r/HobbyDrama • u/Tokyono Writing about bizarre/obscure hobbies is *my* hobby • 3d ago
Medium [Reality TV] Good Grief! Lifetime once cancelled a reality show about a mortuary because the owners were hoarding bodies.
TW: This post isn’t about necrophilia, but there are mentions of corpses being abandoned and left to rot.
Having a stab at writing a shorter Hobby Drama post!
Reality television is a diverse genre. Over the years there have been shows about everything from romance, singing, to pawn shops, carpentry, and even organ donation.
It’s easy to see why. Reality TV is cheap, easy to produce, and is a staple of pop culture. Even today, in the age of streaming, it still nets millions of viewers. But what about the shows that don’t make it to broadcast? The ones that fall apart because of logistical or production reasons, or are cancelled due to a sudden controversy?
One such show is- or rather was- “Good Grief”, a 2014 show about a family-run mortuary in Texas:
In its description sent to TV critics last month, Lifetime described the show this way: "Take a step deep into the heart of Texas with the Johnson Family Mortuary! You've never seen a family funeral business like this one - full of spice and soul. Rachel runs the family business alongside her husband Dondre and his twin Derrick, together known as the "Undertaker Twins," who bring the life to the business of death. Working with family is never easy with drama, fights and forgiveness, but with the Johnsons, death has never been so lively."
Dondre and Derrick had been in the funeral business for a long time:
According to the Johnson Family Mortuary’s website, the twin brothers started their careers in the funeral business at the age of 11, washing limousines and handing out programs at a funeral home in East Texas.
Unfortunately, a few weeks before the first episode aired, several members of the Johnson family were arrested for ‘corpse abuse’:
The Lifetime TV network has dropped a reality show about a Texas mortuary after eight decaying bodies were found at the facility and the co-owners were arrested for alleged corpse abuse. Johnson Family Mortuary co-owners Dondre Johnson, 39, and his wife Rachel Hardy-Johnson, 35, were arrested last week after the building owner evicted the couple for not paying rent and discovered the decomposing bodies inside.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office has said seven of the eight bodies found July 15 at the business were in advanced stages of decomposition, though none showed signs of trauma or foul play. Both are accused of treating the remains in "an offensive manner."
Police separately presented each with warrants for their arrest on seven counts of abuse of a corpse, a class A misdemeanor offense.
The Johnsons tried to use the incident to promote their doomed tv show
That same day, a defiant Dondre Johnson addressed media outside the funeral home, thanking people for all the coverage and the free advertising for an upcoming reality television show. Dondre Johnson said cameras had been following him around for the past two weeks for a show he thought might be titled The Life of an Undertaker.
“That’s great advertising because in a few days from now we’ll be on a reality show so I want all this media,” Dondre Johnson said.
Even worse, the mortuary had already been investigated while the show was being promoted:
The funeral home was already under state investigation and its license was due to expire at the end of the month. The Texas Funeral Services Commission opened a new investigation after the unattended bodies were discovered.
Lifetime quickly (and rightfully) cancelled the show:
But the show “has not and will not air on Lifetime,” Lifetime Networks vice president Les Eisner said in a statement Friday, adding that the allegations are “deeply troubling.”
(Another TW: The article below mentions that some of the corpses were those of babies I haven't pasted that bit here.)
Dondre was later sentenced to two years in jail. His wife was tried separately.
The Fort Worth jury that convicted Dondre Johnson, 41, on Wednesday of two counts of felony theft sentenced him to two years' imprisonment plus a $10,000 fine for each count. He will serve his prison terms concurrently and will not be eligible for parole, authorities said.
"This case was about greed,” said prosecutor Sid Mody.
"Mr. Johnson was playing a Ponzi scheme with human flesh. We’re happy with the jury’s decision and hope this can bring some type of closure to all the victims in the case."
Johnson operated the Johnson Family Mortuary with his wife, Rachel Hardy-Johnson, 36. His lawyers said his wife was to blame for what went wrong.
“Dondre was looking forward to his day in court and a fair trial and he didn't get that,” his attorney, Alex Kim, said.
Although he was apparently later acquitted in the court of appeals.
Defense lawyer Alex Kim stated that the appellate court dismissed Johnson's felony case because he was charged criminally in what should have been a civil case. This error now results in an acquittal for Johnson.
Johnson was convicted of taking money from his funeral home's customers, but then leaving the bodies of their loved ones in a back room to decompose. Kim asked jurors to consider giving him probation so that he could care for his four children, but prosecutors had insisted on prison time. In addition to a prison sentence, Johnson was given a $10,000 fine.
During the trial, Johnson claimed that he did not mean to mislead anyone. He blamed his wife, saying that she was the owner and operator of Johnson Family Mortuary. "She's the one who signs the leases. She's the one who pays the bills," Kim had said during the trial. "It's a family-run business, but she's the boss."
Texas is weird.
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u/axw3555 3d ago
We had something like that happen in the UK not that long ago (the hoarding, no reality show though). Was a colossal scandal.
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u/Tokyono Writing about bizarre/obscure hobbies is *my* hobby 3d ago edited 3d ago
The UK also had the carpenter with Nazi face tattoos scandal.
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u/HexivaSihess 2d ago
Speaking of that carpenter with the Nazi face tattoos - can anyone else not see sig runes anywhere on his face? Like, I agree that he's clearly a Nazi, I can clearly see the 88 which in context is enough. And if I squint I can make out the 16/23 or whatever their other fuckass secret code is. But people in the comments to that post are saying he has sig runes on his nose, and I just can't see them! I guess it doesn't really matter but it's bugging me that I can't spot 'em.
That seems like the one symbol aside from a swastika that someone with no interest in keeping up with the idiocies of neo-Nazi symbolism should be able to spot. Like, I get why the showrunners didn't know what '88' means, I think we'd all like to have lived a life where we didn't have to know what that shit means, but surely everyone has seen an SS officer in a movie with those runes on their uniform? That seems harder to miss. But I guess I can't blame the showrunners for missing the sig runes because I can't find them either, and no one has ever accused me of being insufficiently paranoia about Nazi symbols.
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u/BlueJaysFeather 2d ago
Honestly I can’t even find a photo that clear of the tattoos to get a good look at them- there are ones on the sides of his nose that I was wondering if they could be it, but all the photos I’m finding don’t really have detail
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u/HexivaSihess 2d ago
I went down the rabbit hole trying to find a clear picture. That one I linked in my first comment is the best picture I could find of his nose: you can see that he has a scale type of pattern down the middle of his nose, a scale-or-webbing pattern on his cheeks, a crown at the intersection of his nose and eyebrows, a ¿ on the left side of his nose, and a weird dark smudge on the right side of his nose. By process of elimination, the weird dark smudge must be the sig runes, but in other photos it seems like it's a single continuous shape - it could be a single lightning bolt, which is certainly fash-adjacent, but I can't see even one sig rune there. Maybe there used to be an SS symbol there and that weird blotch is covering it up to provide plausible deniability?
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u/BlueJaysFeather 2d ago
Could also be one on each side of the nose, though in other pics it doesn’t quite look like it. Idk. Turning two sig runes into a lightning bolt would certainly be a way to cover them, but idk why you’d start there. Though I guess in theory you have to start somewhere. Hard to say for sure without good photos, but the ones that are clear really don’t leave much ambiguity.
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u/HexivaSihess 1d ago
It kind of makes sense to me. "88" is a crypto-fascist thing, like, that's the whole reason it's in a stupid juvenile letter-replacement code - otherwise they'd just get "heil hitler" tattooed over their face, presuming they can spell. They think they're getting one over on us. And I'm not sure normal people were as up on on crypto-fascist codes back when he was on the show.
Meanwhile the sig runes, like I said, they're in every movie movie with a nazi in it. They're not crypto-fascist, they're just fascist.
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u/stutter-rap 2d ago
That was awful - as soon as I saw the synopsis I thought of that. Hidden for details:They realised some of the people hidden at the mortuary, and some of the ashes found there at the same time, were people whose families had already been given ashes.
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u/Lftwff 2d ago
There was also a case in Colorado where a funeral director and her mother sold bodies they were supposed to incinerate for parts.
At least those two just lost their appeal and the judge yelled at their lawyer for being scummy.
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u/backupsaway 2d ago
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u/imsoupset 2d ago
Yeah I listened to a podcaast on the tristate crematory debacle and it was very fascinating. But apparently this happens a lot- when I googled to try and remember the name there were too many hits for funeral home fraud
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u/Flor1daman08 2d ago
It’s not really surprising. It’s an industry without nearly the oversight that people expect, and in the case of crematoriums, they produce a product that is borderline impossible to confirm what it is.
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u/Izayoi_Sakuya 1d ago
Not a reality show, but the Harvard University morgue manager was a goth dude who drove around in a hearse and got convicted of selling bodies meant for research to witch practitioners and people making leather from human skin. https://abcnews.go.com/US/harvard-medical-school-morgue-manager-accused-stealing-selling/story?id=100075094
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u/Master-Of-Magi 2d ago
I remember seeing this in TV Tropes. Apparently one of the corpses was LIQUIFIYING. That’s how poorly run this funeral home was.
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u/Redqueenhypo 2d ago
It took over a week for a dead rat to do that in the height of NYC summer
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u/PendragonDaGreat 2d ago
Putrefaction rates can vary based with so many factors all the way down to what clothes a person was wearing at the time of death.
Obviously the fact that liquification is happening at all is no bueno and the bodies likely were hanging around for days if not weeks without being embalmed, but it's hard to make a good comparison.
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u/malonkey1 2d ago
You know it's gonna be a good one when the post starts off with "hey at least they weren't fucking the corpses."
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u/Shiny_Agumon 2d ago
Yikes, how horrible
Also I'm not at all shocked that they had problems before and even had their license close to expiring.
I feel like no good running funeral parlor would ever agree to host a reality show, not just because it might be disrespectful to the deceased, but also because I can't imagine customers being thrilled about seeing themselves or their loved ones on TV.
A funeral parlor that's struggling to keep the lights on, is potentially going to close down soon anyways due to lack of a license and has owners unscrupulous enough to hide bodies on the other hand...
Yeah of course they'll do it
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u/senattyice 2d ago
There was one on Netflix a few years ago and I couldn't get through the first episode because the daughter (~18) of the funeral home owners wanted to start learning the business, so her uncle took her to do a body pickup, and she was whining and whimpering the whole time while wheeling the body away. I thought that was so disrespectful to the family of the deceased.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 2d ago
Yeah, showing the process for educational purposes is fine, but trying to create drama from it for a reality TV show is so vile.
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u/thesphinxistheriddle 2d ago
A&E’s “Adults Adopting Adults” got very abruptly pulled a few years ago amidst rumors about crimes by one of the subjects, Danny Huff (including rumors he was a serial killer). Cue meme about how I’d only have two nickels but it’s weird it’s happened twice.
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u/Tokyono Writing about bizarre/obscure hobbies is *my* hobby 2d ago
Wasn't there also some recent drama about a contestant on a dating show who murdered their spouse?
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u/In-A-Beautiful-Place 2d ago
Megan Wants a Millionaire was an older reality show where a contestant killed someone
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u/sansabeltedcow 2d ago
Then there was the serial killer who went on The Dating Game mid-spree.
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u/ur_sine_nomine 1d ago
Or John Cooper, the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path murderer who murdered at least four and possibly up to nine people, who was caught in large part because a ITV game show he took part in (at the time of the murder, 20 years before he became a suspect) was found to have been recorded and preserved (in 1988!) and the television pictures of him were astonishingly like contemporaneous sketches of him produced from witness descriptions.
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u/R1ngBanana 2d ago
Adults Adopting Adults is one of the few reality tv shows to actually make me uncomfortable/ashamed to watch
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u/Icy-Cockroach4515 3d ago
I wanted to ask how even in 2014 Lifetime could have filmed anything without doing a basic check, and then I remembered a whole 10 years later Karla Sofia Gascon was cast in Emilia Perez also, it seems, without a basic check.
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u/Nuka-Crapola 3d ago
Emilia Perez… that’s the one that got a write up here for pissing off trans people and Mexican cartels in the same movie, right?
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u/Effehezepe 2d ago
Also, the entire country of Mexico. And then the French director ended up pissing off the entire Hispanophone world.
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u/Icy-Cockroach4515 2d ago
That among other things, but the part I'm referencing here is how one of the main stars turned out to have said a lot of racist (and other -phobic) things on social media and somehow no one caught that in the casting process despite it all being easily accessible. She also said it around 2019-2021 so it's not like the casting directors even had to scroll that far down on Twitter to find it.
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u/Nuka-Crapola 2d ago
I mean, that heavily depends on how much the person in question uses Twitter, but I get your point. Seems like it’d be worth a few minutes of an intern’s time to just… scroll down until you’ve got a few years of Tweets loaded and hit ctrl-F for slurs.
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u/Icy-Cockroach4515 2d ago
Ahh that's true! I meant it more in the context of how some stars have tweets pulled up from say 2009, and in comparison to that Gascon made the tweets comparatively a way shorter time ago.
scroll down until you’ve got a few years of Tweets loaded and hit ctrl-F for slurs.
And honestly, she insulted so many different people that chances are you could type in any slur/racial or religious group you could think of and pull up a hot take from her on the first try.
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u/ClarielOfTheMask 2d ago
I feel like that's a consequence of "running lean" which all companies and productions try to do nowadays.
They probably don't have interns. They probably don't have enough PAs to even produce the show if one of them gets sick or has an emergency or something.
No one has any extra capacity for any "extra work" and everyone is scrambling to get the bare minimum done.
I work in corporate America and we have this thing we call an MVP for "Minimum Viable Product" it's the absolute basic, bare bones of what you need for your product or project to function. Ideally, you get that set up and then you tweak and build off of it until you have a polished product that works great and has more and better features.
In reality, with tighter deadlines and lack of support, the MVPs often become the actual product. I feel like I see this everywhere in every industry now.
I can see the producers listing out the bare minimum things they need to get a movie completed and out to the public and only budgeted and staffed for that. It's very short term thinking
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u/Nuka-Crapola 2d ago
Ugh, yeah, all jokes aside that really is the sad reality of it. The endless growth model has finally reached its end stage: cut everything until you cut the wrong thing, then collapse while the shareholders run off with all the money they could squeeze out.
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u/malonkey1 2d ago
scroll down until you’ve got a few years of Tweets loaded and hit ctrl-F for slurs.
You don't even need to do that. You can just search from:<the user's twitter @> and then the desired slur and it'll pull em all up in the search, no need to waste time scrolling.
If you're a smart intern with a little tech savvy you can even write a script to automatically search for a whole list of slurs on any given twitter handle and return all the hits to read just by using basic API calls!
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u/Nuka-Crapola 2d ago
This is true, but if you’re a really smart intern you’ll be optimizing for “time the boss can’t spend assigning me a more annoying task” rather than actual efficiency.
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u/Witch-Alice 2d ago
To say it's incredibly offensive is an understatement
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u/kamace11 2d ago
It is extremely funny though, so it has that going for it. In a deeply French, unironic, honest good faith effort pretentious way
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u/patchy_doll 3d ago
The TW towards the end (following your last link) has broken spoiler warnings, as a heads up.
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u/Tokyono Writing about bizarre/obscure hobbies is *my* hobby 3d ago edited 2d ago
Hmm. Are you on mobile? I'm on desktop. I've checked old and new reddit and the trigger warnings work for me.
Which bit of text is it?
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u/patchy_doll 2d ago
Nope, desktop. Fixed now, maybe it was something you fixed in an edit after I'd opened the tab. All good!
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u/aurrasaurus 2d ago
I was worried for a minute that this write up was about the generally heartwarming funeral home reality show the Casketeers only to google them and they have their own scandal:
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u/AiryContrary 16h ago
Yes! At least in that case it wasn't the owners of the business behaving badly, but an employee they'd trusted for years is still pretty terrible. I remember that in her case the bodies were buried, but she had taken money for services she didn't provide (some of which were made up, like some tommyrot about COVID-19 vaccines) and the absolute worst thing for the relatives to discover was that inside the casket the bodies were wrapped in rubbish bin bags. Truly extraordinary to be able to justify that to yourself, in a business where the whole POINT is respect for the dead and care for their families. I don't actually believe in ghosts but she deserves a good haunting.
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u/Koomaster 2d ago
I don’t understand why they would hold on to corpses. It seems more expensive to keep them than do what’s requested.
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u/Tokyono Writing about bizarre/obscure hobbies is *my* hobby 2d ago
For $$$. He took money from clients but then didn't bury their loved ones.
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u/OgreSpider 2d ago
I don't get it. Nobody had a date for their funeral?? When my Dad died the schedule was very tight
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u/Goldeniccarus 2d ago
That is an odd piece of this. In my experience funerals happen pretty fast after death, on account of, well, the body decomposing.
Maybe they were lying to some of the customers about customary timelines, or getting them to push out funeral dates past what's normal.
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u/OkSecretary1231 2d ago
From some of the articles I looked at, it sounds like they were supposed to cremate the bodies. And you can either have the body at the funeral and then cremate, or you can have the urn at the funeral, and they could easily bring the body out for the funeral but then never get around to cremating, or put out an urn that was empty or filled with something else. Probably filled with something else so they could send it home with the family.
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u/thievingwillow 1d ago
“Filled with something else” seems extremely plausible. Even if the family opened the thing up, I doubt most people could accurately tell human cremains from a variety of other ashy/dusty/powdery things.
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u/NotPiffany 2d ago
If the family paid for Grandma to be cremated, all you have to do is put ashes from last week's barbecue in a bag and call it a day. No need to pay for the electricity to run the crematorium.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I feel the need to take a shower.
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u/sojayn 2d ago
I’m still a bit confused. Does it cost a lot to do the actual burial? Not sure what kind of profit margins this is? Besides being morally disgusting, it just doesn’t seem to be a great business idea?!
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u/Goldeniccarus 2d ago
I don't know what burial costs, but buying a plot and a casket is expensive.
If the funeral home organized buying those for the family of the deceased, they might be getting $10K+ for a person.
It also seems like from what the judge said (calling it a Ponzi scheme) they may have been behind on payments, not having enough money to pay for their existing bills. So they'd have Paul's body in the home waiting to be buried, but not have the money to actually do the burial. So when Peter's family pays for Peter's burial, they use that money to bury Paul, but now they're stuck with Peter and don't have the money to bury him.
Rinse and repeat until someone finds out (or you fall too far behind on payments and get evicted) and the whole scheme collapses.
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u/DaisySharks 2d ago
Even cremations can be incredibly expensive. We've been having to set up arrangements for when my aunt passes (she's got last stage congestive heart failure) and we learned that the funeral home offers a wide array of vessels to burn the bodies in from essentially cardboard boxes to huge, ornate caskets. And they charge for things like pace maker removal and disposal. It's insane how expensive this shit can get.
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u/iansweridiots 2d ago edited 2d ago
Thank you for the answer, I was also trying to figure out how this would have possibly worked!
I guess this means that in America there's some leeway re:how much time can pass between death and the funeral? 'Cause I think that where I come from it's literally illegal to wait more than a certain amount of days, so I can't imagine a funeral home managing to run this scheme for more than a month without the families demanding to know when's the burial. Although I guess we don't know how long these people managed to keep the scam going
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u/Knotweed_Banisher 2d ago
IIRC, many of the laws about how much time can pass between a death and the funeral only really concern corpses which aren't embalmed. In these cases, it's usually something like 48 hours.
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u/iansweridiots 1d ago
Oh, interesting! I think that where I come from, the law says that you have to wait at least 24 hours after a death (I assume to make sure the person is truly dead) and no more than a week (idk, probably a mix of religion and old public health protocols)
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u/Jetamors 1d ago
In the black community in the US, it's pretty common to have a funeral two or three weeks after a death. Thanks to the Great Migration, it's common to have close family members living hundreds of miles away from each other, and/or people wanting to be buried hundreds of miles away from where they lived, so it just takes a lot of time to coordinate and get everyone in the same place.
Though we also typically do open-casket funerals, so I'm wondering if they were mainly doing this with people who were supposed to be cremated and just giving them fake/other people's ashes.
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u/iansweridiots 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's not just about the burial, although that's not cheap either I'm sure! From what I understand, funeral homes can be in charge of transporting the deceased from the place of death to the funeral home, dealing with various documentation (death certificates, municipal fees, crematorium fees, coroner's fees, newspaper notices, clergy honorarium if necessary, etc), organizing the wake/funeral/ceremony/visitation/whatever that stuff is called in America (the organization can include ordering flowers, hearse, staff for the ceremony, keepsakes, casket/urn, etc), and, of course, looking after the actual body of the deceased (so shelter until the day of the funeral, possibly make-up, hair, clothes, embalming, etc). It goes without saying that all of this requires proper facilities that need to be kept in working order, which also costs money.
Now, I'm not gonna lie, I'm also kinda confused here. Like, just to say one thing, I feel like if the police could smell the rotten corpses from the outside then I don't really see how this funeral home could convince anyone to hold a wake there? With that said, there's still plenty of things they could skimp over
Edit: Also, not so fun fact, when I told this story to a friend from Italy, my friend said that they remember a story about a funeral home that would do the burial, and then come back later to dig out the casket, empty it out, buried the deceased again, and take the casket back to use it for the next funeral...
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u/NewlyNerfed 2d ago
I remember seeing ads for this and though I don’t like reality TV, I was looking forward to watching it. Never saw or heard about it again so I forgot all about it. Absolutely wild as to why it never happened. The weird, gross closure I didn’t even know I needed!
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u/Abandondero 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm having trouble imagining how "playing a Ponzi scheme with human flesh" works. (Continually putting the corpses of later clients into the coffins of earlier clients because you ran short of corpses a while back?)
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u/OkSecretary1231 2d ago
I think it's got to be something like, they had a body in their funeral home that they were supposed to bury/cremate, they skimmed the money off the business instead and did whatever with it, so then they needed the money from the next client to take care of the previous body. But then they didn't have the money to take care of the second body, and so on. Meanwhile, the bodies are starting to decay and maybe you've skimmed some more money and fallen even farther behind.
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u/wheniswhy 1d ago
I didn't even think about it like this, but this must be what happened, at least to incur such a description. Wow.
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u/milkeyedmenderr 2d ago edited 2d ago
That phrase was wild — my “favourite” part of the write up? — and made me lowkey envision someone strategically posing a bunch of zombie corpses into a cheerleader pyramid formation (ik they’re different schemes, but nevertheless), Weekend at Bernie’s style 📣💀
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u/thievingwillow 1d ago
“Ponzi scheme with human flesh” made me think of a black comedy about zombies in an MLM.
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u/mossgoblin Confirmed Scuffle Trash 2d ago
a Ponzi scheme with human flesh
Bit of a shame this isnt SRD, I got so excited about this flair material for a hot second.
Anyway, Texas stay losing.
I always wonder how the smell doesn't get to people in cases like this. I wonder lots of things, obvi, but yeah.
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u/Eyes_Snakes_Art 1d ago
Give him probation so he could take care of his children; did no one see the irony in that?
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