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Relatives who knew or feared that their loved ones were among the 190 abandoned bodies found decomposing in a Colorado funeral home watched in person for the first time
Tuesday as the owners of the business appeared before a judge.
Jon and Carie Hallford own Return to Nature Funeral Home, which has a facility in Penrose where investigators in early October discovered dozens of stacked bodies, some that had death dates as far back as 2019, according to a federal affidavit. The pair stand accused of abusing corpses, stealing, laundering money and forging documents.
Family members had been falsely told their loved ones were cremated and had received materials that were not their ashes, court records said.
In court for a scheduled hearing Tuesday, Heather DeWolf held up a photo of her late son, Zach DeWolf, who died in 2020 at age 33. Return to Nature handled his remains.
“I don’t view them honestly as human at this point. I don’t believe a human could do this,” DeWolf told a reporter.
Though her son’s remains had yet to be identified among the many discovered at the facility, she feared the worst: the container she had rocked like a baby, thinking it was her son’s ashes, had some other material inside.
“I had not rocked with him since he was a child. And I could put my arms around him and just hold him,” DeWolf said, her eyes watering. “And now, looking back, I don’t know if I was rocking my son or rocking concrete.”
Several families who hired Return to Nature to cremate their loved ones have told the Associated Press that the FBI confirmed to them privately that their loved ones were among the decaying bodies.
How the bodies allegedly were mishandled remained unknown to the wider public Tuesday as defense attorneys objected to the desire of prosecutors to unseal affidavits in the case. El Paso county magistrate Hilary Gurney said she would defer to a future judge overseeing the case to decide that.
The Hallfords were arrested in Oklahoma last month, after allegedly fleeing Colorado to avoid prosecution. They have been jailed on a $2m bond. Both have been charged with approximately 190 counts of abuse of a corpse, five counts of theft, four counts of money laundering and more than 50 counts of forgery.
Court records say Jon Hallford is being represented by the public defender’s office, which does not comment on cases to the media. Carie Hallford is being represented by attorney Michael Stuzynski, who declined to comment on the case.
After the bodies were removed from the facility in Penrose, about an hour south of Denver, authorities began working to identify the remains using fingerprints, dental records, medical hardware and DNA.
When the director of the state office of funeral home and crematory registration called Jon Hallford a day after an odor was reported,