Owner of funeral home with nearly 200 decaying bodies admits to fraud

The owner of a Colorado funeral home who promised so-called green burials but instead hid nearly 200 decaying bodies at the business pleaded guilty to fraud in federal court Monday, according to court documents.

The woman, Carie Hallford, ran the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, about 100 miles south of Denver, with her husband, Jon Hallford. The couple advertised burials that included biodegradable caskets and shrouds. But a foul smell emanating from the business led investigators to discover at least 190 corpses at the site in 2023, in a scene that the county sheriff called “horrific.”

The Hallfords had been leaving bodies to decompose at the site for years, according to prosecutors. They gave families urns filled with concrete dust instead of the ashes of the deceased and provided the wrong bodies for cemetery burials.

On Monday, Carie Hallford pleaded guilty as part of a plea agreement in the U.S. District Court in Colorado to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a charge that carries up to 20 years in prison. She will also pay a fine of up to $250,000 and restitution of more than $1 million to victims, according to the plea agreement.

Hallford, who is scheduled to be sentenced in December, had previously pleaded guilty to federal charges, but a judge rejected that agreement because it capped her sentence at 15 years. Jon Hallford, who pleaded guilty to similar federal charges last year, was given 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence, in June.

Prosecutors in the cases accused the Hallfords of two main schemes: Cheating customers by selling cremation services without performing them and defrauding the Small Business Administration of more than $800,000 through fraudulent COVID-19 pandemic relief loan applications.

Carie Hallford was largely responsible for bookkeeping and interacting with customers, while Jon Hallford transported the bodies and prepared them for cremation or funerals, prosecutors said.

Instead of cremating the corpses, the Hallfords left the bodies “in various states of decay and decomposition” at the funeral home, according to court documents. They hid the activity, which began as early as 2019, by covering the windows and doors and lying about the source of the odor emanating from the building.

Outside the courthouse Monday, Crystina Page, whose son David died in 2019, told The Associated Press she was disappointed that the Hallfords’ cases were not going to trial. Her son’s body was left in a deactivated refrigerator at the funeral home for four years, she said.

“We still don’t know the truth of what they’ve done to us,” she said.

Prosecutors estimated that the couple earned $130,000 in cremation services that they never provided, while spending thousands on vacations, cryptocurrency, laser body sculpting, jewelry from Tiffany & Co., and shopping on Amazon.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Colorado, which has been prosecuting the cases against the Hallfords, declined to comment Tuesday morning on Carie Hallford’s plea deal. A lawyer for her also declined to comment. A lawyer for Jon Hallford did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Hallfords previously pleaded guilty to multiple counts of corpse abuse in a separate state case last year. They are both awaiting sentencing in that case.

In Colorado, the case against the Hallfords has helped lead to a push by lawmakers to regulate the funeral home industry. The state did not require education, certification and licensure for employees in the funeral home industry.

In May 2024, Gov. Jared Polis signed two bills into law that implemented licensing for those who work in the industry and required regulators to routinely inspect funeral homes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.