Concrete dust in urns

Funeral director couple left 200 bodies to decompose

The Hallfords outside their funeral home

(Bild: instagram.com/returntonaturecolorado)

When the police raided the funeral home of Jon and Carie Hallford in the US state of Colorado after receiving an anonymous tip about a "strong smell of decay", they were met with sheer horror. Almost 200 corpses were rotting away all over the building of the "Return to Nature Funeral Home".

The mortician couple were proven in the civil court in Colorado to have acted out of pure greed. The jury ordered the Hallfords to pay almost one billion (!) dollars to the families of their dead victims.

Bargain funeral for 1200 dollars
The Hallfords had advertised an "eco-friendly, natural burial" at a discount price of just 1,200 dollars (around 1,100 euros). For this price, the bodies would either be cremated or buried in a coffin made from recycled wood without prior embalming. On top of this, the funeral home promised to plant a tree in the Colorado National Forest for every eco-burial.

Here you can see what a funeral in an eco-coffin should look like:

In reality, according to investigators, the bodies were simply stored in a funeral home building. They decomposed there at room temperature. According to the police report, maggots were crawling around everywhere and the stench of the corpses was unbearable. The cops also found a second warehouse full of corpses near the nearby village of Penrose.

Cars, travel, luxury goods
According to the indictment, the Hallfords had spent the relatives' money on expensive cars, trips and luxury goods. The promised funerals and even the cremations were never carried out. An analysis of urns that relatives had received revealed that they contained concrete dust instead of the remains of their loved ones.  

Here you can see the house where the bodies decomposed being demolished: 

Probably no more money to be had
Although the couple are to be prosecuted for fraud, body snatching and money laundering in the near future, the verdict of a class action lawsuit in the civil court now prevents this. The court announced that it wanted to set an example and ordered the Hallfords to pay the monstrous sum of 950 million dollars in total to the families of the victims. But even Andrew Swan, the families' lawyer, sees no real prospect of his clients ever receiving any money: "Unfortunately, the defendants are already heavily in debt and have spent all their money."

Samantha Naranjo, who found out that her mother Dorothy's body was simply stacked with other bodies in the funeral home for more than a year under "horrendous circumstances", is furious. She told TV station KRDO: "We are hurt, frustrated and just angry. We want justice - for all families. And even if we don't see a penny, these inhumans simply have to be punished for their actions!"