Meet the Coffin Confessor: Bill crashes funerals to reveal the dead's secrets.

In the middle of the best mate's eulogy, Bill Edgar stood up. 

He'd been sitting quietly amongst the mourners waiting for this very moment. 

"Sit down, shut up or f*** off", he told those gathered. Graham — the man in the coffin — had something to say.

Bill proceeded to read aloud a letter he'd been paid $10,000 to deliver. 

Firstly, he told the 'best mate' that Graham knew that he'd been trying to have an affair with his wife while he was on his deathbed. He denounced him as a best friend.

Then, he told three relatives in the room to leave. Graham had given strict instruction to move them along if they dared show their faces — they hadn't bothered to contact him in 30 years.

With his job complete, Bill placed Graham's letter on his coffin and left the funeral. But as he made his way towards his car, a woman stopped him. She wanted him to crash another funeral. 

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Since Graham's funeral in 2018, Bill has crashed dozens upon dozens of funerals across Australia and the world. He has plenty more lined up, some for people who aren't even remotely close to death yet. But the majority are living with terminal illness and know death is approaching them. 

Bill calls himself the 'coffin confessor,' and he's heard just about every secret out there.

He was paid by a bikie to tell his loved ones he was gay.

He was asked to be someone's suicide note.

He told a priest to stop talking in his own church after his client insisted he didn't want a religious funeral but his family planned one anyway.

He has confessed crimes; mostly petty theft within the family. But he's sitting on much more grizzly admissions in his future. 

"If I'm told about a serious crime, I have to report it. So I decided to tell those people [who wanted to tell me about something bad they did] to not tell me, and to write it down and put it in the postpaid envelope that I'd given to them. It's posted to me and I will not open it until the day of their funeral," he told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

Listen to the full chat with Bill. Post continues after podcast.

Bill admits he has several of these letters filed away waiting for their owner's future funerals. One man warned him the contents of his letter are particularly "horrific," "shocking," and "of the worst nature". But he will stick to his word — Bill will not read his words until his client has passed. 

Five years into his unique business offering, funeral crashing is now only part of the gig. 

Bill started getting other requests and now his services — which range in price from $2000-$10,000, plus flights and accommodation if required — also include 'home sweeps.' That's where he clears people's properties of things they don't want their families to find; like sex toys, lingerie, web histories and personal documents. 

"I had no idea the extent of how many people have a fall at home or the shops and get taken to hospital, and get told they'll never go home again. They've got a lot of unfinished business," he insists.

He also attends 'viewings' to either place items, (most commonly mobile phones), in people's coffins or do things to their bodies.

"I didn't realise so many people really have a phobia about death... [I had one man who] feared being cremated alive. So he asked me to treat his body like a pincushion at his viewing to make sure that he was deceased." 

The more Bill did for his clients, the more word spread and the more doors just kept opening.

"Things just started to roll, and everybody had these crazy ideas for what they wanted at their funeral or their wake or their will reading or a face-to-face personal message, or a gift from the afterlife... I didn't think there was a need for this, but obviously there is."

Bill has worn many hats in his life, most notably he is one of Australia's leading private detectives, which lends itself very well to his newfound venture. But his childhood was troubled and incredibly tough. Bill's father was an underworld figure and hitman and Bill was abused sexually, physically and mentally by his grandfather as a young boy. By age 14 he was living on the streets and at the age of 17 he went to prison for four years. 

He credits his teenage girlfriend — now wife of 40 years — who he met just prior to his jail stint, for helping him turn his life around as an adult. 

Without his life story, Bill isn't sure he'd even be able to do this job. He says his upbringing has given him the mental toughness to have hard conversations and do something as bold as crash people's funerals, while still having the empathy and sympathy required to deal with any kind of situation. It's also made him a real advocate for the underdog and the hard done by. 

He remains the only 'coffin confessor' on the planet, despite the huge gap in the market he's stumbled across. But Bill says it's because you have to be a particular kind of person to do this kind of work - and he's yet to come across many people who'd be able to hack it.

Bill crashes people's funerals to reveal the dead's secrets. Image: Supplied.

"It takes a lot of nerve," he says. 

While he'll always welcome newcomers to his newfound industry, Bill thinks we can all take a bit of inspiration from what he does. As he explains, if you are sitting in a loved one's funeral and "hear bullsh*t," say something. Funerals are for the dead after all, not the living. 

His work as a coffin confessor has also woken him up to the frailty of life, and Bill is not wasting a second.

"We just live and then we die, but very few of us die living and no matter if it's just going for a coffee with my wife or something, I embrace every moment," he tells True Crime Conversations. 

"You've got to embrace every moment in your life because you can be gone in a heartbeat. I've really come to terms with the fact we're only here for a short time, so enjoy it. Live it."

Feature image: Getty.