In a rare move, an El Paso County judge on Friday rejected a plea agreement for Jon Hallford, who, with his wife, allegedly let roughly 190 bodies rot inside the Return to Nature funeral home south of Colorado Springs and sent fake ashes to grieving families.
Hallford would have likely been sentenced to 20 years in prison as part of the deal after pleading guilty to 191 counts of abuse of a corpse, a Class 6 felony. His sentence in the Department of Corrections would have run concurrent to — or at the same time as — the federal sentence of 20 years that he previously received.
Judge Eric Bentley, though, decided he “could not accept” the agreement after hearing from more than a dozen victims in court Friday calling for a harsher punishment…