By Jesse Bedayn, The Associated Press/Report for America
Colorado funeral home owners accused of misspending nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief funds and living lavishly, all while allegedly storing 190 decaying bodies in a building and sending grieving families fake ashes, pleaded guilty Thursday to federal fraud charges for defrauding customers.
Jon and Carie Hallford each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The plea agreement, which stipulates that prosecutors will not request over 15 years imprisonment, still has to be approved by the judge. It’s unclear when that will happen.
The owners of Return to Nature Funeral Home, about an hour’s drive south of Denver, had been charged with 15 federal offenses related to defrauding the U.S. government and the funeral home’s customers. More than 200 criminal counts are already pending against them in Colorado state court, including for corpse abuse and forgery.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Neff said after the hearing that the plea agreement includes both Hallfords admitting to COVID-19 fraud and committing fraud against customers.
The Hallfords used the pandemic aid and customers’ payments to buy a GMC Yukon and Infiniti that together were worth over $120,000, laser body sculpting, trips to California, Florida and Las Vegas, $31,000 in cryptocurrency and luxury items at stores like Gucci and Tiffany & Co., according to court documents.
Jon Hallford is being represented by the federal public defenders office, which does not comment on cases. Calls and emails to Carie Hallford’s lawyer in the federal case have not been returned, and her attorney in the state case, Michael Stuzynski, declined to comment.
The federal indictment arrived after last year's discovery of the 190 corpses in a bug-infested building owned by Return to Nature in Penrose, a small town southwest of Colorado Springs. The Hallfords allegedly stashed bodies as as far back as 2019, at times stacking them on top of each other, and in two cases buried the wrong body, according to court documents.
An investigation by The Associated Press found that the Hallfords likely sent fake ashes and fabricated cremation records to families who did business with them. Court documents allege that the dust inside some of the bags was dry concrete, not the cremated remains of lost loved ones.
The discovery devastated relatives of the deceased, who began learning that their family members' remains weren't in the ashes that they ceremonially spread or held tight but were still languishing in a building. The stories prompted Colorado lawmakers to patch the state's lax funeral home regulations in 2024, requiring routine inspections of facilities and licensing for funeral home roles.
Crystina Page, whose son’s body was left languishing in the funeral home after his death in 2019, spoke in court Thursday, saying she understood the plea deal was as close to justice as she was going to get, but that it “only scratches the surface of the atrocities they committed.”
“My son was one of those victims, he lost 60% of his body weight,” said Page, describing her son's body while in the funeral home's building. “Rats and maggots ate his face.”
