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

DENVER — It’s been two years since nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered throughout a fetid, room-temperature building in rural Colorado.

DENVER — It’s been two years since nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered throughout a fetid, room-temperature building in rural Colorado. On Friday, 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 the 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.