The funeral home owners had given families fake ashes for years, trying to conceal the bodies.<\/b>
\nDerrick Johnson buried his mother\u2019s ashes beneath a golden dewdrop tree with purple blossoms at his home on Maui\u2019s Haleakal\u0101 Volcano, fulfilling her wish of a final resting place looking over her grandchildren.
Then the FBI called.
It was Feb. 4, 2024, and Johnson was teaching an eighth-grade gym class.
\u201c\u2019Are you the son of Ellen Lopes?\u2019\u201d a woman asked, Johnson recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.
There had been an incident, and an FBI agent would fly out to explain, the caller said. Then she asked: \u201c\u2019Did you use Return to Nature for a funeral home?\u2019\u201d
\u201c\u2019You should probably google them,\u2019\u201d she added.
In the clatter of the weight room, Johnson typed \u201cReturn to Nature\u201d into his cellphone. Dozens of news reports appeared, details popping out in a blur.
Hundreds of bodies stacked on top of each other. Inches of body decomposition fluid. Swarms of bugs. Investigators traumatized. Governor declares state of emergency.
Johnson felt nauseated and his chest constricted, forcing the breath from his lungs. He pushed himself out of the building as another teacher heard his cries and came running.
Two FBI agents visited Johnson the following week, confirming his mother\u2019s body was among 189 that Return to Nature\u2019s owners, Jon and Carie Hallford, had stashed in a Colorado building between 2019 and Oct. 4, 2023, when the bodies were found.
It was one of the largest discoveries of decaying bodies at a funeral home in the U.S. Lawmakers overhauled the state\u2019s lax funeral home regulations. And besides handing over fake ashes to grieving families, the Hallfords also admitted to defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era aid for small businesses.
Even as the Hallfords\u2019 bills went unpaid, authorities said they spent lavishly on Tiffany jewelry, luxury cars and laser-body sculpting, pocketing about $130,000 clients paid for cremations.
They were arrested in Oklahoma in November 2023 and charged with abusing nearly 200 corpses.
Hundreds of families learned from officials that the ashes they ceremonially spread or kept close weren\u2019t actually their loved ones\u2019 remains. The bodies of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and babies had moldered in a room-temperature building in Colorado.
Jon Hallford will be sentenced Friday, facing between 30 to 50 years in prison, and Carie Hallford in April after a judge accepted their plea agreements in December. Attorneys for Jon and Carie Hallford did not respond to an AP request for comment.
Johnson, 45, who\u2019s suffered panic attacks since the FBI called, promised himself that he would speak at Hallford\u2019s sentencing and ask for the maximum penalty.
\u201cWhen the judge passes out how long you\u2019re going to jail, and you walk away in cuffs,\u201d he said, \u201cyou\u2019re gonna hear me.\u201d\u201cShe lied\u201d
Jon and Carie Hallford were a husband-and-wife team who advertised \u201cgreen burials\u201d without embalming as well as cremation at their Return to Nature funeral home in Colorado Springs.
She would greet grieving families, guiding them through their loved ones\u2019 final journey. He was less seen.
Johnson called the funeral home in early February 2023, the week his mother died. Carie Hallford assured him she would take good care of his mother, Johnson said.
Days later, she handed Johnson a blue box containing a zip-tied plastic bag with gray powder, saying those were his mother\u2019s ashes.
\u201cShe lied to me over the phone. She lied to me through email. She lied to me in person,\u201d Johnson told the AP.
The following day, the box lay surrounded by flowers and photos of Ellen Marie Shriver-Lopes at a memorial service at a Holiday Inn in Colorado Springs.
Johnson sprinkled rose petals over it as a preacher said: \u201cAshes to ashes, dust to dust.\u201dCaught on video
On Sept. 9, 2023, surveillance footage showed a man appearing to be Jon Hallford walk inside a building owned by Return to Nature in the town of Penrose, outside Colorado Springs, according to an arrest affidavit.
Camera footage inside showed a body laying on a gurney wearing a diaper and hospital socks. The man flipped it onto the floor.
Then he \u201cappeared to wipe the remaining decomposition from the gurney onto other bodies in the room,\u201d before wheeling what appeared to be two more bodies into the building, the affidavit said.
In a text to his wife, Hallford said, \u201cwhile I was making the transfer, I got people juice on me,\u201d according to court testimony.The neighborhood mom
Johnson grew up with his mother in an affordable-housing complex in Colorado Springs, where she knew everyone.
Johnson\u2019s father wasn\u2019t around much; at 5 years old, Johnson remembers seeing him punch his mom, sending her careening into a table, then onto a guitar, breaking it.
It was Lopes who taught Johnson to shave and hollered from the bleachers at his football games.
Neighborhood kids called her \u201cmom,\u201d some sleeping on the couch when they needed a place to stay and a warm meal. She would chat with Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses because she didn\u2019t want to be rude. With a life spent in social work, Lopes would say: \u201cIf you have the ability and you have the voice to help: Help.\u201d
Johnson spoke with his mother nearly everyday. After diabetes left her blind and bedridden at age 65, she\u2019d ask Johnson to describe what her grandchildren looked like over the phone.
It was Super Bowl Sunday in 2023 when her heart stopped.
Johnson, who had flown in from Hawaii to be at her bedside, clutched her warm hand and held it until it was cold.A gruesome discovery
Detective Sgt. Michael Jolliffe and Laura Allen, the county\u2019s deputy coroner, stood outside the Penrose building on Oct. 3, 2023, according to the 50-page arrest affidavit.
A sign on the door read \u201cReturn to Nature Funeral Home\u201d and listed a phone number. When Jolliffe called it, it was disconnected. Cracked concrete and yellow stalks of grass encircled the building. At back was a shabby hearse with expired registration. A window air-conditioner hummed.
Someone had told Jolliffe of a rank smell coming from the building the day before, the affidavit said.
One neighbor told an AP reporter they thought it came from a septic tank; another said her daughter\u2019s dog always headed to the building whenever it got off-leash.
It was reminiscent of rancid manure or rotting fish, and struck anyone downwind of the building.
Jolliffe and Allen spotted a dark stain under the door and on the building\u2019s stucco exterior. They thought it looked like fluids they had seen during investigations with decaying bodies, the affidavit said.
But the building\u2019s windows were covered and they couldn\u2019t see inside.
Allen contacted the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agency, which oversees funeral homes, which got in touch with Jon Hallford. Hallford agreed to show an inspector inside the next afternoon.
Inspector Joseph Berry arrived, but Hallford didn\u2019t show.
Berry found a small opening in one of the window coverings, the affidavit said. Peering through, he saw white plastic bags that looked like body bags on the floor.
A judge issued a search warrant that week.Bodies stacked high
Donning protective suits, gloves, boots and respirators, investigators entered the 2,500-square-foot (232-square-meter) building on Oct. 5, 2023, according to the affidavit.
Inside, they found a large bone grinder and next to it a bag of Quikrete that investigators suspected was used to mimic ashes. Bodies were stacked in nearly a dozen rooms, including the bathroom, sometimes so high they blocked doorways, the affidavit said.
There were 189.
Some had decayed for years, others several months, according to the affidavit. Many were in body bags, some wrapped in sheets and duct tape. Others were half-exposed, on gurneys or in plastic totes, or lay with no covering, it said.
Investigators believed the Hallfords were experimenting with water cremation, which can dissolve a body in several hours, the document said. There were swarms of bugs and maggots.
Body bags were filled with fluid, according to the affidavit. Some had ripped. Five-gallon buckets had been placed to catch the leaks. Removal teams \u201ctrudged through layers of human decomposition on the floor,\u201d it said.
Investigators identified bodies using fingerprints, hospital bracelets and medical implants, the affidavit said. It said one body was supposed to be buried in Pikes Peak National Cemetery.
Investigators exhumed the wooden casket at the burial site of the U.S. Army veteran, who served in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. Inside was a woman\u2019s deteriorated body, wrapped in duct tape and plastic sheets.
The veteran\u2019s body was discovered in the Penrose building, covered in maggots.\u201cAshes to ashes\u201d
Following the call from the FBI, Johnson promised himself he would speak at the Hallfords\u2019 sentencing. But he struggled to talk about what had happened even with close friends, let alone in front of a judge and the Hallfords.
For months, Johnson obsessed over the case, reading dozens of news reports, often glued to his phone until one of his children would interrupt him to play.
When he shut his eyes, he said he imagined trudging through the building with \u201cmaggots, flies, centipedes. There\u2019s rats, they\u2019re feasting.\u201d He asked a preacher if his mother\u2019s soul had been trapped there. She reassured him it hadn\u2019t. When an episode of the zombie show \u201cThe Walking Dead\u201d came on, he broke down.
Johnson started seeing a therapist and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He joined Zoom meetings with other victims\u2019 relatives as the number grew from dozens to hundreds.
After Lopes\u2019 body was identified, Johnson flew in March 2024 to Colorado, where his mother\u2019s remains lay in a brown box in a crematorium.
\u201cI don\u2019t think you blame me, but I still want to tell you I\u2019m sorry,\u201d he recalled saying, placing his hand on the box.
Then Lopes\u2019 body was loaded into the cremator and Johnson pushed the button.Justice
Johnson has slowly improved with therapy, engaging more with his students and children. He practiced speaking at the Hallfords\u2019 sentencings while in therapy. Closing his eyes, he envisioned standing in front of the judge \u2014 and the Hallfords.
\u201cJustice is, it\u2019s the part that is missing from this whole equation,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe somehow this justice frees me.\u201d
\u201cAnd then there\u2019s part of me that\u2019s scared it won\u2019t, because it probably won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n