the way my mum just said it. Then the police came that day and told me. It was awful. It was like being right back to losing him all over again. I just couldn’t believe a man who I trusted with the most precious person in my life could do that. It wasn’t until later on I found out where they found him. They found him in the cooler, in an envelope, he was on the floor in the bottom corner. It looked like he’d been somewhere and fallen off. It left me devastated.” As if her heartbreak was not bad enough, she was then informed that as Sunny was born less than 24 weeks, Bush could not be charged with a crime. She said: “The police knew he had done all of us wrong but there was no law to say that it was a crime. Eventually the CPS did find a way of charging him with fraud by misrepresentation. “It is good it recognises it is a crime but it doesn’t help my grief and it doesn’t help people in the future. I just want to see the law changed so babies born at 24 weeks are treated the same, with the same dignity and respect, as a baby born after 24 weeks. It’s treating our loss like it was a stolen credit card. That was a living being. It’s disappointing, it’s an insult, it might as well not even be there for me. “If they take a breath outside the womb, they are classed as stillborn but if they don’t that’s when the law comes into play and it’s 100 years old. In those days they didn’t have ultrasounds, you could not see a baby on the screen, there wasn’t a baby there to see until it came out. But now you can literally see 3D images of babies and they are saying it’s not a human being. I was already thinking what my child would be like, what school they were going to and where they were going to fit into the family. Where they were going to sleep. In my mind my son already existed .” Jasmine says she has been getting comfort since meeting the other mums hurt by Legacy. “We were all pregnant at the same time. If we’d known we were all going through this back then, it would have helped,” she said. “I feel guilty that I chose Rob. I had one thing to do for my son and I could not even do that. It breaks me to think that he didn’t come home. I can’t forgive him because he’s done something disgusting to me and I feel violated. He’s broken families. I have never hated anyone in my life, that’s what makes it worse. “He was lovely and very caring but that turns out to be a lie. He didn’t care for any of us. It’s horrible to lose a child and then to trust someone with your child. He will get his karma hundred per cent. Never in a million years would we have thought this man, in such a position, would do that to the people of Hull. “Every single human being has got the ability to do bad things and it’s our morality that stops us in our tracks. Money is the root of all evil, it seems the rewards of the risk far outweighed his moral compass. To have that as your legacy I would feel shame.” She told how it has since emerged he was a ‘compulsive liar’ claiming to have been a paramedic, in the military and a former prison officer. But trying to find some comfort, she said: “I’d always regretted getting Sunny cremated. My friend said to me ‘you don’t burn treasure, you bury it’ and that stuck in my mind. “When this all happened I wanted to have him buried with my grandma and that’s what I finally got to do. I took something from that and now he’s got a home and he’s with my grandma. I’ve got a place where I can go. I haven’t been for a while now after the last court hearing. I decided not to go back until this is done and then I can celebrate because it’s such a beautiful place where he is.” 'We had jewellery made out of stranger's ashes instead of our son' Stacey Foster, 28, who now has two girls aged five and one, with partner Peter, said she discovered she’d lost her child at a gender reveal scan. She’d recently got engaged and felt “everything was falling into place” and she was heading for her dream family. But tragedy struck when she went to the gender scan at 17 weeks at a private clinic, taking her eldest daughter, who was then almost three years old, with her for the big reveal. She said: “We had a pram sorted, we’d started buying clothes. The spare room was made into the baby’s room. “We took our little girl with us, we’d planned a gender reveal party but it wasn’t to be. We were all in the room together and our little girl was with us. They were taking a long time trying to find the heartbeat and then she said to my partner ‘can you take your little girl out.’ They said ‘I’m really sorry I can’t see a heartbeat but we need it confirmed by the NHS.' It didn’t hit us until later when we were alone, It didn’t feel real. The minute we got into the car me and my partner just broke down, and my little girl was asking what’s wrong. We took her to grandma’s house. ” The bereavement midwife gave them the option of having Tommy cremated at the hospital but Stacie said ‘I wanted him home”. Everything was so raw. Stacie recalled: “She said if you go to any funeral director, they will do it for free because it was not a baby of term. We picked Legacy because they had looked after my dad. Everything just got shut in a room and it was like we will deal with that when we’ve got the headspace. We had chosen his name Tommy and imagined what they looked like.” “We went to his office and signed all the papers. A week later the morgue phoned and asked why we hadn’t picked Tommy up yet. We were chasing Legacy for five weeks to get the ashes back, we were constantly ringing," she continued. “We were getting suspicious because my dad was a fully grown man and his ashes only took four weeks. When I called him (Bush) he sounded like he was in a service. I said: ‘I’m just ringing to find out when I can pick up my son Tommy?’ and he was like ‘Tommy? Tommy? Oh yeh the baby’. You can come this afternoon but I’ve got no urns. At this point I didn’t care, I just wanted my son back. “So we went to pick up what we thought was Tommy and he came to the doorstep and he handed us this bag. They were in an envelope and in a cardboard box. We asked what the hold up was and he said ‘the midwife’s filled out the paperwork wrong’. Something was telling me to weigh the ashes and it was more than double that Tommy weighed. “Being as devastated as we were, we had jewellery made up with the ashes. I had a ring made and my partner had a little mini urn necklace. When it came out what had happened I rang the helpline for peace of mind. Later they phoned to tell me they’d found Tommy’s ashes at the crematorium. It turned out Tommy had been cremated that morning, so he gave us someone else's for the fun of it. There’s no other reason. He had nothing to gain as he didn’t get a single penny from me. He’s the scum of the earth - it’s like he got a sick kick out of it.” After she found out about the ashes they have since sent the jewellery they’d made to the memorial gardens for victims. She added: “Whoever they belonged to, they were loved and looked after. I feel awful because I have technically split ashes up. I’m the only one of the girls who actually has got their ashes back.” She says it is important that something changes in the law for the future: “Technically in the eyes of the law my baby never existed. That’s dreadful, you can’t imagine this happening.”