'Terrible' funeral home owners plead guilty to federal fraud charges

Carie and Jon Hallford have pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges, a year after the married couple fled Colorado, leaving 190 decomposed bodies at funeral homes. They were accused of taking money from customers and pandemic relief funds and spending it on themselves, paying for expenses such as travel, plastic surgery and expensive cars.

The couple was charged with numerous state and federal crimes. in April, they were accused 15 federal indictments on wire fraud and conspiracy charges.

The Hallfords were set to begin a jury trial on fraud charges last week, but as that date approached they wanted to change their plea. They pleaded guilty at a hearing Thursday afternoon, which victims’ families could listen to via audio conference.

“The plea agreement, which stipulates that prosecutors will not seek a prison sentence of more than 15 years, still needs to be approved by the judge.” Associated Press reports. “It’s unclear when that will happen.”

Federal prosecutors said the duo ran two fraud schemes with a combined net proceeds of just under $1 million. On the one hand, they transferred $882,300 from a COVID-19 relief fund for businesses; On the other hand, they victimized customers who paid to have their loved ones’ remains treated legally and respectfully.

The Hallfords’ Back to Nature Funeral Home had touted its service as being more natural, promising to cremate or bury bodies without the use of embalming fluids or metal caskets.

But in reality, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Neff said at a hearing earlier this year that Hallford’s funeral home had “become a horrific and horrific house of horrors where bodies were stacked like wood and left to rot and rot.”

Hypocrisy exposed a year agowhen law enforcement was alerted to a “horrible” odor coming from the Hallfords’ facility in Penrose, Colo.

For several years, families had been given containers purportedly containing the remains of their loved ones; However, after discovering the crime scene at the funeral home last October, law enforcement concluded that the ashes could not be from the bodies sent to the funeral home.

In August, a judge presiding over a civil case instructed the Hallfords to: will pay $950 million to families the remains of loved ones were mishandled; It was seen as a symbolic decision given the lack of significant assets.

In the early summer of 2020, the Hallfords were discussing the escalating problem at their main facility, according to text messages cited in court hearings. In them, Jon Hallford repeatedly expressed the difficulty of finding a way to get rid of the bodies and the threat of exposure.

In October 2020, he sent his wife a text saying they had four possible options: building a new crematorium machine; dig a hole and use lye on the corpses; burn the bodies in a pit; or “(d) I’ll go to jail, which is probably what’s going to happen.”

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