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Jon Hallford and Carie Hallford‘s Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, left customers wondering if they were given concrete instead of the ashes of their loved ones.
In a clip of Investigation Discovery’s The Curious Case of … The Funeral Home of Horrors shared with In Touch, a family in Colorado Springs, Colorado, questioned the “ashes” they received from the funeral home after the Hallfords were accused of sending concrete to their customers instead.
“When all of this came about, we needed to try to determine if we had concrete,” Heather DeWolf, whose son Zach died in 2020, said in the clip from the episode, which aired on Monday, February 3, and is now streaming on ID and Max. “What is it that we have? And suddenly we’re kind of manipulating the contents and as we’re doing that, something came to the surface.”
Heather explained that they found metal discs and other mechanical objects in the contents of the bag, but she didn’t know what they were.
“What I do know for certain is that my son had no medical devices inside of his body,” she added.
“We will never know if the ashes that we have are Zach’s,” the victim’s brother, Austin DeWolf, said. “They highly likely aren’t. It’s despicable and it pisses me off because how dare they do this to my big brother?”
“How dare they?” Austin asked again, becoming emotional.
While the DeWolfs initially wondered if they had been sent a bag of concrete, Heather explained in the clip that she did believe it was a bag of ashes belonging to a human. However, she did not believe they were Zach’s.
“I believe I have somebody else. I believe those ashes are human, but I believe they are not my human. If I have somebody else’s loved one, where’s my son? Who has my son?” she concluded.
ID’s The Curious Case of … The Funeral Home of Horrors follows the story of Jon, 44, and Carie, 47, who opened Return to Nature in 2017 with the promise of “eco-friendly care,” according to the episode’s description. However, the couple was accused of “[leaving] bodies decomposing in filth and [providing] families with concrete instead of ashes.”
“When investigators arrive, the Hallfords flee, leaving families demanding justice and answers,” the description concluded.
Jon and Carie were arrested in October 2023 after residents in Penrose reported an odor coming from the Return to Nature facility, according to an April 2024 press release from the United States Attorney’s Office, District of Colorado. FBI investigators “found 190 dead bodies inside the building in various states of decomposition.” Some of the bodies died in as early as 2019.
Investigators also revealed at the time that the Hallfords allegedly misled their customers into believing that their loved ones would be buried or cremated.
Jon and Carie each faced 13 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in October 2024, while the other counts were dismissed in a plea deal, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Jon and Carie were also charged with 190 counts of corpse abuse and pleaded guilty in November 2024, USA Today reported.
The couple faces up to 20 years in prison. Their sentencing hearing is set to take place in 2025.
English (US) ·