COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — It’s been two years since nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered in a pungent funeral home in rural Colorado. On Friday, the owner who acknowledged mishandling corpses, leaving them to rot, was set to be sentenced in state court.
Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, for four years ran a fraudulent scheme from their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs: assuring people they were handling loved ones’ cremations only to stash the bodies in a bug-infested building and give them dry concrete resembling ashes.
“My son wasn’t simply mishandled. He was dumped out of a body bag, into the corner of an inoperable refrigerator,” said Crystina Page, whose son David died in 2019. For four years, Page said, she carried an urn that she wrongly thought carried her son’s ashes.
“I loved it, I cried over it, I held it close during sleepless nights. I kissed him,” Page said. “It wasn't him at all. ... What happened to my son has broken me in ways I cannot repair."
A controversial plea deal
A plea agreement calls for Hallford to receive a 20-year prison sentence for the corpse abuse charges.
He is already headed to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. Friday’s sentencing hearing was on state charges related to mistreatment of the bodies. Family members described the anguish of learning a loved one slowly decayed among piles of others and the sense of guilt they will forever carry for having chosen Return to Nature.
Numerous family members pressed Judge Eric Bentley to reject the agreement because Hallford's state sentence would run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could be freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.
Page said the plea agreement would essentially erase the crimes committed against her son and the other 190 people whose bodies have been identified.
“Please give them the dignity they were denied in death,” she said, urging the judge to reject the plea agreement.
If the court rejects the agreement, Hallford could withdraw his plea agreement and go to trial, Bentley said to a packed courtroom as Friday's hearing got underway. The judge cautioned family members objecting to a plea deal that they could be “opening Pandora's box” since a trial would drag out the case for many months and extend their grief.
Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and for many years had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. It’s had a slew of abuse cases, including an estimated 20 decomposing corpses discovered this week at a funeral home in Pueblo.
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.
The couple was accused of letting 189 bodies decay. In two other instances, the wrong bodies were buried. Four remains were yet to be identified, the district attorney's office said this week.
The Hallfords got a license for their funeral home in 2017, and authorities said the bodies started piling up by 2019. Many languished for years in states of decay, some decomposed beyond recognition, some unclothed or on the floor in inches of fluid from the bodies.
The Hallfords bought luxury items after defrauding the government
As the gruesome count grew, Jon and Carie Hallford were also defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief aid.
With the money from families and the federal government, the Hallfords bought ritzy items from stores like Tiffany & Co., a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth $120,000 combined, laser body sculpting and $31,000 in cryptocurrency.
In 2023, a putrid smell poured from the building and the police turned up. Investigators swarmed the building, donning hazmat suits and painstakingly extracting the bodies. Hallford and his wife were arrested in Oklahoma, where Jon Hallford had family, more than a month later.
Families learned that their cathartic moments of grief — spreading a mother's ashes in Hawaii or cradling a son's urn in a rocking chair — were tainted by a deception. It was as if those signposts of the grieving process had been torn away, unraveling months and years of working through their loved ones' deaths.
Some had nightmares of what their relatives' decayed bodies must have looked like. Others were anguished by the fear their family members' souls were trapped, unable to go free.
A mother, Crystina Page, demanded to watch as her son's body, rescued from the Return to Nature building, was cremated for real. Wilson, who thought she had already spread her mother's ashes in Hawaii, said the family cremated her mother's remains after they were recovered by authorities. She is waiting for the court cases to conclude before returning to Hawaii to spread the ashes.
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Brown reported from Billings, Montana.
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