A couple is accused of leaving dozens of bodies abandoned, piled up in a building infested with insects. They charged $1200 to relatives of the deceased and replaced the ashes in the urns with dry cement.
An incident that rocked Colorado. Former owner of an “eco-friendly” funeral home in the American state, Carie Hallford, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Friday, April 24 for helping her ex-husband hide nearly 200 decomposing bodies, reported the Associated Press (AP). Her ex-husband Jon Hallford had already been sentenced to 40 years in prison in February for abuse of corpses.
The couple is accused of leaving dozens of bodies abandoned, piled up in a building that they owned, infested with insects. The nauseating odor emanating from the place alarmed the residents of Penrose, Colorado, who alerted the authorities in 2023. The accusation states that the two owners of this business, called Return to Nature, which offered a range of natural decomposition services, were “motivated by the desire for profit.”
“They were charging more than $1200 per customer, and authorities said the money spent on luxury items would have been enough to cover cremation costs,” explained the American press agency AP. This fraudulent system reportedly earned them $130,000, according to USA Today.
During the trial of the two managers, families of victims testified about their pain. They recounted how the Hallfords gave them false ashes instead of the incinerated remains. The urns were actually filled with dry cement. Some relatives of the victims urged the judge to impose the maximum penalty. Carie Hallford faced a sentence of 25 to 35 years in prison.
However, the judge judged that the accused had presented credible allegations of domestic violence committed by her ex-husband. Carie Hallford also apologized to the court, stating that she was raised to respect right from wrong, but lost her way.
AP reported that she held back tears as she declared that her marriage was “a complex tangle of lies, deceit, and abuse.” She claimed she was not a monster but deserved to be punished. Carie Hallford was the one in contact with the clients, while her ex-husband did most of the manual work.
This scandal led the state to crack down on the funeral industry, plagued by widespread corruption and notoriously lax oversight, according to AP. This same source specified that Colorado was the only American state that did not regulate funeral businesses before the recent adoption of new laws.
Since the Hallford case, a law requiring regular inspections has been adopted, and another establishes an accreditation system for funeral directors.
Last year, state inspectors, acting under the new law, discovered 24 decomposing bodies and numerous containers of bones behind a hidden door at a funeral home owned by the county coroner of Pueblo. This was the first inspection of this funeral establishment.
