Grieving families who were cheated out of the respectful treatment they deserved when entrusting their dead to a Colorado funeral home will probably never see a penny of the $950 million civil judgment against the funeral home owners.
In the fall of 2023, investigators discovered 190 rotting corpses at and around the Return to Nature funeral home in Penrose, Colorado. Many families had paid for either cremation, or what is called a “green funeral,” and some were even given fake ashes by the funeral home owners.
Crystina Page is one of them. For four years she had what she believed were the cremated remains of her son, only to learn to her horror that his body was among those found abandoned to rot at the former mortuary. “I’m never going to get a dime from them,” Page said, describing the situation as frustrating.
The funeral home owners are Jon and Carrie Hallford, and they have not even bothered to show up in person for hearings in the now-decided civil case. Page called that a slap in the face to grieving families and defrauded customers. Jon Hallford is in jail, but his wife Carrie is still out on bail.
The lack of hope for any payment is not a surprise to the more than 100 families involved in the civil suit, though it disappoints. The Hallfords don’t have any money, and it seems likely they must have mismanaged their business very badly to have ended up mistreating and abandoning the bodies of people from almost 200 families.
A criminal case against the couple is proceeding, and they’re faced with multiple charges of abuse of a corpse, forgery, money-laundering, and theft. It is not clear whether a previously offered plea bargain to 190 counts of abuse of corpse is still available to the Hallfords.
The funeral home offered what are called “green” funerals. These are burials that do not involve chemical embalming (which is not required by law in most cases, contrary to popular misconception) or non-biodegradable coffins.
While critics have pointed out that Colorado does not require a license to operate a funeral home, there are laws governing the treatment of the dead just the same. Most other states require funeral homes to be licensed, but that has no relationship to whether a business owner turns out to be a criminal. Similar scandals have occurred in multiple states involving fully licensed and “state-certified” funeral homes.
The Hallfords were arrested in the fall of 2023 in Oklahoma as they were attempting to escape capture.
