Valerie Coates will never forgive Robert Bush for his mistreatment of
A line of floral tributes outside Legacy Funeral Directors on Hessle Road, Hull(Image: Hull Live)
On Friday, July 31 2026, Hull funeral director Robert Bush was jailed for 20 years.
The 48-year-old left bodies to decompose at Legacy Independent Funeral Directors’ premises in the city, gave bereaved families the ashes of other people and stole money donated from collections at funerals.The “horror” and revulsion felt by the families who had lost loved ones was revealed at Hull Crown Court during a series of powerful and harrowing victim statements during the first four days of the five-day sentencing hearing.
Over the coming weeks, we will be publishing those statements – from families who had cruelly been taken advantage of when they were at their most vulnerable. Their stories need to be told, and we will ensure that they are, for as long as it takes. This whole ordeal caused by Mr Bush has overshadowed my life since the news first broke. My family and I are haunted by what happened to our beloved Ron.
I try to wear a brave smile, but my close friends and family know that I am tortured by thoughts of how Ron’s poor body was mistreated – and the cruel realisation that the beautiful urn I cherished, and talked to every day, did not contain his ashes after all.
We had made a pact, Ron and I, a promise to each other, that our ashes would eventually be together. Robert Bush has made that impossible and I shall never know what actually happened to Ron’s ashes.
I paid an additional sum of money, all lost of course, to have Ron cremated locally at a specific time and date. We had a special family day on 19 July, when we were told that would be. We then had a celebration of life in late July, attended by over 100 people.
All that has been reduced to a sick joke, a horror story! I believe that Mr Bush took advantage of me and my family when we were grieving and very vulnerable.
I paid him for a service that I trusted him to conduct with professionalism and dignity. He took our money but did not care for Ron as promised and callously gave us some other poor soul’s ashes, knowing that I believed them to be Ron’s and intended to keep them with me.
I feel every day as though I am silently screaming. The pain this has caused is never ending. We adored our lovely Ron, but he wasn’t loved just by his family. He was the embodiment of that phrase, a big man with a very big heart: to know him was to love him.
If he had met Robert Bush in life he would have treated him with kindness and respect. The lack of respect Robert Bush gave Ron in death is abhorrent, beyond evil and heartbreaking and can never be forgiven.
If you had met him, Robert Bush, he would have been nice to you. You would have liked him. But you abused him in a despicable and callous way. May God forgive you, I can’t!
Valerie Coates