A Colorado funeral home owner who, with her husband, improperly stored the remains of nearly 200 decomposing bodies and in some cases gave families the incorrect remains was sentenced on Monday to 18 years in prison.
Judge Nina Y. Wang of the U.S. District Court in Colorado announced the prison term for Carie Hallford, 49, who owned the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colo., about 100 miles south of Denver, with Jon Hallford, offering services that included cremation and burials in biodegradable caskets and shrouds.
Federal prosecutors had accused Ms. Hallford and her husband of cheating customers by selling cremation services without performing them, and defrauding the Small Business Administration of more than $800,000 through fraudulent Covid-19 pandemic relief loan applications. Ms. Hallford was sentenced for a charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
In April 2024, the Hallfords were each charged with 13 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Last August, Ms. Hallford pleaded guilty to the federal charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Last week, federal prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the other counts in the indictment, saying she “has assisted authorities in the investigation and prosecution of her own misconduct,” a court filing shows.
Judge Wang on Monday recounted the emotional impact of the case, quoting victims who had described how Ms. Hallford looked relatives of deceased loved ones in the eye, offered condolences and then promised services she and Mr. Hallford would never provide, instead in some cases handing over cremation urns that contained cement mix.
Before announcing the sentence, Judge Wang said the Hallfords had also misused the small business loan for personal use, including for vacations, jewelry, vehicles and to pay vendors unrelated to the business. “What I can pronounce today is one element and one measure of what the consequences should be,” she said.
In court on Monday, Ms. Hallford apologized to the relatives of the deceased and said she had endured years of an abusive marriage. “Over time I became someone else,” she said.
She attributed her “wrong” decisions to acting “out of fear” and “self preservation” in trying to avoid the onset of what she described as her husband’s rage. “When it did” appear, she added, “it spilled over to every area of my life.”
In a court filing this month, Ms. Hallford’s lawyer said that she had a “deep sense of shame” but that she “recognizes that her apologies will likely fall on deaf ears.” It said she had “seen and heard the pain and anguish of her victims.”
The sentence included three years of supervised release, and $1.07 million in restitution. She has the right to appeal.
In court on Monday, victims spoke about the pain of knowing that their loved ones were not properly interred and rejected Ms. Hallford’s claim that fear and domestic abuse motivated her to participate in the scam, The Associated Press reported.
It quoted one of them, Kelly Schloesser, whose mother died in 2022, saying of Ms. Hallford: “She took my money and instead of taking care of my mother she took care of herself.”
From September 2019 through October 2023, Ms. Hallford and her husband failed to provide basic funeral services, such as cremation or burial, for at least 190 bodies, despite having collected more than $130,000 from families, prosecutors said.
As the case wound its way through state and federal courts, many relatives spoke of their anguish upon discovering what had really happened to the remains of their family members.
Ms. Hallford was largely responsible for bookkeeping, interacting with customers and filing death certificates with the state. Mr. Hallford transported the bodies and prepared them for cremation or funerals, prosecutors said. The couple falsely stated that the “method of disposition” of the bodies was either cremation or burial, when instead the bodies were decomposing at the Penrose location, prosecutors said.
But in 2023, investigators responding to reports of a foul smell discovered at least 190 corpses in a scene the sheriff called “horrific.”
The couple were arrested on Nov. 8, 2023, on state charges including suspicion of abuse of a corpse, theft, money laundering and forgery. They each pleaded guilty in December 2025.
Mr. Hallford, who is serving a 20-year prison term on federal fraud charges, was sentenced last month to 40 years on the state charges.
Ms. Hallford will be sentenced on state charges on April 24.
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news stories, features and explainers.
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