Families reveal horrors of funeral home

WHEN he received his father’s ashes, a death certificate, and a folded American flag in December 2020, Rich Law assumed that the 86-year-old military veteran had been cremated.

The awful truth of what happened to Roger Law, who had died of Covid, did not become apparent until October last year when Rich was visited by the FBI, a representative of the coroner’s office and a victims’ advocate.

“They told me the remains I received were not, in fact, my father’s. They didn’t know what was given to me,” Mr Law, 63, said.

Mr Law senior’s body was one of 190 rotting corpses found stacked in the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, 100 miles south of Denver. He had been identified by his fingerprints, which had been stored as a result of his military service.

The corpses were found after residents complained of the smell emanating from the premises.

It took more than a month to remove the bodies from the building where “human decomposition fluids and insects” were said to cover the floors.

Carie and Jon Hallford, the proprietors of the funeral home, were arrested in Oklahoma after fleeing Colorado. They are facing 256 charges: 190 charges of abusing corpses, 61 of forging death certificates and five of theft, after charging for cremations that were never performed.

Their company had previously been lauded for its environmental credentials.

Return to Nature had capitalised on the growing popularity of green funerals. Embalmed bodies do not decompose naturally, and concrete vaults are considered to be environmentally costly.

As a result, there has been a growth in sales of biodegradable coffins, which decompose naturally into the earth along with the body inside.

Crystina Page, 44, was another one of the company’s clients. Her son, David, was 20 years-old when he died in 2019.

“I was notified on Sept 24 2023, that his body had been identified at the Return to Nature Funeral Home,” she told The Telegraph.

“We were in court. I had no idea at the time how awful it was going to get. Seeing their bodies in court was as bad a time as a mother can have.”

Her son was finally cremated on Nov 8 last year.

Other victims of the scam included Gary and Shelia Canfield-jones, who discovered that the body of their daughter Marella had been decaying for four years in the Colorado funeral home.

Marella was 38 when she died on Oct 8 2019. “My husband picked them out because they said they would plant a tree for her,” Mrs Canfield-jones told The Telegraph. “You don’t normally do business with funeral homes. You don’t really know what to look for.

“You assume that everybody is honourable and has compassion.”

Mrs Canfield-jones said she was contacted by the FBI on Oct 26. “They told us over and over again that it wasn’t our daughter’s ashes.”

Kelly Bennett, 44, still does not know if her aunt, Janet Mcgowan, who was supposedly cremated by Return to Nature, was one of those whose bodies were found.

“I should have got a document that she was cremated and there should have been a cremation tag. Neither of those has been given to me,” she told The Telegraph.

“We just don’t know, it’s heartbreaking. We may never know, that is where I have got to in my head: we may never know.”

‘You don’t normally do business with funeral homes. You don’t really know what to look for’