DENVER (AP) — The husband and wife owners of a funeral home accused of piling 190 bodies inside a room-temperature building in Colorado while giving grieving families fake ashes were expected to plead guilty Friday, charged with hundreds of counts of corpse abuse.
The discovery last year shattered families’ grieving processes. The milestones of mourning — the “goodbye” as the ashes were picked up by the wind, the relief that they had fulfilled their loved ones’ wishes, the moments cradling the urn and musing on memories — now felt hollow.
The couple, Jon and Carie Hallford, who own Return to Nature Funeral home in Colorado Springs, began stashing bodies in a dilapidated building outside the city as far back as 2019, according to the charges, giving families dry concrete in place of cremains.
While going into debt, the Hallfords spent extravagantly, prosecutors say. They used customers’ money — and nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief funds intended for their business — to buy fancy cars, laser body sculpting, trips to Las Vegas and Florida, $31,000 in cryptocurrency and other luxury items, according to court records.