DENVER — It’s been two years since nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered throughout a fetid, room temperature building in rural Colorado. On Friday, the man responsible, a funeral home owner, is set to be sentenced in state court for 191 counts of corpse abuse.
Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, ran a morbid racket for four years out of their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs: assuring people they were handling their loved ones’ cremations only to stash the bodies in a bug-infested building and then giving them dry concrete resembling ashes.
Jon Hallford is already headed to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. Friday’s sentencing hearing will focus on state charges related to mistreatment of the bodies. Family members will have the chance to describe the anguish of learning a loved one slowly decayed among piles of others.
“To me it’s the heart of the case. It’s the worst part of the crime,” said Tanya Wilson, who is traveling from Georgia to speak at the sentencing. She hired the funeral home to cremate her mother and later discovered the supposed ashes the family spread in Hawaii weren’t from her mother’s body, which had been wasting away in the building in Penrose, a small town 35 miles from Colorado Springs.
A plea agreement calls for Hallford to receive a 20-year prison sentence for the corpse abuse charges.
Wilson said she and some other families want Judge Eric Bentley to reject the agreement because Hallford’s state sentence is expected to run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could be freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.
“The scale of this is staggering. Why does the state believe they deserve a plea deal?” Wilson asked. “There needs to be accountability.”
If the judge rejects the agreement, Hallford would not be immediately sentenced and the case would likely go to an arraignment, the first step toward a criminal trial, said Kate Singh with the Fourth Judicial District District Attorney’s Office.
Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and for many years had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. It’s had a slew of abuse cases, including an estimated 20 decomposing corpses discovered this week at a funeral home in Pueblo.
Carie Hallford is accused of the same crimes as her husband and also pleaded guilty. Her sentencing on the corpse abuse charges has not been scheduled.
The couple was accused of letting 189 bodies decay. In two other instances the wrong bodies were buried. Four remains have yet to be identified, Singh said.
The Hallfords got a license for their funeral home in 2017, and authorities said the bodies started piling up by 2019. Many languished for years in states of decay, some decomposed beyond recognition, some unclothed or on the floor in inches of fluid from the bodies.
As the gruesome count grew, Jon and Carie Hallford were also defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in COVID-19 era aid.
With the money from families and the federal government, the Hallfords bought ritzy items from stores like Tiffany & Co., a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth $120,000 combined, laser body sculpting and $31,000 in cryptocurrency.
In 2023, a putrid smell poured from the building and the police turned up. Investigators swarmed the building, donning hazmat suits and painstakingly extracting the bodies. Hallford and his wife were arrested in Oklahoma, where Jon Hallford had family, more than a month later.
Families learned that their cathartic moments of grief — spreading a mother’s ashes in Hawaii or cradling a son’s urn in a rocking chair — were tainted by a deception. It was as if those signposts of the grieving process had been torn away, unraveling months and years of working through their loved ones’ deaths.
Some had nightmares of what their relatives’ decayed bodies must have looked like. Others were anguished by the fear their family members’ souls were trapped, unable to go free.
A mother, Crystina Page, demanded to watch as her son’s body, rescued from the Return to Nature building, was cremated for real. Wilson, who had thought she already spread her mother’s ashes in Hawaii, said the family cremated her mother’s remains after they were recovered by authorities. She is waiting for the court cases to conclude before returning to Hawaii again to spread the ashes.
The Hallfords pleaded guilty in the federal case to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Jon Hallford has appealed his federal prison sentence. Carie Hallford faces a December sentencing in that case.
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Brown reported from Billings, Montana.
