Colorado funeral home director Jon Hallford, who acknowledged abusing corpses, withdraws guilty plea

One of the owners of a southern Colorado funeral home where the remains of 191 people were left to rot will now stand trial for state fraud charges in that case.

Jon Hallford withdrew from his plea deal on Friday, instead pleading not guilty to abusing corpses after a judge rejected that plea agreement in a rare decision.

The judge said he made that decision after hearing testimony from the loved ones of those people saying the plea agreement does not do the victims justice. The plea agreement would have resulted in a 20 year sentence in Colorado prison.

Police arrested Hallford and his wife Carie after neighbors smelled what turned out to be the remains inside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose in 2023.

Hallford has already been sentenced to 20 years on federal charges in this case.

Authorities say the Hallfords maintained a lavish lifestyle while they were running a fraudulent scheme from their funeral home. Prosecutors say they took money from customers for cremations, only to stash the bodies and give the families dry concrete resembling ashes.

A jury trial for Jon Hallford was set for Feb. 9 and is expected to last a month or longer.

The plea agreement that was rejected had said Hallford's state sentence was to run concurrently with the federal sentence, meaning he could have been freed many years earlier than if the sentences had run consecutively. State District Judge Eric Bentley said he had never rejected a plea agreement in his nine years on the bench and called it an "extreme action by the court."

A conviction for abuse of a corpse is the least serious type of felony under the law, with a possible sentence ranging from probation to a maximum of up to 18 months in prison on each count.

Carie Hallford was accused of the same crimes as her husband and pleaded guilty. She's awaiting sentencing.

Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and, for many years, had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. It has had a slew of abuse cases, including 24 decomposing corpses discovered last month at a funeral home in Pueblo owned by the county coroner and his brother.

Investigators in the Pueblo case said this week that they had identified four of the bodies and further identifications could take a significant amount of time. No charges have been filed.