Jon Hallford, the owner of a Colorado funeral home where nearly 190 bodies were found decomposing in a decrepit building, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for defrauding customers and the federal government. The sentence, handed down in federal court on Friday, was five years more than prosecutors had sought and double what his defence lawyer requested.
Hallford, who ran Return to Nature funeral home with co-owner Carie Hallford, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud last year. He is due to be sentenced in August in a separate state case in which he admitted 191 counts of corpse abuse. Investigators discovered the bodies stacked throughout a bug-infested building in Penrose, about two hours south of Denver, in 2023, revealing that families had been sent fake ashes.
During the hearing, victims described the emotional toll. A boy named Colton Sperry told the judge his grandmother's body had lain in the building for four years, plunging him into depression. “I miss my grandma so much,” he said. Derrick Johnson, who travelled 3,000 miles to testify, said his mother had been “thrown into a festering sea of death”, adding: “While the bodies rotted in secret, they lived, they laughed and they dined.”
Federal prosecutors said Hallford and his co-owner siphoned Covid-19 aid and customer payments to buy a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti worth more than $120,000, along with $31,000 in cryptocurrency, luxury items from Gucci and Tiffany & Co, and laser body sculpting. Hallford apologised in court, saying he still hated himself for his actions.
His attorney, Laura H Suelau, had asked for a 10-year sentence, while assistant US attorney Tim Neff requested 15 years, describing how bodies were piled so high in some rooms that investigators could not enter, and had to lay boards over fluid. Carie Hallford, who is charged with 191 counts of corpse abuse in the state case, is scheduled to go on trial in the federal case in September.
