Case against funeral home owners delayed until June
COLORADO SPRINGS>> A judge on Thursday granted a defense request to delay the criminal case against two Colorado funeral home operators accused of letting nearly 200 corpses decay, in some cases for years, angering some families of the deceased who are eager for the case to be resolved.
Jon and Carie Hallford are now scheduled to enter pleas to the numerous felony charges they face in June, with a tentative trial date in October. That would be a year after the corpses were discovered in a decrepit, bug-infested building. Prosecutors did not object to the defense request for a delay, which attorneys for the couple said was necessary to prepare their case.
“Every single time this is postponed or this is dragged out, it just reopens that whole wound all over again,” Heather Dewolf said after the hearing. She wore a shirt with a photo of her son, Zach Dewolf, who died at age 33 in 2020. His remains were handled by the Hallford’s funeral home but haven’t been identified among the bodies that were found.
Before a previous hearing, Dewolf confronted Jon Hallford outside the court room, demanding: “What have you done with my son? Where is my son?”
Dewolf said Thursday that she’s living through “the deepest sorrow that I have ever experienced in my life.”
The Hallfords were arrested in Oklahoma in November and accused of corpse abuse, falsifying death certificates and sending fake ashes to families.
They operated Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs and a storage facility in the small town of Penrose where the bodies were found.
They also face charges of money laundering, and prosecutors say they spent payments received from families of the deceased on cryptocurrency, a $1,500 dinner in Las Vegas and two vehicles with a combined worth over $120,000.
The disturbing details of the case left families grasping for answers, their grieving processes shattered after the deaths of sons, grandmothers and parents. Some have said they can’t shake thoughts of what their decaying relatives’ bodies must have looked like.
It’s one of several criminal cases to rock Colorado’s funeral industry. One funeral home was accused of selling body parts between 2010 and 2018, and last month, the owner of another funeral business in Denver was arrested after authorities say he left a woman’s body in the back of a hearse for more than a year and hoarded cremated remains at his home.
The horror stories follow years of inaction by state lawmakers to bring Colorado’s lax funeral home regulations up to par with the rest of the country. The state does not conduct routine inspections of funeral homes and has no educational requirements for funeral home directors. They don’t need a high school degree, let alone a degree in mortuary science, or to pass an exam. Colorado lawmakers have proposed bills to overhaul funeral home oversight. They would require routine inspections and hefty licensing requirements for funeral home directors and other industry roles.
The Hallfords each face about 190 counts of abuse of a corpse, along with charges of theft, money laundering and forgery.