Colorado Springs, Colorado — Funeral home owner in Colorado Storing 189 decomposing bodies In a building over four years and gave Grieving families The fake ashes will be sentenced on Friday on corpse abuse charges.
John Halford owned Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs with his then-wife Carrie. they plead guilty In December, he was charged with nearly 200 counts of abuse of corpses under an agreement with prosecutors.
John Halford faces between 30 and 50 years in prison. Carrie Halford faces 25 to 35 years in prison when she is sentenced on April 24.
Halfords Storage of bodies In a building in the small town of Penrose, south of Colorado Springs, from 2019 until 2023, when Investigators In response to reports of a foul odor coming from the building, he discovered the bodies.
Investigators said bodies were found throughout the building, some stacked on top of each other, with swarms of insects and decomposing fluids covering the floors. The remains, including adults, infants and fetuses, were stored at room temperature. Investigators believe the Halfords gave the families dried concrete that mimicked ash.
The bodies were identified over a period of months using fingerprints, DNA and other methods.
The families learned that the ashes they were given, then scattered or kept at home, were not actually those of their loved ones. Many said it invalidated their grieving process, while others had nightmares and struggled with guilt that they had let their relatives down.
Funeral home owners also pleaded guilty Federal fraud charges after prosecutors said they defrauded the government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era small business aid.
John Halford was sentenced to 20 years in prison in this case. he He told the judge He opened Back to Nature to making a positive impact on people’s lives, “and then everything got completely out of control, especially me.”
“I still hate myself for what I did,” he said at his sentencing last June.
Carrie Halford’s federal sentencing is set for March 16.
Lawyers for the Halford family did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
For the past years, they have been hiding the bodies of the Halford family He spent lavishlyaccording to court documents. This included the purchase of a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth more than $120,000 combined, as well as $31,000 in cryptocurrency and luxury goods from stores such as Gucci and Tiffany. & Laser body sculpting company.
FBI agent Andrew Cohen said one of the bodies recovered was that of a former Army sergeant who was believed to have been buried in a veterans’ cemetery.
He added that when investigators exhumed the wooden coffin in the cemetery, they found inside it the remains of a person of a different gender. The veteran, whose identity was not revealed in court, was later given a funeral with full military honors at Pikes Peak National Cemetery, he added.
Revelations about the abuse of dead bodies have sparked changes in Colorado Lax funeral home regulations.
The AP previously reported that the Halfords had fallen behind on taxes, been evicted from one of their properties and were being sued for unpaid bills, according to public records and interviews with people who worked with them.
In a rare decision issued by State District Judge Eric Bentley last year Rejecting previous plea agreements between Halford’s family and prosecutors who asked for up to 20 years in prison. Family members of the deceased said the agreements were too lenient.