DENVER (AP) The owners of a funeral company in Colorado are scheduled to enter a guilty plea on Friday to state charges alleging that they provided false ashes to bereaved family members and allowed 190 bodies to rot on their property.
According to the allegations, Jon and Carie Hallford, the operators of Return to Nature Funeral Home, started keeping bodies in a dilapidated structure close to Colorado Springs as early as 2019 and provided families with dry concrete instead of cremated remains. Families’ grieving processes were upended by the sobering finding made last year.
Prosecutors claim that the Hallfords spent lavishly over the years. According to court documents, they purchased luxury goods including laser body sculpting, expensive cars, trips to Florida and Las Vegas, $31,000 in bitcoin, and other items using consumer money and almost $900,000 in pandemic relief funding.
The Hallfords admitted to cheating the federal government and consumers when they entered a guilty plea to federal fraud charges last month. In state court, the two are accused with over 200 counts of money laundering, theft, forgery, and corpse abuse.
The public defender’s office, which represents Jon Hallford, does not comment on cases. Michael Stuzynski, Carie Hallford’s lawyer, chose not to comment.
Over the course of four years, Return to Nature clients scattered what they believed to be the ashes of their loved ones in significant places, occasionally a plane ride away. Others kept their urns close to home or transported them on cross-country road journeys.
In the small hamlet of Penrose, southwest of Colorado Springs, the bodies were found last year after neighbors complained of a stench emanating from a structure. Prosecutors claim the bodies were unlawfully stored.
Authorities discovered victims heaped on top of one another, some of them covered in insects. They included remains that were too decomposed to be identified by sight. Responders could only stay inside the structure for short amounts of time and had to wear hazmat gear because it was so hazardous.
Following the bodies’ discovery at Return to Nature, Texas lawmakers tightened some of the nation’s most permissive funeral home laws. Colorado, in contrast to the majority of states, did not mandate regular funeral home inspections or the operators’ credentials.
With a lot of help from the funeral home sector, lawmakers this year raised Colorado’s regulations to the level of the majority of other states.
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Bedayn is a member of the Statehouse News Initiative’s Associated Press/Report for America corps.A nonprofit national service initiative called Report for America places reporters in local newsrooms to explore topics that aren’t often covered.
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