Woman’s corpse and 30 cremated remains found after ex-funeral home owner gets evicted from house
DENVER — A financially troubled former funeral home owner kept a deceased woman’s body in a hearse for two years at a house where police also found the cremated remains of at least 30 people, authorities said Friday in the latest case to underscore lax oversight of Colorado’s funeral industry.
DENVER — A financially troubled former funeral home owner kept a deceased woman’s body in a hearse for two years at a house where police also found the cremated remains of at least 30 people, authorities said Friday in the latest case to underscore lax oversight of Colorado’s funeral industry.
The grisly discovery occurred Feb. 6 during a court-ordered eviction of a house rented by Miles Harford, the 33-year-old owner of Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services in the Denver suburb of Littleton, police said. It had been closed since September 2022.
“Mr. Harford appears to have experienced financial trouble in his business. At times he was not able to complete cremations to provide remains to families for services,” Denver Police Cmdr. Matt Clark said Friday. He said on occasion, Harford might have provided family members with another person’s ashes instead of the ashes of their loved ones.
Temporary urns — plastic boxes the size of a shoe box — were found in the crawl space of the house while a Denver sheriff’s deputy oversaw the removal of Harford’s belongings, Clark said. Some of the boxes were empty.
Other urns were found in a moving truck parked outside and still others were in a hearse, where investigators found the woman’s body covered with blankets, Clark said. Harford said she died in August of 2022.
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