Cops hunt funeral home owner who kept a woman’s body in a hearse for two YEARS and stashed remains of 30 people in crawl space at his Denver house

Police have launched a hunt to find a former funeral home owner who allegedly kept a woman’s body in a hearse for two years and the cremated remains of at least 30 people in a crawl space at his Denver home has kept.

The 63-year-old woman’s body and cremains were found Feb. 6 during a court-ordered eviction from a home rented by Miles Harford, the 33-year-old owner of Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services in the Denver suburb of Littleton.

The woman died in August 2022. Police said Harford was cooperating with investigators when the arrest warrant was announced last Friday.

But yesterday they offered a $2,000 Crimestoppers award for information leading to his arrest because he failed to turn himself in to authorities and cannot find him.

Harford appeared to have had financial difficulties in his business and was sometimes unable to complete cremations to provide the remains to families for services.

On occasion, he may have given family members someone else’s ashes instead of their loved ones, Denver Police Chief Matt Clark said.

Temporary urns — plastic boxes the size of a shoebox — were found in the home’s crawl space while a Denver sheriff’s deputy supervised the removal of Harford’s belongings. Some boxes were empty.

Other urns were found in a moving truck parked outside and still others were in the hearse where investigators found the woman’s body covered in blankets.

Charges of abuse of a corpse, forgery of the death certificate and theft of the money paid for the woman’s cremation are listed on the warrant.

Other charges are possible as the investigation continues, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said last week.

The cremains found appear to be linked to individuals who died between 2012 and 2021, Clark said.

Harford’s company performed cremations for people who had little money and people whose next of kin were unknown.

Officials were working to return labeled cremains to families, but they said they did not want to conduct DNA testing because the “extreme temperatures associated with the cremation process change the molecular structure of DNA, often leaving it fragmented and highly degraded.” .

“It’s a very labor-intensive process with a very low probability of success,” Clark said. “We do not have the ability to do that at this time.”

Clark said last week that the woman’s family is devastated.

‘They are shocked. They were injured because of this,” he said. ‘They thought they were dealing with their grief with the remains they had and had services with them. And then they find out that that wasn’t the person being treated, and she was kept there in that hearse.”

This case is the latest to underscore the lax oversight of Colorado’s funeral industry.

A couple is awaiting trial in Colorado Springs after their arrest last year for allegedly leaving nearly 200 bodies in an insect-infested facility over several years and giving fake ashes to relatives of the deceased.

The operators of another funeral home in the western Colorado town of Montrose received federal prison sentences last year for mail fraud after being accused of selling body parts and distributing fake ashes.

More than two dozen additional criminal cases and complaints involving Colorado funeral homes since 2007 were detailed in a January report to state regulators’ lawmakers.

The cases include mishandling of bodies, theft of personal belongings, improper embalming of bodies, mislabeled remains and remains never returned to families.

The report concluded that additional regulation for the industry was “necessary to protect the public.”