Colorado funeral home owner sentenced to 20 years after stashing decaying bodies

The owner of a Colorado funeral home received the maximum prison sentence after he was found guilty of stashing nearly 190 bodies in a decrepit building and sending families fake ashes instead of their loved ones.

Jon Hallford, owner of Return to Nature Funeral Home, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Friday for cheating customers and defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in COVID-19 aid. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in federal court last year.

Separately, Hallford pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse in state court and will be sentenced in August.

During Friday’s hearing, federal prosecutors asked for a 15-year sentence while Hallford’s attorney requested 10 years.

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Judge Nina Wang said that despite the case only focusing on a single fraud charge, the circumstances and scale of Hallford’s crime, as well as the emotional impact on the families, warranted the maximum sentence.

“This is not an ordinary fraud case,” she said.

Ahead of the sentencing, Hallford told the judge that he opened the funeral home to make a positive impact on people’s lives before “everything got completely out of control, especially me.”

“I am so deeply sorry for my actions,” he said. “I still hate myself for what I’ve done.”

Hallford and his wife, Carie, were accused of storing the bodies between 2019 and 2023 and sending families fake ashes. Investigators found the bodies in 2023 stacked on top of each other throughout a squat, bug-infested building in Penrose, Colorado.

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Investigators could not move into some rooms because the bodies were piled so high and in various states of decay. FBI agents had to put boards down so they could walk above the fluid.

Many families learned after the discovery that their loved ones were not cremated and that the ashes they had received were fake. In two cases, the wrong body was buried.

Some relatives had nightmares, others have struggled with guilt and at least one wondered about their loved one’s soul.

Victim Colton Sperry spoke during Friday’s sentencing and told the judge about his grandmother, who he said was a second mother to him and died in 2019, according to The Associated Press.

Her body was inside the Return to Nature building for four years until the discovery, which Sperry said pushed him into depression.

He said he told his parents at the time, “If I die too, I could meet my grandma in heaven and talk to her again.” He was eventually taken to the hospital for a mental health check, which led to therapy and an emotional support dog.

“I miss my grandma so much,” he told the judge in tears.

Federal prosecutors accused both Hallfords of pandemic aid fraud, siphoning the money and spending it and customers’ payments on a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth over $120,000 combined, as well as $31,000 in cryptocurrency, luxury items from stores such as Gucci and Tiffany & Co., and laser body sculpting.

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Another victim, Derrick Johnson, told the judge that he traveled 3,000 miles to testify about how his mother was “thrown into a festering sea of death,” The AP reported.

“I lie awake wondering, was she naked? Was she stacked on top of others like lumber?” said Johnson.

“While the bodies rotted in secret, (the Hallfords) lived, they laughed and they dined,” he added. “My mom’s cremation money likely helped pay for a cocktail, a day at the spa, a first-class flight.”

Carie Hallford is scheduled to go to trial in the federal case in September, the same month as her next hearing in the state case in which she is also charged with 191 counts of corpse abuse.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.