US crime This article is more than 2 months oldThis article is more than 2 months oldThe arrest of Carrie and Jon Hallford in Oklahoma follows shocking news to the loved ones of about 190 dead people
Over the years, the families of about 190 dead people whose remains were entrusted to a Colorado funeral home run by Carrie and Jon Hallford were led to believe that their loved ones’ remains had been cremated or buried.
They even received what were supposed to be ashes of their late family members, comforting keepsakes meant to help the grieving honor and remember their dead.
But authorities who descended on the financially troubled Return to Nature parlor in early October to check out a stomach-turning odor emanating from within uncovered something that would bring back the couple’s clients’ grief for a second, devastating time.
The remains in question had not been buried or cremated. They were stacked atop each other, decomposed, right there at Return to Nature.
That’s all according to authorities who recently arrested the Hallfords following an initial investigation into the couple which produced charges of theft, money laundering, forgery and corpse abuse that the local district attorney summarized as “absolutely shocking”.
“How do you [just] store almost 200 people?” Michael Martinez, whose grandmother Linda Martinez’s remains were among those found at Return to Nature, said to the Associated Press. “How do you even stomach that?”
Neither the Hallfords nor any legal representatives could immediately be reached by the Guardian for comment about the case. It exposed the particularly weak oversight Colorado has over its funeral homes – the state does not require routine inspections or minimum requirements for operators.
The pair were arrested in Oklahoma last week and face a charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
A federal court complaint related to that charge, first reviewed by the Colorado television news station KUSA, provides some of the most vivid details available about the grisly case.
The document explains how the Hallfords first drew scrutiny when the sheriff’s office that patrols their Rocky Mountain town of Penrose received a call on 3 October about a “horrific odor” coming from Return to Nature, which opened in 2017 as a “green” – or environmentally friendly – funeral home that cremated and buried without embalming fluids.
On the next day, a Colorado state regulatory investigator called Jon Hallford about accessing Return to Nature. Hallford told the investigator that he had been using the funeral home to learn taxidermy – which is the preservation of animal skins for the purposes of studying or displaying them – and “knew” that would be a problem, the federal complaint alleged.
He allegedly agreed to meet the inspector that afternoon but never showed up. Investigators obtained a warrant to search Return to Nature, and that’s when they found the corpses of about 190 people, some who had died as far back as 2019.
The discovery ignited a frantic investigation, which involved using fingerprints, dental records and in some cases DNA. There were also efforts to make contact with the survivors of the dead after it became evident that the remains “each family was given could not have been their loved one”, federal court documents show.
At least 137 families had been reached – 110 of the dead had been identified, and remains of 25 had been returned to their survivors, authorities have said.
Several families told the AP that federal investigators had privately confirmed for them that some of the decaying bodies found at Return to Nature belonged to their loved ones.
That meant any ashes the survivors were given were not actually those of their late family members. And they were asked to provide samples of those ashes for investigators to analyze.
Since then, the legal fallout for the Hallfords has steadily ballooned.
The family of Roger Law – who was supposed to have been cremated after dying from Covid-19 in November 2020 but was found at Return to Nature – sued the Hallfords demanding damages for negligence, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress and violation of state law, as CBS News has reported. “Roger … was allowed to decompose in squalid conditions,” the lawsuit asserted.
Investigators also tracked the couple to Wagoner, Oklahoma, east of Tulsa. The Hallfords were each arrested on Wednesday on a warrant accusing them of 190 counts of corpse abuse, five of theft, four of money laundering and 50 of forgery.
Separately, federal officials charged them with illegally crossing state lines in an attempt to flee justice.
Exactly why the Hallfords allegedly conducted themselves as they did so far has not been clear. But their business had been in distress for years.
The couple had missed tax payments in recent months, had been evicted from one of their properties and drew a lawsuit over unpaid bills from a crematory that stopped working with them last year, the AP reported, citing public records and interviews with people who had done business with the Hallfords.
Meanwhile, what is known is how painful the case’s revelations have been to those who trusted Return to Nature to prepare those whom they had lost for their final resting places.
Crystina Page attended a news conference hosted by officials after the Hallfords’ arrest on Wednesday. She recounted how she had spent years marching all over the US advocating for police reform while clutching a red urn that Return to Nature convinced her contained the ashes of her 20-year-old son, David, who was shot and killed by law enforcement in 2019. Yet her son’s actual remains had been at Return to Nature the whole time, and it wasn’t until Wednesday that they were scheduled to be cremated.
“My son [had] been laying there rotting for four years,” Page said. “It’s the most horrendous feeling I’ve ever had in my life.”
Page said the arrest of the Hallfords gives her hope that “there’s an end in sight” to the nightmare that suddenly enveloped her. But she also said she struggled to comprehend how the Hallfords could be so “intentional” with their alleged misdeeds.
“Not only did they think about doing this, but they followed through with it,” she said. “They concealed it, and they did this to almost 200 families.”
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