Colorado funeral home owners accused of letting 190 bodies decay plead guilty to corpse abuse

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The owners of a Colorado funeral home accused of piling 190 bodies inside a room-temperature building and giving the grieving relatives fake ashes pleaded guilty Friday to corpse abuse as aggrieved families looked on in court.

Jon and Carie Hallford, who own the Return to Nature Funeral Home, began storing bodies in a decrepit building near Colorado Springs as far back as 2019 and gave families dry concrete in place of cremated remains, according to the charges. The grim discovery last year upended families’ grieving processes.