Funeral home owner who stashed nearly 200 decaying bodies set to be sentenced for corpse abuse

Aug. 22, 2025:

DENVER (AP) — It’s been two years since nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered throughout a fetid, room temperature building in rural Colorado. On Friday (Aug. 22, 2025), the man responsible, a funeral home owner, is set to be sentenced in state court for 191 counts of corpse abuse.

Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, ran a morbid racket for four years out of their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs: assuring people they were handling their loved ones’ cremations only to stash the bodies in a bug-infested building and then giving them dry concrete resembling ashes.

Jon Hallford is already headed to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. Friday’s sentencing hearing will focus on state charges related to mistreatment of the bodies. Family members will have the chance to describe the anguish of learning a loved one slowly decayed among piles of others.

“To me it’s the heart of the case. It’s the worst part of the crime,” said Tanya Wilson, who is traveling from Georgia to speak at the sentencing. She hired the funeral home to cremate her mother and later discovered the supposed ashes the family spread in Hawaii weren’t from her mother’s body, which had been wasting away in the building in Penrose, a small town 35 miles from Colorado Springs.

A plea agreement calls for Hallford to receive a 20-year prison sentence for the corpse abuse charges.

Wilson said she and some other families want Judge Eric Bentley to reject the agreement because Hallford’s state sentence is expected to run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could be freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.

“The scale of this is staggering. Why does the state believe they deserve a plea deal?” Wilson asked. “There needs to be accountability.”

If the judge rejects the agreement, Hallford would not be immediately sentenced and the case would likely go to an arraignment, the first step toward a criminal trial, said Kate Singh with the Fourth Judicial District District Attorney’s Office.

Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and for many years had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. It’s had a slew of abuse cases, including an estimated 20 decomposing corpses discovered this week at a funeral home in Pueblo.

Carie Hallford is accused of the same crimes as her husband and also pleaded guilty. Her sentencing on the corpse abuse charges has not been scheduled.

The couple was accused of letting 189 bodies decay. In two other instances the wrong bodies were buried. Four remains have yet to be identified, Singh said.

The Hallfords got a license for their funeral home in 2017, and authorities said the bodies started piling up by 2019. Many languished for years in states of decay, some decomposed beyond recognition, some unclothed or on the floor in inches of fluid from the bodies.

As the gruesome count grew, Jon and Carie Hallford were also defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in COVID-19 era aid.

With the money from families and the federal government, the Hallfords bought ritzy items from stores like Tiffany & Co., a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth $120,000 combined, laser body sculpting and $31,000 in cryptocurrency.

In 2023, a putrid smell poured from the building and the police turned up. Investigators swarmed the building, donning hazmat suits and painstakingly extracting the bodies. Hallford and his wife were arrested in Oklahoma, where Jon Hallford had family, more than a month later.

Families learned that their cathartic moments of grief — spreading a mother’s ashes in Hawaii or cradling a son’s urn in a rocking chair — were tainted by a deception. It was as if those signposts of the grieving process had been torn away, unraveling months and years of working through their loved ones’ deaths.

Some had nightmares of what their relatives’ decayed bodies must have looked like. Others were anguished by the fear their family members’ souls were trapped, unable to go free.

A mother, Crystina Page, demanded to watch as her son’s body, rescued from the Return to Nature building, was cremated for real. Wilson, who had thought she already spread her mother’s ashes in Hawaii, said the family cremated her mother’s remains after they were recovered by authorities. She is waiting for the court cases to conclude before returning to Hawaii again to spread the ashes.

The Hallfords pleaded guilty in the federal case to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Jon Hallford has appealed his federal prison sentence. Carie Hallford faces a December sentencing in that case.

MAY 24, 2024:

DENVER (AP) — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed two bills into law Friday (May 24, 2024) that overhaul state oversight of the funeral home industry after a series of gruesome discoveries, including 190 discomposing bodies in a facility, families being sent fake ashes and the unauthorized sale of body parts.

The cases put Colorado’s lax funeral home regulations — some of the weakest in the nation — in the spotlight and rocked hundreds of already grieving families.

Some families had ceremonially spread ashes that turned out to be fake. Others said they had nightmares about what their loved ones might have looked like in a decayed state.

“When grieving the loss of a loved one, the last thing a family should worry about is the trustworthiness and professionalism of those entrusted to care for the person who has passed,” Polis said in a statement.

The new laws bring Colorado in line with most other states.

One requires regulators to routinely inspect funeral homes and give them more enforcement power. Another implements licensing for funeral directors and other workers in the industry. They would need to pass background checks and a national exam while possessing degrees and work experience.

Previously, funeral home directors in Colorado didn’t have to graduate from high school, let alone have a degree.

The funeral home industry was generally on board with the changes though some expressed concern that strict requirements for funeral home directors were unnecessary and would make it difficult to find hirable applicants.

The bill signings follow a rocky year for Colorado funeral homes.

In early October, neighbors noticed a putrid smell coming from a building in the town of Penrose about two hours south of Denver. Authorities soon found 190 decaying bodies there including adults, infants and fetuses.

Some were stacked atop each other. Decomposition fluid covered the floors while flies and maggots swarmed.

Almost two dozen bodies dated to 2019 and some 60 more were from 2020. As the bodies were identified, families who had received ashes learned the cremains weren’t their loved ones.

In most states, funeral homes are routinely inspected but no such rules were on the books in Colorado. The owners of the funeral home were arrested in November and collectively face hundreds of charges of abusing corpses and other counts.

Just months later, in February, a woman’s body was found in the back of hearse where a suburban Denver funeral home had left it for over a year. At least 30 sets of cremated remains were found stashed throughout the funeral director’s home.

NOVEMBER 9, 2023:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The owners of a Colorado funeral home have been arrested on charges linked to the discovery of 190 sets of decaying remains at one of their facilities. Some apparently had been languishing there for four years. Jon and Carie Hallford were arrested Wednesday (Nov. 8, 2023) in Oklahoma. A federal affidavit says investigators entered the Return to Nature Funeral Home building in the Rocky Mountain town of Penrose in early October to find “abhorrent” conditions with dozens of stacked bodies. The document says some bodies had 2019 death dates. The Hallfords have been jailed on $2 million bond.

Extended version:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The owners of a Colorado funeral home were arrested Wednesday (Nov. 8, 2023) in Oklahoma on charges linked to the discovery of 190 sets of decaying remains at one of their facilities, including some that apparently had been languishing there for four years.

Investigators entered the Return to Nature Funeral Home building in the Rocky Mountain town of Penrose in early October to find “abhorrent” conditions with dozens of stacked bodies, according to a federal affidavit that’s under seal in Colorado but available in Oklahoma.

Some bodies had 2019 death dates, according to the document.

“Law enforcement now knows the cremains each family was given could not have been their loved one,” reads the documents alleging funeral home owners Jon and Carie Hallford had fled Colorado to avoid prosecution.

The Hallfords were jailed on $2 million bond on a Colorado arrest warrant alleging approximately 190 counts of abuse of a corpse, five counts of theft, four counts of money laundering and over 50 counts of forgery — after their arrest in Wagoner, east of Tulsa. They’re set for an initial appearance on a federal fleeing charge on Nov. 9 in Muskogee.

They couldn’t be reached for comment and didn’t have attorneys listed in jail records. Neither has a listed personal phone number, and the funeral home’s number no longer works.

During a news conference in Colorado Springs announcing the charges Wednesday, District Attorney Michael Allen said authorities wouldn’t be releasing many details in order to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation. He said the charging documents contain information that is “absolutely shocking.”

Several families have told The Associated Press that the FBI told them privately that their loved ones were among the decaying bodies, meaning the ashes they were given weren’t their family members’. Those families were asked to give samples of the ashes they received to investigators to analyze.

Crystina Page is among the aggrieved relatives of the dead. She went to the news conference clutching a red urn with what Return to Nature told her were the ashes of her 20-year-old son, David, who was shot and killed by law enforcement in 2019. For four years, she carried the urn from the marble halls of the Colorado Capitol to Washington, D.C., as she advocated for police reform.

Her son’s actual body was set to be cremated later Wednesday.

“For four years, I’ve marched all over this country with this urn believing it to be my son,” Page said “My son has been laying there rotting for four years. … It’s the most horrendous feeling I’ve ever had in my life.”

Allen and others described an ongoing process of identifying the remains using fingerprints, dental records, medical hardware and, if necessary, DNA. They have identified 110 of the 190 sets of remains and have returned 25 to those people’s families.

The remains of Linda Martinez, 66, who died in 2020, were recently returned to relatives who originally thought they had interred her ashes in a cemetery.

“How do you store almost 200 people?” wondered her grandson, Michael Martinez, of Colorado Springs. “And how do you even stomach that?”

Investigators are in contact with 137 families, and Allen asked for anyone who might have worked for or with the Hallfords or done business with the funeral home going back to September 2019 to come forward. He also asked relatives of the yet-unidentified dead to contact their late loved ones’ dentists for records that might help the investigation.

The Hallfords’ funeral home business is based in Colorado Springs and has a facility in Penrose, a small town about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Denver. Authorities found the remains Oct. 4 while responding to a report of an “abhorrent smell” near the Penrose building.

Officials initially estimated there were about 115 bodies inside, but the number increased to 189 after they finished removing all the remains in mid-October. The total rose to 190 on Wednesday, though authorities didn’t explain the increase.

A day after the odor was reported, the director of the state office of Funeral Home and Crematory registration spoke by 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 dated Oct. 5.

Relatives of people whose remains were handled by the funeral home have feared that their loved ones weren’t cremated and were instead among the remains that authorities found. They said death certificates indicated that the remains were cremated at one of two crematories, but both crematories told the AP that they weren’t performing cremations for Return to Nature at the time of the dates on the certificates.

“This was intentional,” said Page, who started a private Facebook group for affected families. “And not only did they think about doing this, but they followed through with it, they concealed it and they did this to almost 200 families.”

As for the arrests, Page said, it “makes it feel like there’s an end in sight.”

Retired Army officer Tanya Wilson said her mother’s body was identified in the neglected remains found last month and believes the ashes Return to Nature had given her were fake. The bracelet left on the body of her mother, who sometimes three jobs to keep the family afloat, was returned to Wilson’s family with a substance left on it.

“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.

The company, which was started 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.

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.

NOVEMBER 8, 2023:

DENVER (AP) — A Colorado funeral home owner and his wife have been arrested after the decaying remains of at least 189 people were recently found at his facility. District Attorney Michael Allen said Wednesday (Nov. 8, 2023) that Jon and Carrie Hallford were arrested in Wagoner, Oklahoma, on suspicion of four felonies: abuse of a corpse, theft, money laundering and forgery. Jon Hallford owns Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, a town about 100 miles south of Denver. Authorities discovered the bodies at a funeral home building Oct. 4, 2023. Neighbors had noticed a bad smell for days. The Hallfords couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Jon Hallford is jailed in Muskogee County, Oklahoma.

OCTOBER 20, 2023:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Several families who sent loved ones to a Colorado funeral home where 189 decaying bodies were discovered fear they were given fake ashes. Death certificates and other evidence collected by The Associated Press suggests their loved ones weren’t cremated as claimed. They could instead be among the corpses authorities are trying to identify. Return to Nature Funeral Home gave families death certificates stating their loved ones’ remains had been handled by two crematories that told the AP this week that they were not performing cremation services for Return to Nature when the death certificates were received.

Extended version:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — A Colorado funeral home where 189 decaying bodies were discovered this month appears to have fabricated cremation records and may have given families fake ashes, according to information gathered by The Associated Press from customers and crematories.

The families that did business with Return to Nature Funeral Home fear their loved ones weren’t cremated at all and instead could be among the yet unidentified corpses authorities discovered after responding to a report of an “ abhorrent smell.”

“My mom’s last wish was for her remains to be scattered in a place she loved, not rotting away in a building,” said Tanya Wilson, who believes the ashes she spread in Hawaii in August were fake. “Any peace that we had, thinking that we honored her wishes, you know, was just completely ripped away from us.”

Return to Nature gave Wilson’s family and some others death certificates stating their loved ones’ remains had been handled by one of two crematories. But those businesses told the AP they were not performing cremations for Return to Nature on the dates included on the certificates.

Calls and texts sent to numbers listed for Return to Nature and owners Jon and Carie Hallford have gone unanswered since the discovery of the decaying bodies. No arrests have been made. Law enforcement officials have said Return to Nature’s owners were cooperating as investigators sought to determine any criminal wrongdoing.

The AP reviewed four death certificates shared by families. All list a crematory owned by Wilbert Funeral Services, but the deaths came at least five months after the company stopped doing cremations for the financially troubled Return to Nature Funeral Home last November. Lisa Epps, attorney for Wilbert, said members of at least 10 families told the company they had death certificates from after November.

A second crematory, Roselawn Funeral Home in Pueblo, Colorado, was contacted by a family last week that had a 2021 death certificate from Return to Nature listing Roselawn as the crematory. Roselawn did not do the cremation, said its manager, Rudy Krasovec.

None of the families the AP interviewed received an identification tag or certificate that experts say are usually given to ensure cremations are authentic. Members of all four families described a similar consistency of the ashes that seemed like dry concrete. Two mixed some ashes with water and said they solidified. Dry concrete has been used before by funeral homes to mimic human ashes.

Stephanie Ford said her dry-witted adrenaline junkie husband, Wesley Ford, had nightmares of waking up in a coffin and hated the idea of being buried and his body decaying.

“He wanted to be cremated,” she said, “and back to the earth quickly.”

Wesley Ford died in April, and Return to Nature handled the cremation. When Stephanie Ford learned of the grim discovery at the funeral home this month, her daughter, a physician, took a closer look at the ashes.

“Mom, that’s not dad,” she told her mother.

“I know logically it’s not my fault,” said Stephanie Ford, pushing the words through tears. “There’s a little bit of guilt on my part that I let him down.”

Public records show the Hallfords and their company, which opened in 2017 and offered cremations and “green” burials without embalming fluids, were beset by recent financial and legal troubles. Among the problems were a forced eviction, unpaid taxes and a lawsuit by Wilbert, which received a $21,000 judgment in June because Return to Nature failed to pay for “a couple hundred” cremations, Epps said.

When Return to Nature gave the ashes to Wilson’s family, her brother, Jesse Elliott, thought they were unusually heavy. Elliott confronted Carie Hallford about his concerns.

“Jesse, of course this is your mother,” Elliott recalled Hallford telling him after she handed him a June death certificate that said Wilbert handled the cremation.

With both siblings skeptical, Wilson took some of the ashes to a different funeral home for a second opinion. Funeral director Amber Flickinger from Platt’s Funeral Home told the AP that the ashes were unusually fine and dark, adding, “I’ve never seen anything that looks like that in the range of what cremated remains would typically expect to look like.”

After the bodies were found at Return to Nature, Michelle Johnston also became skeptical of the ashes that the funeral home said were of her husband, Ken, a retired UPS driver with a gentle demeanor. After mixing the ashes with water, she said, it looked like concrete.

“I was kind of getting to a place where I wasn’t losing it every day,” she said, and now, “I don’t know where my husband is.”

Properly cremated remains are made up of bone fragments that do not have any organic material left, which means they lack DNA that could be used to identify individuals, said Barbara Kemmis, director of the Cremation Association of North America. Sometimes RNA is preserved in the bone fragments, and that can distinguish if the ashes are from a male or female and if they are human or from another animal, she said.

Determining that ashes are fake can be more straightforward, particularly when they’ve been substituted with concrete. A simple test entails wetting the material and seeing if it hardens when it dries, Kemmis said. Real ashes won’t solidify and would stay brittle, said Faith Haug, who chairs the mortuary science program at Colorado’s Arapahoe Community College.

Authorities could be waiting to bring charges until they determine if there are any more improperly stored bodies, said Ian Farrell, a criminal law expert at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.

Potential charges under state law could include misdemeanor violations of mortuary regulations and misdemeanor fraud, Farrell said. Each body could result in separate charges, meaning potential fines topping $1 million. The maximum consecutive sentence for misdemeanors is 2 years in jail, he said.

If any federal charges were brought, the penalties potentially could be more severe. In January, a Colorado funeral home operator accused of illegally selling body parts and giving clients fake ashes received a 20-year prison sentence for federal mail fraud.

Abby Swoveland hired Return to Nature when her mother, Sally Swoveland, passed away. The senior Swoveland had run a muzzleloader gun shop called The Mountain Man for nearly 50 years with a sense of humor and a sharp tongue.

When Abby Swoveland called Wilbert Funeral Services, listed on the death certificate, and learned they had long ago stopped doing business with Return to Nature, she was devastated.

“It completely has undone any healing that was taking place,” Swoveland said.

OCTOBER 6, 2023, UPDATE:

CAÑON CITY, Colo. (AP) — Police say they have found at least 115 bodies at Colorado ‘green’ funeral home under investigation for improper handling of remains. Authorities are investigating the Return to Nature Funeral Home outside Colorado Springs that performs “green” burials without embalming chemicals or metal caskets. Fremont County Sheriff Allen Cooper said they are coordinating with other agencies to determine if there is any wrongdoing. Family members who used the funeral home were asked to contact the sheriff’s office. A woman who lives near the funeral home said Thursday that she had noticed a putrid smell in the area in recent weeks. Authorities say they believe there is currently no health risk to the public.

Extended version:

CAÑON CITY, Colo. (AP) — Police said Friday (Oct. 6, 2023) they have found at least 115 bodies at Colorado ‘green’ funeral home under investigation for improper handling of remains.

Fremont County Sheriff Allen Cooper said they are coordinating with other agencies to determine if there is any wrongdoing.

The Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, performed “green” burials without embalming chemicals or metal caskets.

The investigation centered on a building owned by the funeral home where local residents reported smelling a foul stench before police became involved.

Deputies were called to the single-story building on Tuesday night in reference to a suspicious incident. Fremont County Sheriff’s Office investigators returned the next day with a search warrant and found the improperly stored remains.

Authorities said Friday at the press conference they believe there is currently no health risk to the public. They declined to describe in detail the scene inside the 2,500-square-foot (232-square-meter) facility next door to the town’s post office, the size of an average U.S. home.

“It is not clear if a crime has been committed, that is a focus of the investigation at the state and federal level,” FBI spokeswoman Vikki Migoya said.

Investigators were in touch with the funeral home operators and they were cooperating, Cooper said.

Penrose is a town of about 3,000 people.

Trash bags could be seen outside the entrance of the company’s building, with two law enforcement vehicles parked in front. Yellow police tape cordoned off the area and a putrid odor pervaded the air.

A hearse was parked at the back of the building, in a parking lot overgrown with weeds. Near the squat building was a post office and a few scattered homes, spaced out between dry grass and empty lots with parked semi-trucks.

Under Colorado law, green burials are legal but state code requires that any body not buried within 24 hours must be properly refrigerated.

Joyce Pavetti, 73, can see the funeral home from the stoop of her house and said she caught whiffs of a putrid smell in the last few weeks.

“We just assumed it was a dead animal,” she said. On Wednesday night, Pavetti said she could see lights from law enforcement swarming around the building and knew something was going on.

The building has been occupied by different businesses over the years, said Pavetti, who once took yoga classes there. She hasn’t seen anyone in the area recently and noticed the hearse behind the building only in recent months, she said.

Neighbor Ron Alexander thought the smell was coming from a septic tank, adding that Wednesday night’s blur of law enforcement lights “looked like the 4th of July.”

The father of a 25-year-old U.S. Navy serviceman who died last summer said Return to Nature handled his son’s body between the time of its arrival back in Colorado and an Aug. 25 funeral service at Pikes Peak National Cemetery east of Colorado Springs.

“I mean, there’s obviously questions after hearing that there is something going on but there’s not any information that I can go off of to really make any kind of judgement on it,” said Paul Saito Kahler, of Fountain, Colorado.

The Return to Nature Funeral Home provides burial of non-embalmed bodies in biodegradable caskets, shrouds or “nothing at all,” according to its website. The company also provides cremation services. Messages left for the Colorado Springs-based company were not immediately returned.

“No embalming fluids, no concrete vaults. As natural as possible,” it says on its website.

The company charges $1,895 for a “natural burial.” That doesn’t include the cost of a casket and cemetery space, according to the website.

The funeral home also performs cremations that involve no chemicals or unnatural materials — “just you and the Earth, returning to nature,” according to its website.

Return to Nature was established six years ago in Colorado Springs, according to public records.

Fremont County property records show that the funeral home building and lot are owned by Hallfordhomes, LLC, a business with a Colorado Springs address that the Colorado Secretary of State declared delinquent on Oct. 1 for failing to file a routine reporting form that was due at the end of July.

The LLC changed addresses around Colorado Springs three times since its establishment in 2016 with a post office box. Hallfordhomes still owes about $5,000 in 2022 property taxes on its building in Penrose, according to Fremont County records.

A green burial refers to burying bodies that have not been embalmed. That’s different from human composting, in which the body is placed in a vessel and transformed into soil.

The Return to Nature Funeral Home was licensed in Colorado Springs in 2017. There were no disciplinary actions against the company listed on a state license database. There was not a separate license for the Penrose facility and it wasn’t known if one was needed. Messages left with licensing authorities were not immediately returned.

OCTOBER 6, 2023:

PENROSE, Colo. (AP) — Authorities in Colorado said Thursday (Oct. 5, 2023) they were investigating the improper storage of human remains at a funeral home that performs “green” burials without embalming chemicals or metal caskets.

The investigation centers on a building owned by the Return to Nature Funeral Home outside Colorado Springs in the small town of Penrose.

Deputies were called to the single-story building Tuesday night in reference to a suspicious incident. Investigators returned the next day with a search warrant and found the improperly stored remains, the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office said. The number of human remains found and their condition were not specified.

The sheriff’s office said it was working with state and federal officials on the investigation. Family members who used the funeral home were asked to contact the sheriff’s office. More details were expected to be released by officials at a scheduled news conference Friday morning.

Trash bags could be seen Thursday outside the entrance of the company’s building, with two law enforcement vehicles parked in front. Yellow police tape cordoned off the area and a putrid odor pervaded the air.