A Colorado judge on Monday rejected a plea deal for Carie Hallford, a funeral home owner accused of hiding nearly 190 decaying bodies in a bug-infested building, after grieving families argued the proposed 15- to 20-year sentence was far too lenient.
According to The Associated Press, Carie and her husband, Jon Hallford, owned Return to Nature Funeral Home and allegedly dumped the bodies between 2019 and 2023, all while giving families fake ashes and defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000.
Both had pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse, but State District Judge Eric Bentley rejected the agreements after hearing from victims’ families who demanded harsher punishment.
The rare decision leaves Carie Hallford with two choices — withdraw her plea or proceed without a deal, risking a longer prison sentence. Her husband has already withdrawn his plea and is headed to trial.
Families of the deceased described their horror after learning their loved ones’ remains were never cremated.
Some said they were haunted by images of what their relatives must have looked like in that decaying building, while others questioned what became of their loved ones’ souls.
Court documents revealed that concerns about the funeral home were raised years earlier — the Fremont County coroner reportedly flagged the facility’s poor treatment of bodies and lack of refrigeration in 2020, but the state failed to act.
“The fact that he made a complaint and nothing was done about it just completely blows my mind,” said Tanya Wilson, who hired the funeral home to cremate her mother, only to later learn the ashes she spread in Hawaii were not her mother’s.
Colorado has some of the weakest funeral home regulations in the country, with no routine inspections or licensing requirements for operators — loopholes prosecutors say the Hallfords exploited while allegedly using victims’ payments to fund a lavish lifestyle.
