A pair of former funeral home owners who stashed 190 decaying bodies at their Colorado facility instead of cremating them also stole nearly $900,000 in federal pandemic relief funds, newly unsealed court documents reveal.
Jon and Carie Hallford, already charged with abusing corpses, now have 15 fraud counts added to the list that could slap them with up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. The indictment filed by the U.S. attorney for the District of Colorado alleges that from March 2020 to October 2021, they fraudulently obtained three pandemic-relief loans totaling $882,300 and used the funds to buy everything from cars to lavish vacations, cryptocurrency, jewelry and cosmetic procedures.
The pair were plagued by debt and lawsuits over unpaid cremations even as they raked in $130,000 in fees for cremations and burial services that never happened.
Public records even before the indictment was unsealed showed that the Hallfords had not paid their taxes, were evicted from one of their properties and got sued by a crematory for nonpayment.
Regulators, however, did not notice until neighbors complaining of a putrid smell emanating from Return to Nature Funeral Home prompted a search that revealed the scores of bodies last fall.
The money the Hallfords spent on a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti alone — more than $120,000 — could have covered cremation costs twice over for the bodies found rotting in their “green” facility last October. Adults, infants and fetuses were stored at room temperature in a maggot-infested room in several inches of bodily fluids in the Penrose, Colo., facility, an FBI agent testified in January.
The couple had given ashes to families along with fake cremation records saying Wilbert Funeral Services had performed the service. Wilbert’s owners denied doing so.
They were arrested in November. The horrific discovery has sparked a push for more stringent regulation in Colorado, which has some of the weakest rules in the nation for treatment of bodies.
With News Wire Services
