Funeral home owner Jon Hallford is set to be sentenced in state court on Friday for 191 counts of corpse abuse, nearly two years after 191 decaying bodies were discovered in a building in rural Colorado.
Hallford and his wife, Carie, co-owned Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs, where they deceived grieving families by claiming to perform cremations. Instead, they hid the bodies in a bug-infested building and handed out dry concrete that resembled ashes.
Hallford is already headed to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges, including abuse of a corpse, forgery and money laundering. Friday’s sentencing hearing will focus on state charges related to the mistreatment of the bodies.
Carie Hallford is accused of the same crimes as her husband and also pleaded guilty. Her sentencing on the corpse abuse charges has not been scheduled yet.
Dozens of families are expected to deliver victim impact statements after learning their loved ones slowly decayed among piles of others.
A plea agreement calls for Hallford to receive a 20-year prison sentence for the corpse abuse charges.
Tanya Wilson, who hired the funeral home to cremate her mother, told The Associated Press that she was travelling from Georgia to speak at the sentencing.
“To me it’s the heart of the case. It’s the worst part of the crime,” she said of learning the bodies were stored and not cremated.
Wilson said she and other families want Judge Eric Bentley to reject the plea agreement because Hallford’s state sentence is expected to run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could be freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.
“The scale of this is staggering. Why does the state believe they deserve a plea deal?” Wilson asked. “There needs to be accountability.”
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Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and for many years had some of the weakest regulations.
Unlike nearly all other states, Colorado’s funeral homes aren’t routinely inspected. Those who run them don’t have to graduate high school, pass an exam or apprentice.
The operators of the Return to Nature Funeral Home didn’t pay their taxes, got evicted from one of their properties and got sued for unpaid bills by a crematory that quit doing business with them almost a year ago, according to The Associated Press.
A 2022 state law permits the agency overseeing funeral homes to inspect facilities at random or following complaints. Many other states perform annual inspections that entail entering the premises and have educational requirements, such as a degree in mortuary science, a licensing exam or an apprenticeship.
Elsewhere in Colorado, inspectors have found “several bodies in various stages of decomposition” behind a barricaded door at a mortuary operated by the Pueblo County Coroner.
The bodies were discovered in a room behind a door hidden by a cardboard display during an inspection of Davis Mortuary in Pueblo. Inspectors found a “strong odour of decomposition” after arriving at the business on Wednesday. Brian Cotter — the owner and Pueblo County coroner — had asked them not to enter the room, according to a document from Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies.
The state regulators said Davis Mortuary has been suspended after the first annual inspection of the facility under rules adopted last year in response to prior crimes within Colorado’s funeral industry.
Before the law changed, funeral homes could only be inspected if a complaint had been filed against them. Davis Mortuary did not have any complaints, said Sam Delp, director of the Division of Professions and Occupations in the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
Cotter told inspectors that some of the bodies had been awaiting cremation for about 15 years, according to the document from state regulators that explained why the state suspended the mortuary’s registration.
Cotter has not been arrested and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation has opened a criminal investigation into Davis Mortuary.
— With files from The Associated Press