Families of deceased loved ones may have received fake ashes as gifts from Colorado Funeral Home

A funeral home in Colorado is under investigation for possible falsification of death certificates and passing fake ashes to his relatives after nearly 200 decomposing bodies were found on the premises.

The Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, has been accused by at least four families of giving them fake human remains after a bad smell at the funeral home led to the discovery by police of 189 decomposing human bodies, almost all of which have not yet been found were identified, according to an Associated Press article.

Return to Nature reportedly listed third-party crematoriums on death certificates that were returned to the bereaved after they paid for funeral services. An Associated Press investigation culminated in the owners of the funeral homes in question vehemently denying that they had done any recent business with Return to Nature. The AP said it reviewed four death certificates submitted to it by families who used Return To Nature’s cremation services and found that none of the cremations appear to have actually taken place, or at least not to those provided by Return to Nature places took place.

“My mother’s final wish was for her remains to be scattered in a place she loved, rather than rotting in a building,” said Tanya Wilson, who told the Associated Press she believes the ashes she left in the Distributed in Hawaii in August was a fake. “Any peace we had because we thought we were respecting their wishes was just completely taken away from us.”

According to the AP, all of the death certificates they reviewed listed a crematorium owed by Wilbert Funeral Services. An attorney for Wilbert Funeral Services, Lisa Epps, said they stopped performing cremations for Return to Nature several months before the deaths listed on the provided death certificates. Epps told the AP that as many as 10 families had contacted her about cremations not being carried out. The owner of a second crematorium, Roselawn Funeral Home, also said he was recently contacted by a family about a cremation in 2021 that Roselawn did not perform.

Wilbert Funeral Services has reportedly stopped doing business with Return to Nature due to alleged financial problems. According to the AP, public records showed that Return to Nature was recently the subject of an eviction notice and had unpaid taxes. They also recently had to pay $21,000 in restitution to Wilbert Funeral Services for allegedly failing to pay for what Epps called “a couple hundred cremations.”

Return to Nature’s owners, Jon and Carrie Hallford, have not yet been arrested but have not responded to any of the AP’s requests for comment. A member of one of the four families interviewed by AP, all of whom suspect they were given dry concrete instead of human remains, said he confronted Carie Hallford with his concerns when he was originally given the urn that they said contained his mother’s ashes contained

Jesse Elliott, Tanya Wilson’s brother, told the AP that when Carie Hallford gave him particularly heavy ashes, he asked her about them and Hallford said, “Jesse, of course that’s your mother.” Elliott and Wilson reportedly brought the ashes to another funeral director who told them the ashes looked very strange.

“I’ve never seen anything that looks like cremated remains that you would normally expect,” Amber Flickinger of Platt’s Funeral Home told the AP.

Another potential victim of the alleged ash counterfeiting, Michelle Johnston, told the AP she became suspicious after news broke about all the bodies found at Return to Nature. She examined her husband’s ashes closely and found that after she applied some water to them, they turned into what she thought was concrete. Properly cremated remains do not behave this way and remain in a fragile state, according to Faith Haug, chair of the funeral sciences program at Arapahoe Community College in Colorado.

“I kind of got to the point where I didn’t lose it every day,” Johnston told the AP. “I don’t know where my husband is.”

At the time of publication, no charges had been filed against Hallford’s Funeral Home and Return to Nature, but according to the AP, hefty fines and a maximum of two years in prison are on the table. Colorado is known for having particularly lax laws regarding funeral services and cremations, and this is actually not the first time that human remains have potentially been replaced with concrete in Colorado. Another Colorado funeral home manager was found guilty of selling body parts and counterfeit ashes and received a 20-year prison sentence for mail fraud in January.