COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The owners of a Colorado funeral home who let nearly 200 bodies decay in a room-temperature building and gave grieving families fake ashes pleaded guilty on Friday to corpse abuse. 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 decomposing. “The bodies were laying on the ground, stacked on shelves, left on gurneys, stacked on top of each other or just piled in rooms,” prosecutor Rachael Powell said.
She said the family members of the bodies that were discovered “have been intensely and forever outraged.” The Hallfords each pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse for 189 bodies that were found decaying and two instances of the wron.