A judge in the US state of Colorado has handed a funeral home owner, who stashed 191 dead bodies on his premises, a 20-year prison sentence for cheating customers and defrauding the federal government.
Federal prosecutors had sought a 15-year sentence for Jon Hallford, the owner of Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado, where he and his wife, Carie Hallford, stored bodies between 2019 and 2023 and sent families fake ashes.
At Friday’s hearing, US District Judge Nina Wang said the circumstances and scale of John Hallford’s crimes, as well as the emotional damage to families he inflicted, warranted a longer sentence.
“This is not an ordinary fraud case,” Judge Wang said.
Investigators were called to the dilapidated, insect-infested building in the small town of Penrose, about 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of Denver, in 2023 after reports of an “abhorrent smell” coming from the property.
At trial, investigators described finding the bodies stacked on top of each other and being unable to move into some rooms because they were piled so high with human remains.
FBI agents also had to put boards down so they could walk around the crime scene and above the bodily fluid that had pooled on the ground.
The morbid discovery by investigators in 2023 revealed for the first time to many families that the ashes they had received from Return to Nature were fake. Court documents showed Hallford had sent families urns filled with dry concrete mix, and in two cases, the wrong body had been buried.
In separate charges, Jon Hallford has pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse in state court. He is scheduled to be sentenced for those charges in August.
Carie Hallford is scheduled to go to trial in the federal case in September. That same month, she will attend her next hearing in the state case, in which she’s also charged with 191 counts of corpse abuse.v
