DENVER (AP) – The owner of a Colorado Funeral Home and his wife were arrested on Wednesday after the decomposing remains of at least 189 people were recently discovered at his site.
John and Carrie Holford were arrested in Wagoner, Oklahoma, on suspicion of four felonies — abuse of a corpse, theft, money laundering and forgery, District Attorney Michael Allen said in a news release after at least some of the victims’ families were notified.
John Holford was being held at the Muskogee County Jail in Oklahoma, but his wife was not listed there, according to a man who answered a call at the jail but declined to give his name. John Holford does not have an attorney listed in prison records, and neither he nor his wife could immediately be reached for comment. Neither has a personal phone number listed, and the funeral home’s number is no longer in service.
John Holford owns Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, a small town about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Denver. The remains were discovered on October 4 by authorities responding to a tip “disgusting smell” in the dilapidated company building. Officials initially estimated there was about 115 bodies inside but count later increased to 189 after they finished removing all the debris in mid-October.
The day after the smell was reported, the director of the state’s Office of Registration of Funeral Homes and Crematoria spoke to John Holford on the phone. He tried to cover up the improper storage of corpses at his business, admitted to having a “problem” at the site and claimed to practice embalming there, according to an Oct. 5 order from state officials.
The funeral home also had a location in Colorado Springs, but it was unclear if any of the charges related to handling bodies at that location. The pair’s arrests are related to funeral home operations over a four-year period through September, the families were told.
Relatives of people whose remains were processed by the funeral home fear their loved ones were not cremated and are instead among the remains authorities have recovered. They said death certificates indicated the remains were cremated at one of two crematoriums, but both crematoriums told the Associated Press that they did not perform Back to Nature cremations during the dates of the certificates.
One of the affected family members, Tanya Wilson, said her mother’s body was among the neglected remains found last month and that the ashes that Return to Nature told her family were her mother’s were not. after law enforcement identified the body to her mother, who cooked second-to-none Korean meals and sometimes worked three jobs to keep the family afloat, they gave Wilson the jewelry left on the body. There was some substance left on the bracelet, she said.
“I don’t think any jail/prison time will justify my brother having to clean my mother’s rotting flesh off her bracelet that was returned to us. Nothing,” Wilson said in a statement to the AP. Regarding the arrests, she said: “This is just one step in a long process. I get no satisfaction from it.”
The company, which was founded in 2017 and offered cremations and “green” burials without embalming fluids, has continued to do business even as financial and legal problems have mounted in recent years. The owners had failed to pay taxes in recent months, were evicted from one of their properties and were being sued for unpaid bills by a crematory that went out of business with them nearly a year ago, according to public records and interviews with people who worked with them.
Colorado has some of the weakest oversight of funeral homes in the nation, with no routine inspections or qualification requirements for funeral home operators.
There is no indication that state regulators visited the site or contacted Hallford until more than 10 months after Penrose Funeral Home’s registration expired in November 2022. State lawmakers gave regulators the power to inspect funeral homes without owners’ consent last year. but no additional money was received provided increased checks.
There is a family filed a lawsuit accusing Return to Nature and the Hallfords of negligence, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress and violation of several Colorado laws, among other allegations.
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Associated Press writers Ken Miller in Oklahoma City and Amy Hanson in Helena, Montana contributed to this report.
