Owner of Colorado funeral home and his wife arrested after 189 bodies found
The owner of a Colorado funeral home and his wife were arrested on Wednesday after the decaying remains of at least 189 people were recently found at his facility.
Jon and Carie Hallford were arrested in Wagoner, Oklahoma, on suspicion of four felonies – abuse of a corpse, theft, money laundering and forgery – the district attorney, Michael Allen, said in a news release after at least some of the aggrieved families were told.
Jon Hallford owns the Return to Nature funeral hjome in Penrose, a small town about 100 miles (160km) south of Denver. The remains were found on 4 October by authorities responding to a report of an “abhorrent smell” inside the company’s decrepit building. Officials initially estimated there were about 115 bodies inside, but the number later increased to 189 after they finished removing all the remains in mid-October.
A day after the odor was reported, the director of the state office of funeral home and crematory registration spoke on the phone with Jon Hallford. He tried to conceal the improper storage of corpses at his business, acknowledged having a “problem” at the site and claimed he practiced taxidermy there, according to an order from state officials.
The funeral home also had a location in Colorado Springs, but it wasn’t clear if any of the charges pertained to the handling of bodies at that location. The couple’s arrests involved funeral home operations over a four-year period through September, the families were told.
Relatives of people whose remains were handled by the funeral home have feared that their loved ones were not cremated and were instead among the remains that authorities found. They said death certificates indicated the remains were cremated at one of two crematories, but both crematories told the Associated Press that they were not performing cremations for Return to Nature at the time of the dates on the certificates.
One of the aggrieved family members, Tanya Wilson, said her mother’s body was among the neglected remains found last month and that ashes that Return to Nature told her family were her mother’s were not. After law enforcement officials identified the body of her mother, who Wilson said cooked unbeatable Korean dishes and sometimes worked three jobs to keep the family afloat, they gave Wilson the jewelry left on the body. Some substance was left on the bracelet, she said.
“I don’t think any amount of jail/ prison time will justify my brother having to clean my mother’s rotting flesh off her bracelet that they gave back to us. Nothing,” Wilson said in a text to the AP. Regarding the arrests, she said: “It’s just one step in a long process. I don’t feel any satisfaction from this.”
The company, which was founded in 2017 and offered cremations and “green” burials without embalming fluids, kept doing business even as its financial and legal problems mounted in recent years. The owners had missed tax payments in recent months, were evicted from one of their properties and were sued for unpaid bills by a crematory that quit doing business with them almost a year ago, according to public records and interviews with people who worked with them.
Colorado has some of the weakest oversight of funeral homes in the nation, with no routine inspections or qualification requirements for funeral home operators.
There is no indication state regulators visited the site or contacted Hallford until more than 10 months after the Penrose funeral home’s registration expired in November 2022. State lawmakers gave regulators the authority to inspect funeral homes without owners’ consent last year, but no additional money was provided for increased inspections.
One family has filed a lawsuit accusing Return to Nature and the Hallfords of negligence, fraud, intentionally inflicting emotional distress and violating several Colorado laws, among other allegations.
Neither Jon Hallford nor his wife could immediately be reached for comment.