A funeral home owner, who engaged in the distressing act of hiding 190 decomposing bodies in a vermin-infested building and providing bereaved families with counterfeit ashes, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Jon Hallford, co-owner of the Return to Nature Funeral Home in southern Colorado, was sentenced in federal court on Friday.
The 44-year-old pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud over a gruesome scheme that shocked the nation.
He confessed to deceiving clients and misappropriating almost $900,000 intended as Covid-19 relief for struggling businesses, spending the money on extravagant shopping sprees, laser body sculpting, luxury vehicles, and cryptocurrency investments.
His sentence is five years more than prosecutors requested, and double what his own lawyer pushed for.
“I am so deeply sorry for my actions,” Hallford told the judge.
“I still hate myself for what I’ve done.”
He expressed his initial intention to open the funeral home with the aim of “making a positive impact in people’s lives,” but confessed: “Then everything spiraled completely out of control, including myself.”
Bodies piled up ‘like lumber‘
Hallford and his wife, Carie Hallford, who co-owned the funeral home, ran their grisly scam between 2019 and 2023.
Investigators were first alerted in October last year when neighbours in Penrose, a tiny town two hours south of Denver, complained of a foul stench.
Cops who turned up made a stomach-churning discovery — at least 190 bodies stacked atop each other in various states of decay, so badly decomposed that FBI agents had to lay boards over the sludge to navigate the rooms.
Some corpses had been left there for years, including the body of Colton Sperry’s grandmother who died in 2019.
In court on Friday, the young boy tearfully told the judge he fell into a deep depression when he found out.
He told his parents at the time: “If I die too, I could meet my grandma in heaven and talk to her again.”
His father later rushed him to hospital for a mental health check, which led to therapy and an emotional support dog.
Another victim, Derrick Johnson, travelled nearly 3,000 miles to tell the court how his mother was “thrown into a festering sea of death”.
“I lie awake wondering: was she naked? Was she stacked on top of others like lumber?” he said.
“While the bodies rotted in secret, [the Hallfords] lived, they laughed and they dined.
“My mom’s cremation money likely helped pay for a cocktail, a day at the spa, a first-class flight.”
Two families even buried the wrong bodies after being sent urns of worthless dust — devastating relatives who said it destroyed their ability to properly grieve.
Lavish spending spree
Federal prosecutors revealed the Hallfords drained the pandemic aid and clients’ money to bankroll a lavish lifestyle.
They splashed out on a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti worth over $120,000 combined, snapped up Gucci and Tiffany jewellery, spent $31,000 on cryptocurrency, and paid for laser body sculpting treatments.
The sentencing also included an order for Jon Hallford to pay more than $1 million in restitution — with $193,000 to be divided among the victims’ families and the rest to the Small Business Administration.
Hallford will serve his 20-year term concurrently with a state sentence expected in August, after he pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse and hundreds of other state charges including forgery and money laundering.
Meanwhile, his wife Carie withdrew her guilty plea in the federal case earlier this year and will now go to trial in September.
She also faces 191 counts of corpse abuse in the state case.
The pair were arrested in Oklahoma last November after going on the run.
By then, the decaying funeral home had already been torn down.
