COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The owner of a funeral home in Colorado, who admitted to mistreating 191 bodies, has retracted his guilty plea and will now face a trial. This follows a judge’s unusual decision to dismiss a plea agreement.
Relatives of the deceased, whose remains were found decomposed in a Penrose, Colorado building, demand a longer prison sentence than the 20-year term proposed in the plea deal.
For years, Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, operated a fraudulent scheme from their Return to Nature Funeral Home while living extravagantly, as per investigators. They are accused of taking payment for cremations, then hoarding the bodies and returning fake ashes—actually dry concrete—to families.
Jon Hallford has already been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in a separate fraud case.
The judge decided against the plea agreement after emotional testimonies were presented in a hearing last month. Jon Hallford is now scheduled for a jury trial starting February 9, anticipated to extend for a month or more.
The plea deal indicated that Hallford’s state sentence would be served concurrently with a 20-year federal sentence, allowing for an earlier release than if the sentences were served one after the other. State District Judge Eric Bentley noted this was his first time rejecting a plea deal in his nine-year tenure and described it as an “extreme action by the court.”
Under the law, abuse of a corpse is considered the least serious category of felony, with potential penalties ranging from probation to a maximum of 18 months in prison for each offense.
Carie Hallford was accused of the same crimes as her husband and pleaded guilty. She’s awaiting sentencing.
Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and, for many years, had some of the weakest regulations in the nation.
It’s had a slew of abuse cases, including 24 decomposing corpses discovered last month at a funeral home in Pueblo owned by the county coroner and his brother.
Investigators in the Pueblo case said this week that they had identified four of the bodies and further identifications could take a significant amount of time. No charges have been filed.
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