'Green' Funeral Home Owner and Wife Arrested on Charges Connected to Handling of 190 Corpses
The owner of a “green” Colorado funeral home and his wife were arrested Wednesday in Oklahoma on charges linked to the discovery of 190 sets of decaying remains at one of their facilities, including some that had apparently been languishing there for four years.
Jon and Carie Hallford were jailed in Oklahoma on a $2 million bond on suspicion of four felonies — abuse of a corpse, theft, money laundering and forgery — after their arrest in Wagoner, east of Tulsa. They couldn’t be reached for comment.
During a news conference in Colorado Springs announcing the charges, District Attorney Michael Allen said authorities wouldn’t be releasing many details about the case in order to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation. But he said the charging documents, which will remain sealed, contain “absolutely shocking” information.
Some allegations have emerged, including from families accusing Return to Nature Funeral Home of giving them fake ashes instead of their relatives’ remains.
Allen and others described an ongoing process of identifying the remains using fingerprints, dental records, medical hardware and, if necessary, DNA. They have identified 110 of the 190 sets of remains, and have returned 25 to those people’s families.
Jon Hallford’s funeral home business is based in Colorado Springs and has a facility in Penrose, a small town about 100 miles south of Denver. Authorities found the remains on Oct. 4 while responding to a report of an “abhorrent smell” near the Penrose building.
Officials initially estimated there were about 115 bodies inside, but the number increased to 189 after they finished removing all the remains in mid-October. The total rose to 190 on Wednesday.
A day after the odor was reported, the director of the state Office of Funeral Home and Crematory Registration spoke by phone with Jon Hallford.
He tried to conceal the improper storage of corpses at his business, acknowledged having a “problem” at the site and claimed he practiced taxidermy there, according to an order from state officials dated Oct. 5.
It wasn’t clear if any of the charges pertained to the handling of bodies at the business’ Colorado Springs location. The couple’s arrests involved funeral home operations over a four-year period through September, the families were told.
Relatives of people whose remains were handled by the funeral home have feared that their loved ones weren’t cremated and were instead among the remains that authorities found.
At the news conference, Crystina Page clutched a red urn with what Return to Nature told her were the ashes of her 20-year-old son, David, who was shot and killed by law enforcement in 2019. For four years, she carried the urn from the Colorado Capitol to Washington, D.C., as she advocated for police reform.
Her son’s body was identified among the 190 discovered and was set to be cremated later Wednesday.
“For four years, I’ve marched all over this country with this urn believing it to be my son,” Page said, but “my son has been laying there rotting for four years. … It’s the most horrendous feeling I’ve ever had in my life.”
Page started a private Facebook group for affected families, which recently reached 50 members.
“This was intentional. And not only did they think about doing this, but they followed through with it, they concealed it and they did this to almost 200 families,” she said.
The company, which was started in 2017 and offered cremations and “green” burials without embalming fluids, kept doing business even as its financial and legal problems mounted in recent years.
The owners had missed tax payments in recent months, were evicted from one of their properties and were sued for unpaid bills by a crematory that quit doing business with them almost a year ago, according to public records and interviews with people who worked with them.
One family has filed a lawsuit accusing Return to Nature and the Hallfords of negligence, fraud, intentionally inflicting emotional distress and violating several Colorado laws, among other allegations.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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