Colorado funeral home owner who kept woman's body inside a hearse for more than a year pleads guilty

A former Colorado funeral home owner who kept a woman's body inside a hearse for more than a year has pleaded guilty. 

Miles Harford was also accused of improperly storing cremated remains in Denver. He pleaded guilty on Monday to charges of abuse of a corpse and theft.

Harford was in the middle of being evicted from a house he was renting when he was arrested in February 2024. Denver police said it was in a crawl space there that investigators found dozens of boxes of cremated remains and they found the body in the vehicle outside. The body was that of a 63-year-old woman named Christina Rosales who died of natural causes in 2022.

The funeral home Harford owned was located in Littleton in the southern part of the Denver metro area and it was called Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services. It had closed about a year-and-a-half before his arrest.

After the arrest was announced and Rosales' body was identified, siblings of Rosales as well as Rosales' husband shared their anguish over the situation with CBS Colorado. Family members had been given the cremated remains of a person who wasn't Rosales.

"The image of her in the back of a car treated like a dog just in blankets. It just... it angers me," George Rosales said.

The siblings said in a statement that what was done was "unethical and immoral."

Sentencing has been set for June 9. Harford faces up to 18 months in prison.

Denver District Attorney John Walsh released a statement saying Miles Harford was "entrusted by friends and family of the deceased with providing professional and dignified cremation services."

"He violated that trust in an unimaginably harmful way -- robbing those friends and family of their peace of mind and opportunity to grieve. Mr. Harford is now accepting responsibility for those actions, which we hope will provide a measure of comfort to the friends and family of the deceased," Walsh said.