Jon and Carie Hallford were exposed when neighbors reported “an abhorrent smell” coming from their Colorado funeral home, authorities said.
by Daniel Wu
The owners of a Colorado funeral home who sparked a statewide scandal after authorities discovered nearly 200 decomposing bodies at their business havepleaded guilty to wire fraud, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
Jon and Carie Hallford operated Return to Nature Funeral Home at two locations in Colorado Springs and Penrose, and from 2019 to 2023 collected over $130,000 from families for funeral services they never provided, according to their plea agreement. The couple did not bury or cremate bodies entrusted to them, filed incorrect death certificates and provided family members with urns filled with dry concrete mix instead of ashes.
The couple also fraudulently spent the majority of an over $800,000 small business loan offered during the coronavirus pandemic on personal purchases, including vacations, cosmetic medical procedures and cryptocurrency, the agreement states.
An attorney representing Carie Hallford, 47, declined to comment. An attorney for Jon Hallford, 44, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
The Hallfords were exposed in October 2023 when neighbors reported “an abhorrent smell” from the funeral home’s Penrose location that had lingered for weeks, The Washington Post previously reported. Authorities discovered the remains of around 190 people inside.
Conditions inside the 2,500-square-foot building, around the size of a one-story home, were so appalling that a paramedic investigating the site developed a rash and had to be medically evaluated, Fremont County Sheriff Allen Cooper said at the time.
The gruesome discovery was the culmination of years of fraud. Return to Nature Funeral Home, which the couple started in 2017, offered cremations and natural burials, where a person’s remains are interred without being embalmed, so that they will decompose in soil. The funeral home charged customers $1,895 for a natural burial and ceremony and $1,290 for a cremation, The Post reported.
The Hallfords did neither with many bodies they received, according to their plea agreement, instead leaving human remains to decay in storage at their Penrose location. The Hallfords also prepared death certificates falsely stating that the bodies they received were cremated or buried.
In several instances, the Hallfords provided family or friends with an urn filled with dry concrete mix instead of ashes, according to the plea agreement. On at least two occasions, they provided the wrong body for a ceremony and buried a different person’s remains without informing next-of-kin.
The Hallfords also did not possess a furnace to cremate bodies and used a third-party business to conduct cremations, according to the plea agreement. At times, they misrepresented or concealed the identities of bodies they sent for cremation, the agreement said.
The Hallfords’s actions sparked a year-long reckoning in Colorado, which until recently was the only state that does not license funeral home operators. A bipartisan bill regulating funeral homes was signed into law in May after lobbying from families whose loved ones were identified among the remains left to rot at Return to Nature Funeral Home.
Many of those families are still reeling from the scandal a year later. A class-action lawsuit brought by victims of the funeral home resulted in a nearly $1 billion judgment against Return to Nature Funeral Home in August, the largest total in Colorado history, the Colorado Gazette reported. But authorities are still working to identify some bodies from the funeral home, the Gazette reported, and some victims still do not know the location of a loved one’s remains.
The Hallfords owe a minimum of $1,012,300 in restitution between their loan fraud and damages to victims of the funeral home, according to their plea agreement. They face up to 20 years each in prison, according to the Justice Department. The Hallfords also still face charges in state court.
The Penrose building was deemed a toxic waste site by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the plea agreement. In April, it was razed, and the debris transferred to a hazardous-waste dump.
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