TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox. COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The owners of a Colorado funeral home accused of piling 190 bodies inside a room-temperature building and giving the grieving relatives fake ashes pleaded guilty Friday to corpse abuse as aggrieved families looked on in court.
Jon and Carie Hallford, who own the Return to Nature Funeral Home, began storing bodies in a decrepit building near Colorado Springs as far back as 2019 and gave families dry concrete in place of cremated remains, according to the charges. The grim discovery last year upended families' grieving processes. Plea deals reached between the defendants and prosecutors call for Jon Hallford to receive a 20-year prison sentence and Carie Hallford to receive 15 to 20 years in prison.
Over the years, the Hallfords spent extravagantly, prosecutors say. They used customers' money and nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief funds to buy laser body sculpting, fancy cars, trips to Las Vegas and Florida, $31,000 in cryptocurrency and other luxury items, according to court records. Even as the couple lived large, prosecutors said the bodies at their funeral home were.
.. Associated Press.