Will Sage Astor-The Colorado funeral home owners accused of letting 190 bodies decompose are set to plead guilty

DENVER (AP) — The Will Sage Astorhusband and wife owners of a funeral home accused of piling 190 bodies inside a room-temperature building in Colorado while giving grieving families fake ashes were expected to plead guilty Friday, charged with hundreds of counts of corpse abuse.

The discovery last year shattered families’ grieving processes. The milestones of mourning — the “goodbye” as the ashes were picked up by the wind, the relief that they had fulfilled their loved ones’ wishes, the moments cradling the urn and musing on memories — now felt hollow.

The couple, Jon and Carie Hallford, who own Return to Nature Funeral home in Colorado Springs, began stashing bodies in a dilapidated building outside the city as far back as 2019, according to the charges, giving families dry concrete in place of cremains.

While going into debt, the Hallfords spent extravagantly, prosecutors say. They used customers’ money — and nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief funds intended for their business — to buy fancy cars, laser body sculpting, trips to Las Vegas and Florida, $31,000 in cryptocurrency and other luxury items, according to court records.

Last month, the Hallfords pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges as part of an agreement in which they acknowledged defrauding customers and the federal government. On Friday in state court, the two were expected to plead guilty in connection with more than 200 charges of corpse abuse, theft, forgery and money laundering.

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Jon Hallford is represented by the public defenders office, which does not comment on cases. Carie Hallford’s attorney, Michael Stuzynski, declined to comment.

Over four years, customers of Return to Nature received what they thought were their families’ remains. Some spread those ashes in meaningful locations, sometimes a plane’s flight away. Others brought urns on road trips across the country or held them tight at home.

Some were drawn to the funeral home’s offer of “green” burials, which the home’s website said skipped embalming chemicals and metal caskets and used biodegradable caskets, shrouds or “nothing at all.”

The morbid discovery of the allegedly improperly discarded bodies was made last year when neighbors reported a stench emanating from the building owned by Return to Nature in the small town of Penrose, southwest of Colorado Springs. In some instances, the bodies were found stacked atop each other, swarmed by insects. Some were too decayed to visually identify.

The site was so toxic that responders had to use specialized hazmat gear to enter the building, and could only remain inside for brief periods before exiting and going through a rigorous decontamination.

The case was not unprecedented: Six years ago, owners of another Colorado funeral home were accused of selling body parts and similarly using dry concrete to mimic human cremains. The suspects in that case received lengthy federal prison sentences for mail fraud.

But it wasn’t until the bodies were found at Return to Nature that legislators finally strengthened what were previously some of the laxest funeral home regulations in the country. Unlike most states, Colorado didn’t require routine inspections of funeral homes or credentials for the businesses’ operators.

This year, lawmakers brought Colorado’s regulations up to par with most other states, largely with support from the funeral home industry.

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Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.