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FUNERAL HOME OWNER AND WIFE ARRESTED AFTER REMAINS OF AT LEAST 189 PEOPLE ARE
FOUND AT FACILITY

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.


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Nov. 8, 2023, 11:41 AM EST / Source: The Associated Press
By The Associated Press

DENVER — The owner of a Colorado funeral home and his wife have been arrested
after the decaying remains of at least 189 people were recently found at his
facility.

Jon and Carrie Hallford were arrested in Wagoner, Oklahoma, on suspicion of
three felonies: abuse of a corpse, money laundering and forgery, authorities
said in an email to aggrieved families. Jon Hallford is being held at the
Muskogee County, Oklahoma, jail, though there aren’t any records showing that
his wife might also be there, according to a man who answered a call to the jail
but refused to give his name.




The Hallfords couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Wednesday. Neither has
a listed personal phone number and the funeral home’s number no longer works.



Jon Hallford owns Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, a small town about
100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Denver. The remains were found Oct. 4 by
authorities responding to a report of an “abhorrent smell” inside the company’s
decrepit building. Officials initially estimated there were about 115 bodies
inside, but the number later increased to 189 after they finished removing all
the remains in mid-October.


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A day after the odor was reported, the director of the state office of Funeral
Home and Crematory registration spoke on the phone with Hallford. He tried to
conceal the improper storage of corpses in Penrose, acknowledged having a
“problem” at the site and claimed he practiced taxidermy there, according to an
order from state officials dated Oct. 5.

The Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colo. on Oct. 16, 2023.David
Zalubowski / AP

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.



Colorado has some of the weakest oversight of funeral homes in the nation with
no routine inspections or qualification requirements for funeral home operators.

There’s no indication state regulators visited the site or contacted Hallford
until more than 10 months after the Penrose funeral home’s registration expired
in November 2022. State lawmakers gave regulators the authority to inspect
funeral homes without the owners’ consent last year, but no additional money was
provided for increased inspections.



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