Funeral home owners plead guilty after nearly 200 decomposed bodies were found

Married co-owners of a funeral home in Colorado Nearly 200 rotting corpses They were found guilty of corpse abuse on Friday.

Jon and Carie Hallford managed Back to Nature Funeral Home, operating in the Colorado Springs area and Penrose, Colorado.

The shocking discovery was made at the Penrose location in October 2023 after the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office responded to reports from residents about a foul odor coming from the facility. Some of the bodies found died as far back as 2019, authorities said.

4th Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen, who prosecuted the case, said the duo pleaded guilty to 191 counts of abuse of a corpse. The counts include two instances where the wrong bodies were buried.

The judge accepted their pleas at Friday’s hearing, but has not yet accepted the plea agreements and will reserve a decision on that issue until sentencing next year, Allen said.

Carie Hallford faces 15 to 20 years in prison and Jon Hallford faces 20 years, the district attorney said.

Their sentencing is scheduled for April 18, 2025.

“Obviously this case has been a huge, emotional struggle for all the families involved,” Allen said Friday outside the El Paso County courthouse. he said. “The impact on these family members has been tremendous.”

He acknowledged that victims “will probably never recover” from the breach of trust, but that his office was honored to “obtain justice on their behalf.”

After the bodies were discovered, investigators uncovered a scheme in which the couple defrauded customers who believed their loved ones would be buried or cremated, according to court documents.

The couple previously admitted in a related federal lawsuit that they accepted payment for services but later never performed those services, in some cases providing dry concrete mix in pots rather than creams, according to court documents.

According to court documents, the couple admitted to collecting more than $130,000 from victims over four years for cremations or burials that they never performed. They also admitted to conspiring to defraud the U.S. Small Business Administration of more than $800,000 in Covid-19 pandemic relief funds, according to court documents.

Both pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the federal case. They are scheduled to be sentenced in this case on March 20, 2025. Prosecutors said they each face up to 20 years in federal prison.

Allen said it’s possible for the state prison sentence to run concurrently with the federal sentence.

At Friday’s hearing, Carie Hallford’s bail was canceled and she was taken into custody. His lawyer declined to comment to ABC News.

Jon Hallford was already in custody. He is represented by the public defender’s office, which does not comment on cases.