DENVER — A snowstorm forced a Colorado court to postpone a hearing Friday where funeral home owners were accused of stacking 190 bodies in a room-temperature building while they gave grieving families false ashwas expected to plead guilty.
Last year’s discovery disrupted the grieving processes of families. The milestones of mourning – the “goodbye” as the ashes were picked up by the wind, the relief at having fulfilled the wishes of their loved ones, the moments they cradled the urn and mused on memories – now felt hollow.
The couple, Jon and Carie Hallford, who own Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs, began stashing bodies in a dilapidated building outside the city as early as 2019, according to the allegations, providing families with dry concrete instead of cremains.
While they were going into debt, the Hallfords spent excessivelyprosecutors say. They used customers’ money — and nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief funds meant for their business — to buy fancy cars, laser body sculpting, trips to Las Vegas and Florida, $31,000 in cryptocurrency and other luxury items, according to court documents.
Last month, the Hallfords pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges as part of an agreement in which they acknowledged defrauding customers and the federal government. On Friday, the two were expected to plead guilty in state court to more than 200 charges of corpse abuse, theft, forgery and money laundering. The hearing has not yet been rescheduled.
Jon Hallford is represented by the public defender’s office, which does not comment on cases. Carie Hallford’s attorney, Michael Stuzynski, declined to comment.
For four years, Return to Nature customers received what they believed were the remains of their families. Some spread those ashes in meaningful locations, sometimes a plane flight away. Others took urns on road trips across the country or held them tightly at home.
Some were attracted to the funeral home’s offering of “green” funerals, which its website said eliminated the need for embalming chemicals and metal caskets and used biodegradable caskets, shrouds or “nothing at all.”
The morbid discovery of the allegedly improperly discarded bodies was made last year when neighbors reported a stench coming from the Return to Nature building in the small town of Penrose, southwest of Colorado Springs. In some cases, the bodies were found stacked on top of each other, surrounded by insects. Some were too dilapidated to visually identify.
The site was so toxic that responders had to use special hazmat equipment to enter the building and could only stay inside for a short time before going outside and undergoing rigorous decontamination.
The case was not unprecedented: Six years ago, owners of another funeral home in Colorado were accused of selling body parts and similarly using dry concrete to simulate human cremains. The defendants in that case received lengthy federal prison sentences for mail fraud.
But it wasn’t until the bodies were found at Return to Nature that lawmakers finally strengthened what had previously been the most lax regulations for funeral homes in the country. Unlike most states, Colorado did not require routine inspections of funeral homes or identification of the businesses’ operators.
This year, lawmakers brought Colorado’s regulations in line with most other states, largely with support from the funeral industry.
___
Bedayn is a staff member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.