Colorado funeral home owner given 18-year sentence in decaying bodies case

A former Colorado funeral home owner who helped her ex-husband hide nearly 200 decomposing bodies in a building was sentenced Monday to 18 years on a federal fraud charge, nearly the maximum allowed under the law.Carie Hallford, 48, faced up to 20 years in prison for taking over $130,000 from families for funeral services, including cremations, and often giving them urns full of concrete mix instead. In two cases, investigators found the wrong body was buried. In August, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and admitted that she and her ex-husband Jon Hallford cheated customers and also defrauded the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic small business aid.Carie Hallford had asked the court for leniency, saying she was a “scared and desperate mother” who was manipulated to keep the family business operating. She decided to get a divorce after she was put back in jail in her state case in November 2024, which put her out of reach of her husband’s constant calls and texts and allowed the “fog in her mind from the years of abuse” to lift, according to a court filing by her lawyer, Robert Charles Melihercik.Federal sentencing guidelines recommended prison time up to eight years since Carie Hallford did not have a criminal history. But lawyers for the government asked US district judge Nina Y Wang to sentence her to 15 years, in part for taking advantage of grieving people following one of the largest discoveries of decaying bodies at a funeral home in the US.Those who entrusted their loved ones to the Hallfords struggled with guilt, shame, nightmares and panic attacks since the bodies were discovered in 2023. They were stacked so high in some places that they blocked doorways. There were bugs and maggots. Buckets had been placed to catch leaking fluids.During Monday’s hearing, Carie Hallford, dressed in a striped jail uniform, did not seem to show any reaction as she sat near her lawyer and victim after victim urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence.As she spoke to the judge, Kelly Schloesser apologized to her mother, who died in 2022, for not taking better care of her. Like many of the victims, she rejected Hallford’s claim that fear and domestic abuse motivated her to participate in the scam.“She took my money and instead of taking care of my mother she took care of herself,” Schloesser said.Another victim, Elizabeth Gannon, described experiencing “ongoing trauma” over her choice to trust the Hallfords with both of her parents’ end-of-life arrangements in 2022 and 2023.“She chose to take our money and our loved ones’ remains knowing exactly what Jon intended to do with the bodies,” Gannon said.Prosecutors also pushed for a longer sentence because the former couple, who had offered “green burials” without embalming, lavishly spent a pandemic-era small business loan on vehicles, cryptocurrency, pricey goods from stores including Gucci and Tiffany & Co and laser body sculpting rather than on their Return to Nature funeral home in Colorado Springs.In court documents, Melihercik said Hallford’s actions were motivated by “fear and severe anxiety”. He said Hallford’s former husband used “classic instruments of domestic violence” to control her, including threatening at times to kill himself and her.The lawyer who represented Jon Hallford in state court, Adam Steigerwald, declined to comment on the abuse allegations. The lawyer who represented him in federal court, Laura Suelau, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.Jon and Carie Hallford each pleaded guilty in December to nearly 200 counts of corpse abuse in state court. The plea deals require their state and federal sentences to be served at the same time.Jon Hallford was sentenced to 20 years in the federal case and 40 years in the state case. At his sentencing last month in the state case, he apologized and said he will regret his actions for the rest of his life.“I had so many chances to put a stop to everything and walk away, but I did not,” he said. “My mistakes will echo for a generation. Everything I did was wrong.”