Funeral home owners who ‘stored bodies’ expected to plead guilty to Covid fraud
US funeral home owners accused of misspending nearly 900,000 dollars in Covid-19 pandemic relief funds and living lavishly, all while allegedly stashing 190 decaying bodies in a building and sending grieving families fake ashes, are expected to plead guilty to fraud charges.
Jon and Carie Hallford, owners of Return to Nature Funeral Home in the state of Colorado, have been charged with 15 offences related to defrauding the US government and the funeral home’s customers.
Additionally, over 200 criminal counts are already pending against them in Colorado state court, including for corpse abuse and forgery.
The Hallfords used the pandemic aid and customers’ payments to buy a GMC Yukon and Infiniti that together were worth over 120,000 dollars, laser body sculpting, trips to California, Florida and Las Vegas, 31,000 dollars in cryptocurrency and luxury items at stores like Gucci and Tiffany & Co, according to court documents.
The charges could carry up to 20 years in prison and 250,000 dollars in fines.
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 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 were not in the ashes that they ceremonially spread or held tight but were still languishing in a building.
The stories prompted Colorado legislators to patch the state’s lax funeral home regulations in 2024, requiring routine inspections of facilities and licensing for funeral home roles.