Former owner of funeral home where hundreds of bodies were improperly stored receives sentence

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV/Gray News) - One of the owners of a now-defunct funeral home in southern Colorado, where hundreds of bodies were found improperly stored, was sentenced Friday.

Carie Hallford was sentenced to 30 years in prison, followed by one year of parole.

Carie Hallford ran the funeral home, Return to Nature, along with her ex-husband, Jon Hallford. The couple was arrested in October 2023 when authorities found nearly 200 decomposing bodies at the business’s second location.

Officials said Friday that all but two individuals found in the funeral home have been identified.

Considered the public face of the funeral home, Hallford handled the client-facing side of the business. Relatives of the individuals found at the funeral home said she was the one to take payment and hand off fake cremains in urns, which investors said were concrete mix in most cases.

“Jon Hallford handled the bodies, but Carie Hallford handled us,” one person said Friday in court.

Carie Hallford took a plea deal in her state case, pleading to abuse of a corpse. She faced a sentence of 25 to 35 years in prison.

Some family members of the victims urged the judge to give her the maximum, but the judge said her team made credible claims that Carie Hallford was a victim of domestic abuse and was manipulated in her marriage.

She was ultimately sentenced to 30 years in prison and ordered to pay $68,360.18 in restitution.

Back in March, Carie Hallford was sentenced to 18 years in a federal fraud case. That sentence will run concurrently with the state sentence.

She is currently appealing her federal sentence.

Jon Hallford was sentenced to 40 years in prison on state corpse abuse charges in February. During his hearing, family members of the victims called him a “monster.”

That sentence will be served concurrently with the 20-year sentence he received in his federal fraud case, which was handed down last summer.