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In October 2023, neighbors of the Return to Nature funeral home in Penrose, Colorado, reported an odor emanating from the facility. The FBI obtained a search warrant and to their horror, found 190 dead bodies inside the building in various states of decomposition. Some of the bodies had been there for four years, with deaths dating back to 2019.
Jon and Carie Hallford, the owners Return to Nature, were indicted by a federal grand jury on April 15, 2024, which alleged that the couple “defrauded their funeral home customers by not providing a cremation or burial for the deceased as promised.”
On the eve of their October 2024 trial, the duo accepted a plea deal. The couple will find out their fates at an April 18, 2025, sentencing hearing, where the Hallfords could each face up to 20 years in prison. Investigation Discovery’s The Curious Case Of … The Funeral Home of Horrors breaks down their story and the trail of tears it left behind on the February 3, 2025, episode of the docuseries.
Families Want Answers
The docuseries episode opens with a group of people leaving a courtroom. Off camera, a woman can be heard shouting, “What did you do with my son?” Another woman yells, “I hope you remember rats eating my son’s face in your refrigeration system,” while another demands,”1,178 people want answers.”
How Jon and Carie Hallford Opened Return to Nature
Emily Miller, a licensed funeral director and the founder of Colorado Burial Preserve, explains the emerging “green burial” market, where everything is biodegradable. As an example, she cites her Colorado Burial Preserve and Cremation Garden being an 80-acre cemetery where families can have the experience of being in a nature preserve, but also, “we can meet every need you might need from a cemetery as well.”
Beth Karas states how another funeral home in Colorado, Return to Nature, is capitalizing on the green burial market. She refers to Jon and Carie Hallford as “a married couple who pride themselves on a light, modern approach to their work.”
In a video, Jon says he’s a third-generation funeral worker, while Carie explains that she is “not a funeral director” but married into the business. The duo opened Return to Nature in 2017.
Jon and Carie Hallford’s Victims Are Introduced
Angelika Stedman is introduced. Her daughter Shanelle died in November 2019, and she chose Return to Nature to handle services as well as the cremation.
“When I met Jon and Carie Hallford, they seemed sincere. Their professionalism and their empathy was making me feel secure,” Angelika explains. “It was nice the way they put things together. They really did a nice job.”
Viewers next meet victim Heather DeWolf, whose oldest son, Zach, passed away in 2020. She was recommended Return to Nature by a family member.
Heather says how Jon and Carie said they would plant a tree in Zach’s name in Pike’s Peak National Forest. She found it so meaningful, as Heather and Zach would plant trees together.
Chrystina Page‘s son David Jackson Page passed away and she chose Return to Nature to cremate her son. While she wears his ashes on a necklace and spread David’s ashes around the country, Chrystina reveals, “I still didn’t feel like I laid him to rest,” and how this is a reoccurring theme with other families who turned to Jon and Carie.
Return to Nature Sets Off Alarm Bells
Beth explains how while it seemed the Hallford’s two Return to Nature Locations were doing well, something seemed amiss at their Penrose, Colorado, facility in the spring of 2023.
“What concerned me first about them, was the way the Penrose location was starting to look on the outside. It was starting to look like a derelict building. Weeds were starting to grow up out of the parking lot,” Emily says in a confessional.
Since Emily is a licensed funeral director, she emailed Jon and offered to mow the weeds of the parking lot, in exchange for storing some of her equipment behind the building. Jon emailed her back saying that they had sublet the building.
Viewers are next introduced to Colorado Springs, Colorado, journalist Tyler Cunnington. He explains that on October 3, 2023, he received a tip at his news outlet that Fremont County Sheriff deputies were going to execute a warrant at Return to Nature.
Tyler says that neighbors complained that “it’s starting to smell a little funky. We don’t know what’s going on, we know it’s a funeral home.” Tyler adds that there is a sign on the building saying, “Taxidermy practiced here.”
Tyler goes on to explain how the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) oversees dozens of professions, including the funeral industry in Colorado. After reaching out to the Hallfords and asking to look around the funeral home, investigators arrived the next day. When Jon does not meet them to show them around, the investigators obtain a warrant later that night.
A Horrific Discovery
“Sheriff’s opened that front door and were presented with something you couldn’t even dream up. They basically said there are bodies decomposing, literally stacked everywhere,” Tyler reveals. “No one knew what was about to come out of this.”
“The entire floor was covered in shin-deep brown sludge, which was a mixture of decomposition matter, body fluids, blood, I mean you name it,” the journalist continues, adding it was so bad that that hazmat suits were required to enter the funeral home.
“Embalming was not a big part of what they did,” Beth says of the green funeral home. “Most of the business at Return to Nature is cremation. But the Hallfords don’t have the facility to do that. So, they’ll take the bodies in, store them, and send them out to someone who operates a crematorium.” She states that refrigeration should have been a “huge part” of their operation but “investigators found a huge issue with their equipment.”
Blanca Eberhardt, a mortician for the state of Colorado, is introduced next. She explains that the Hallfords’ equipment “didn’t have the mechanisms to be a cooler, it was just a shell of the cooler. And that shell of the cooler was filled with bodies.” Blanca wonders, “What was he doing with the loved ones and why was he holding on to them?”
Tyler reveals that there were at least 115 bodies discovered, and the “identification process would be first and foremost. One by one people were starting to get notified.”
Chrystina recalls thinking that there was “no way” her son’s body would be among those found because it was over four years ago. She later learned he was, in fact, one of the victims. She says she was told by the coroner that her son was “left in the building uncovered and exposed. He was left out of his body bag, presumably by Jon Hallford, into the corner of an inoperable refrigerator and covered with dozens of bodies and left there to rot for four years.”
Chrystina then makes the heartbreaking realization that, “the person I have been carrying for four years isn’t my child.” She says, “I’ll never know who I’ve been carrying.”
What Were the Return to Nature Customers Given by the Hallfords?
Beth says, “A discovery inside Return to Nature leads investigators to believe some families were given something other than ashes.” Tyler explains there were bags of concrete mix, as well as a machine to grind down the mix. “The Hallfords would allegedly grind up concrete, put that in an urn or a bag, and give that to the families instead of the cremation of their loved ones,” Tyler says of what investigators learned.
Angelika recalls taking what she had been told were her daughter’s ashes, putting them in a jar and adding water. Much to her horror, the ashes solidified, “like cement does.”
Heather remembers looking over the bag of what she had thought were her son Zach’s ashes, and “manipulated the contents” of the bag. Something came to the surface, which was some type of metal disk. She goes on to wonder, “If I have somebody else’s loved ones, who has my son?”
Jon and Carie Hallford Go Missing
While authorities discovered the rotting bodies, families were left wondering where Jon and Carie were.
Beth explains that when the Sherriff told the media that while the Hallfords were being cooperative, “he wasn’t entirely forthcoming.”
“When Jon failed to meet DORA and the Fremont County Coroner at Return to Nature, Jon and Carie Hallford packed up the family, they left everything.” Their landlord confirmed they left in a hurry, and there was still “food on the table,” Blanca shares.
Jon Hallford’s New Life
Blanca and fellow morticians tracked down Jon on social media and discovered that “he was trying to be a stand-up comedian.” A clip of Jon performing his act is shown, where he jokes about taking a “post shower s–t.”
While Jon said he grew up in the funeral home business after graduating from mortuary school in 2010, Beth reveals that his “background is a little murky.” She explains how Jon attempted to launch a political career in Muskogee, Oklahoma, when he was 26 years old, but an incident occurred during a 2006 campaign that derailed his hopes to become a city council member.
Beth goes on to tell how a group of ladies were having a slumber party while Jon and another man put on masks and broke in, holding an AK-47 to their head “as a joke.” She claims Jon pled guilty to a misdemeanor and received community service, while also losing his bid for the election.
Jon Hallford Had a Mistress
Years later, Jon met Carie and moved to Colorado. Blanca says she found the duo’s social media posts “absurd,” and that “they wanted to project an image that they were this perfect, good looking, fit couple.”
A new twist comes when Blanca says, “One of the first people to reach out to me about Jon’s past, was his mistress.”
Jon’s former mistress is introduced with voice modulation and appearing in shadow form. She explains she had a romantic relationship with him for a year and a half. She claims, “In so many ways I feel lucky to be alive. I really believe that Jon is a dangerous man.”
The mistress said she met Jon after coming across Return to Nature following her father’s death from cancer in 2019. She said he “immediately started messaging me.” Jon went on to paint Carie as someone interested in cutting corners to increase profit while referring to his wife as “the devil.”
The woman stated that Jon told her he would be “going his separate ways” with Carie, she knew that was an approach to them becoming romantically involved. Their affair ended when he “ghosted” her.
Carie Hallford’s Level of Involvement Revealed
Chrystina says that people assume “Jon did this and Carie was just going along with it to appease her husband somehow. This woman signed the paperwork. This woman met with us face to face. She’s the one who promised us she would take care of our dead.”
Tyler makes the gut-turning claim that, “Carie would sit in the car while he would bring in wheelbarrows of bodies into the Penrose location, even making remarks such as ‘I got people juice in my mouth. Can you get me a double cheeseburger and something else for dinner.'”
How Jon and Carie Hallford Got Away With Letting Dead Bodies Rot
Beth asks, “How did they get away with this for so long?” since, based on the coroner’s findings, some of the bodies had been rotting for four years. She goes on to explain that “Colorado law may have played a surprising part in that.”
Blanca says that Colorado law does not require funeral directors, or embalmers, to have a license.
Jon and Carie Hallford Are Arrested
Jon and Carie were arrested in November 2023, a month after investigators descended on Return to Nature.
The FBI was able to piece together that the couple was staying at Jon’s father’s house in Oklahoma, Tyler explains, saying that agents arrived there and took Jon and Carie into custody.
Beth reveals that Jon and Carie were charged by the state of Colorado with “money laundering, forgery and theft. But they’re also charged with 190 counts of abuse of a corpse. Each count directly linked to a body found in Return to Nature.”
She added that many more bodies passed through the funeral home, thus, “The number of victims is likely much higher.”
Heather explains that she is not listed as a victim, because sadly, her son has not been identified.
Jon and Carie Hallford Take a Plea Deal
In January of 2024, the Hallfords were released on bond. The following month after a court appearance, Heather and Chrystina confronted Jon outside the courthouse, which turned out to be the video shown at the start of the episode.
In July 2024, the state made an offer to the couple: plead guilty to all 190 counts of abuse to a corpse in exchange for a 20-year prison sentence for Jon and 15 years for Carie. The families say they are against the plea deal.
Beth is left wondering what happed to the bodies of the unaccounted victims. She says Jon texted his mistress that he was working on a “water cremation device,” where a body is dissolved instead of being burned.
The episode closes as a title card displays: “On November 22, 2024, Jon and Carie Hallford plead guilty to 191 counts of Abuse of a Corpse. They both face up to 20 years in prison. In response to the Return to Nature disaster, the State of Colorado passed legislation requiring Funeral Directors and embalmers to be licensed.”
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