Funeral homeowners accused of giving families fake ashes and leaving 190 bodies to rot plead guilty

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The owners of a Coloradofuneral home have pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy after police found 190 decaying bodies in a building at their business from where they sent fake ashes to grieving families.

Jon Hallford, 44, and Carie Hallford, 47, operated the “Return to Nature” funeral home, which specialized in “green burials” involving biodegradable containers and urns and not embalming the body.

Green burials are legal in Colorado but bodies must be refrigerated if not buried within 24 hours.

As part of their fraud scheme, prosecutors say they misled customers into “believing the remains of their loved ones would be buried or cremated per their wishes and the term of the parties’ contracts.”

But some of the remains recovered had death dates as far back as 2019, the US Department of Justice wrote in a news release. The business offered funerals and cremations and had existed for over 80 years before the owners were arrested.

“The Hallfords failed to provide the basic core service it promised to many of its customers – either a cremation or a burial,” prosecutors wrote in filings. From 2019 to 2023, the owners collected more than $130,000 for funerals and cremations that never took place.

The couple managed to hide the bodies by stopping outsiders from entering their storage building, covering doors and windows and giving false statements about the smell emanating from the building.

In several instances, the Hallfords gave family members, friends or next-of-kin an urn filled with dry concrete mix instead of the actual cremains of the deceased.

Federal prosecutors said the couple at least twice provided the wrong body for a cemetery burial resulting in the incorrect remains being buried in a gravesite plot. They allegedly concealed their mistake from next-of-kin.

One victim, a woman, was buried in a Vietnam War veteran’s grave. Following a hearing in February, Heather DeWolf, who had given her son’s remains to the funeral home, confronted Jon Hallford outside a courthouse.

“What did you do with my son?” she asked. “This is my son. What did you do with him? Where is he? Where is my baby?”

The two defendants admitted to conspiring together to defraud the US Small Business Administration of more than $800,000 in COVID-19 pandemic relief funds, which they obtained under the government’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.

Jon Hallford was responsible for removing the bodies of the deceased, transporting the bodies of the deceased and processing and preparing the bodies for burial or cremation.

In October 2023, law enforcement officials responded to a call about a bad odor from the funeral home’s building in Penrose, Colorado. After obtaining a search warrant, officials discovered “abhorrent” conditions with bodies “stacked on top of each other and some were not in body bags,” court records state. “Human decomposition fluids and insects lined the floors.”

Sentencing will be held at a later date. Each defendant faces up to 20 years in federal prison. A plea deal states that the prosecution will not seek more than 15 years imprisonment. The Independent has emailed attorneys for Hallfords. The plea deal still needs to be approved and signed by a judge.