A Colorado funeral home owner who stashed nearly 190 dead bodies in a decrepit building and sent grieving families fake ashes on Friday received the maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison, for cheating customers and defrauding the federal government out of nearly US$900,000 in COVID-19 aid.
Jon Hallford, owner of Return to Nature Funeral Home, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in federal court last year. Hallford also pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse in state court and would be sentenced in August.
At Friday’s hearing, federal prosecutors sought a 15-year sentence and Hallford’s attorney asked for 10 years.
Photo: Muskogee County Sheriff`s Office via AP
Judge Nina Wang said that although the case focused on a single fraud charge, the circumstances and scale of Hallford’s crime and the emotional damage to families warranted the longer sentence.
In court before the sentencing, Hallford told the judge that he opened Return to Nature to make a positive impact in people’s lives, “then everything got completely out of control, especially me.”
“I am so deeply sorry for my actions,” he said. “I still hate myself for what I’ve done.”
Hallford and his wife, Carie Hallford, were accused of storing the bodies between 2019 and 2023 and sending families fake ashes. Investigators found the bodies stacked atop each other throughout a squat, bug-infested building in Penrose, a small town about a two-hour drive south of Denver.
The discovery revealed to many families that their loved ones were not cremated and that the ashes they had spread or cherished were fake. In two cases, the wrong body was buried, court documents showed.
Many families said it undid their grieving processes. Some relatives had nightmares, others struggled with guilt and at least one wondered about their loved one’s soul.
Among the victims who spoke during the sentencing was a boy named Colton Sperry. With his head poking just above the lectern, he told the judge about his grandmother, who Sperry said was a second mother to him and died in 2019.
Her body languished inside the Return to Nature building for four years until the discovery, which plunged Sperry into depression.
“I miss my grandma so much,” he told the judge through tears.
Federal prosecutors accused both Hallfords of COVID-19 aid fraud, siphoning the money and spending it and customer’s payments on a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth more than US$120,000 combined, along with US$31,000 in cryptocurrency, luxury items from stores such Gucci and Tiffany & Co, and laser body sculpting.
Another victim, Derrick Johnson, told the judge that he traveled 4,830km to testify over how his mother was “thrown into a festering sea of death.”
“I lie awake wondering, was she naked? Was she stacked on top of others like lumber?” Johnson said.
“While the bodies rotted in secret, [the Hallfords] lived, they laughed and they dined,” he said. “My mom’s cremation money likely helped pay for a cocktail, a day at the spa, a first class flight.”
Jon Hallford’s attorney, Laura H. Suelau, asked for a lower sentence of 10 years, saying that Hallford “knows he was wrong, he admitted he was wrong” and has not offered an excuse.
Asking for a 15-year sentence for Hallford, Assistant US Attorney Tim Neff described the scene inside the building, saying that investigators could not move into some rooms, because the bodies were piled so high and in various states of decay.
FBI agents had to put boards down so they could walk above the fluid, which was later pumped out, Neff said.
Carie Hallford is scheduled to go to trial in the federal case in September, the same month as her next hearing in the state case in which she was also charged with 191 counts of corpse abuse.
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