A USstate judge has accepted plea agreements for the owners of a Colorado funeral home for the abuse of 191 corpses, many of which languished in a room-temperature building for years, over the objections of relatives of the victims.
Authorities say Carie and Jon Hallford, who owned and operated Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs, maintained a lavish lifestyle and gave fake ashes to some families of the dead over four years.
The latest plea agreements would have Jon Hallford sentenced to between 30 and 50 years and Carie Hallford to between 25 and 35 years. The sentences would be served at the same time as their prison terms for related federal charges.
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Victims’ family members wanted each of them sentenced to 191 years — which would include one year for each victim.
Some also said the Hallfords shouldn't be able to serve both the state and federal sentences at the same time.
Jon Hallford is scheduled to be sentenced on February 6, Carie Hallford is set to be sentenced April 24.
A statement by a group of victims’ family members had said they wanted to have the cases proceed to trial.
“This case is not about convenience or efficiency,” said Crystina Page, whose son’s body was among those found.
“It is about human beings who were treated as disposable.
"Accepting a plea agreement sends the message that this level of abuse is negotiable. We reject that message.”
Kelly Schloesser said her mother, Mary Lou Ehrlich, looked peaceful after she died in 2022, but her final memories have been haunted after learning a year later that Ehrlich's body had been left to decompose.
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“I apologise to my mother every day for trusting these people,” she told state District Judge Eric Bentley.
Lawyers for both Hallford urged Bentley to accept the plea agreements, which will also ban them from working in the funeral home industry.
Carie Hallford’s lawyer, Beau Worthington, noted that she would be eligible to be sentenced to probation if she was convicted after a trial.
In a rare decision, Bentley earlier this year rejected previous plea agreements that called for up to 20 years in prison, with family members of the deceased saying the proposed punishments were too lenient.
Bentley praised families of the victims for their advocacy in court, which he said resulted in the sentence ranges being lengthened dramatically.
“These are really meaningful changes from where I sit,” he said.
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Bentley said he could not legally stack the state sentences on top of the federal ones because that would amount to punishing the Hallfords twice for the same conduct.
The Hallfords are accused of dumping bodies and giving families fake ashes between 2019 and 2023.
Investigators have described finding the bodies in 2023 stored atop each other in a bug-infested building in Penrose, a small town about a two-hour drive south of Denver.
The scene was horrific, officials said, with bodies stacked atop each other in various states of decay — some having been there for four years.
While Jon Hallford was accused of dumping the bodies, authorities said Carie Hallford was the face of the funeral home.
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During a hearing in November, Bentley said he considered the need for deterrence in rejecting the plea agreement.
Colorado, for many years, had some of the weakest funeral home industry regulations in the nation, leading to numerous abuse cases involving fake ashes, fraud, and even the illegal selling of body parts.
In August, authorities announced that during their first inspection of a funeral home owned by the county coroner in Pueblo, Colorado, they found 24 decomposing corpses behind a hidden door.
That investigation is pending as authorities have reported slow progress in identifying corpses that, in some cases, have languished for more than a decade.
The Return to Nature case has helped trigger reforms, including routine inspections.
The Hallfords also have admitted in federal court to defrauding the US Small Business Administration of nearly $US900,000 ($1.34 million) in pandemic-era aid and taking payments from customers for cremations the funeral home never performed.
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