A Pennsylvania funeral director who pocketed 80 families' prepayments for over a decade
Stephen Kezmarsky, former owner of a funeral home in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, accepted pre-need funeral policy payments from elderly clients between 2005 and 2017, but never submitted their completed policies to the insurer, Homesteaders Life, pocketing roughly $500,000 from 80 victims instead. He pleaded guilty to 172 counts including theft by deception, theft by failure to make required disposition of funds, forgery and insurance fraud, and was sentenced in February 2020 to four to eight years in prison, 20 years of probation, and $555,000 in restitution. Investigators separately found cremated remains improperly stored, some unlabeled, in a storage unit.
- Year
- 2020
- Where
- United States
- Outcome
- Sentenced
- Reported loss
- $500,000
- Victims
- 80
- Schemes
- Prepaid funeral scams
- Last reviewed
- 2026-10-06
The facts, as recorded
- Stephen Kezmarsky, 51, of Uniontown, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, owned and operated a local funeral home.
- From 2005 to 2017, Kezmarsky accepted pre-need funeral policy payments from elderly clients but never submitted the completed policies to the insurer, Homesteaders Life, keeping the money instead.
- The scheme took roughly $500,000 from 80 victims over the 12-year period.
- Kezmarsky pleaded guilty to 172 counts, including theft by deception, theft by failure to make required disposition of funds, forgery and insurance fraud.
- He was sentenced in February 2020 to four to eight years in state prison, 20 years of probation, and $555,000 in restitution; the Fayette County district attorney had sought a sentence of 15 to 30 years.
- Separate charges of abuse of a corpse and tampering with records were added after investigators found cremated remains improperly stored in a storage unit, some unlabeled.
- Fayette County District Attorney Rich Bauer: "He's a thief. He admitted he's a thief, not the great guy everybody was professing."
- A victim's family member, Diana McDowell: "He preyed on old people."
Why this case matters
Unlike the larger, multi-state cases on this page, this is a single local operator, which is the more common shape this fraud actually takes: one funeral home, one community, and elderly clients who genuinely trusted a familiar local business to do what it promised with money paid years in advance.
The failure to remit, not just a failure to invest
Kezmarsky’s scheme did not involve a trust account at all. His clients’ pre-need policies were meant to be funded through an outside insurer, Homesteaders Life; each payment should simply have been forwarded to that insurer to fund a policy in the client’s name. Kezmarsky instead kept the money and never submitted the paperwork, meaning no policy, trust, or any other form of the promised protection ever existed for his 80 victims.
What the bodies revealed
The case expanded after investigators, examining the business during the financial investigation, found cremated remains stored improperly in a storage unit, some without labels identifying whose remains they were. Separate charges of abuse of a corpse and tampering with records followed, alongside the original theft, forgery and insurance fraud counts.
A sentence below what prosecutors sought
The Fayette County district attorney asked the court for a sentence of 15 to 30 years; Kezmarsky received 4 to 8 years, 20 years of probation, and a $555,000 restitution order, a gap that drew public criticism from the victims’ families quoted in coverage of the sentencing.
The caveat
Kezmarsky pleaded guilty to all 172 counts and has been sentenced; this is a concluded criminal matter, not an unproven allegation.
Sources
- Funeral home director sentenced to prison for stealing from elderly clients. CBS News Pittsburgh. Accessed 2026-10-06. Supports: Kezmarsky's name, age, the 172 guilty pleas, the 4-to-8-year sentence and 20 years of probation, the more than $500,000 taken from elderly clients over 12 years, the abuse-of-corpse and record-tampering charges, the improperly stored cremated remains, and the Bauer and McDowell quotes.