DENVER — The husband and wife proprietors of a funeral home accused of storing 190 bodies inside a room-temperature structure in Colorado while delivering mourning families false ashes were scheduled to plead guilty on Friday, facing hundreds of counts of corpse abuse.
The finding last year upended families’ grief processes. The grief milestones — the “goodbye” as the ashes were carried away by the wind, the relief that they had honored their loved ones’ wishes, the moments spent cradling the urn and reflecting on memories — suddenly felt hollow.
According to the accusations, the couple, Jon and Carie Hallford, who manage Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs, began storing bodies in a decaying property outside the city as early as 2019, providing families with dry concrete instead of cremation.
According to authorities, the Hallfords overspent while incurring debt. According to court filings, they spent clients’ money, as well as roughly $900,000 in pandemic relief funding intended for their firm, on exotic cars, laser body sculpting, trips to Las Vegas and Florida, $31,000 in bitcoin, and other luxury items.
Last month, the Hallfords pled guilty to federal fraud charges as part of an arrangement in which they admitted to cheating customers and the federal government. The two were set to plead guilty in state court on Friday to more than 200 offenses including corpse abuse, theft, forgery, and money laundering.
Jon Hallford is represented by the public defender’s office, which does not comment on individual cases. Carie Hallford’s attorney, Michael Stuzynski, declined to comment.
Over the course of four years, Return to Nature customers received what they believed to be their families’ remains. Some people scatter their ashes in special places, often thousands of miles distant. Others took urns on road trips across the country or kept them safe at home.
Some were intrigued to the funeral home’s promise of “green” burials, which, according to the home’s website, eliminated embalming chemicals and metal caskets in favor of biodegradable caskets, shrouds, or “nothing at all.”
The alleged illegally dumped carcasses were discovered last year after neighbors reported a stench originating from Return to Nature’s building in the small town of Penrose, southwest of Colorado Springs. In several cases, the bodies were discovered heaped atop one another, surrounded by insects. Some were too deteriorated for visual identification.
The site was so poisonous that rescuers had to enter the structure wearing specialized hazmat gear and could only stay inside for short periods of time before evacuating and decontaminating.
The situation was not unique; six years previously, the proprietors of another Colorado funeral facility were accused of selling body parts and using dry concrete to resemble human cremains. The perpetrators in that case earned significant federal jail terms for mail fraud.
However, it wasn’t until the bodies were discovered at Return to Nature that lawmakers ultimately tightened what were previously some of the most loose funeral home standards in the country. Unlike most states, Colorado did not mandate routine inspections of funeral establishments or qualifications for their operators.
This year, lawmakers brought Colorado’s regulations up to par with the majority of other states, thanks in large part to the funeral home sector.