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

The owners of a Colorado funeral home have pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy after police found 190 decomposing bodies in a building owned by their business, from which they mailed fake ashes to grieving families.

Jon Hallford, 44, and Carie Hallford, 47, ran the Return to Nature funeral home, which specialized in “green burials” using biodegradable containers and urns and without embalming the body.

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

As part of their alleged fraud scheme, prosecutors say they misled customers “into believing that their loved ones' remains would be buried or cremated in accordance with their wishes and the terms of the parties' contracts.”

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

“The Hallfords failed to provide the basic core service they had promised to many of their clients – neither a cremation nor a burial,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. 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 preventing outsiders from entering their storage building by covering doors and windows and making false statements about the smell emanating from the building.

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

Federal prosecutors said the couple provided the wrong body for a cemetery burial on at least two occasions, resulting in the false remains being buried in a grave plot. They allegedly hid their mistake from their next of kin.

One victim, a woman, was buried in the grave of a Vietnam War veteran. After 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 to my son?” she asked. “This is my son. What did you do to him? Where is he? Where is my baby?”

The two defendants admitted to conspiring together to defraud the U.S. Small Business Administration of more than $800,000 in COVID-19 pandemic relief funds that they received through the government's Economic Injury Disaster Loan program had received.

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, police officers responded to a call about a bad odor coming from the funeral home building in Penrose, Colorado. After obtaining a search warrant, officers discovered “disgusting” conditions, with bodies “stacked on top of each other and some not in body bags,” court documents say. “Human decay fluids and insects lined the floor.”

The verdict will be announced at a later date. Each defendant faces up to twenty years in prison. A plea deal states that prosecutors will seek no more than 15 years in prison. The Independent has emailed Hallfords' lawyers. The plea deal still needs to be approved and signed by a judge.