The latest atrocity was revealed on February 6, when authorities found the corpse of a 63-year-old woman inside a hearse and the cremated remains of at least thirty people at a house in southwest Denver, where Miles Harford had just been evicted. Harford previously owned Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services in Littleton, which shut down in September 2022.
The woman in the hearse died in August 2022. Her family had gone to Harford for her cremation, but were unknowingly given the ashes of another person while the woman's body was left sealed in a hearse in Harford's backyard for a year and a half, according to police. Officials say that when he agreed to cremate the woman, crematories had already stopped working with Harford's funeral home because he owed them money. The cremated remains found in the house are believed to belong to people who died between 2012 and 2021.
"This situation does raise the possibility that this kind of thing is happening in other parts of the state," said Denver District Attorney Beth McCann during a press conference on February 16. "You've lost that trust."
Harford was arrested in Englewood on February 22 under a warrant for investigation of abuse of a corpse, forgery and theft. He faces up to three years in prison based on the charges for the corpse found in the hearse, McCann said, not including potential charges for the dozens of other remains found.
This is just the latest incident that has raised grave reservations about Colorado's funeral industry.
Colorado is the only state in the nation that does not require licensing or certification for funeral directors. State lawmakers are now looking to change that. Several pieces of legislation will soon be introduced regarding funeral homes, including a bill to require routine inspections of funeral homes and a measure to require licensure for funeral home operators.
Legislators have taken steps toward more regulation before, such as allowing involuntary inspections of funeral homes in 2022 and making abuse of a corpse a felony in 2020. But these new proposals are far more sweeping.
As Coloradans await the impact of new policies, horrifying transgressions continue to come to light. Here's a look at the state's most infamous criminal funeral home cases and where they stand today:
Return to Nature Funeral Home
The decaying remains of nearly 200 people were found improperly stored at the Return to Nature Funeral Home facility in Penrose in October 2023. Investigators testified that they discovered stacks of corpses, bodily fluids several inches deep on the floor, and flies and maggots throughout the building. Around two dozen of the bodies had been languishing in the funeral home since 2019, while 61 others had been there since 2020, including adults, infants and fetuses. Families allege that the funeral home gave them fake ashes instead of their loved ones' remains; some say the so-called cremains were actually dry concrete. Prosecutors claim the husband and wife who owned the funeral home, Jon and Carie Hallford, spent the money families gave them for cremations on vehicles, cryptocurrency and a $1,500 dinner in Las Vegas. 
The Hallfords were arrested in Oklahoma in November after fleeing the state. They were charged with 190 counts of abuse of a corpse, in addition to dozens of theft, forgery and money laundering charges. Jon was released on a $100,000 bond in January, and Carie was released on bond on February 27. They're scheduled to appear in court next on March 21.
Family members of those whose bodies were mishandled in the funeral home are pursuing a class action lawsuit against the Hallfords.
Kent Funeral Homes
A woman contacted police in February 2020 after she sent her stillborn baby boy to be cremated at one of the six funeral homes operated by Lake County Coroner Shannon Kent. She had received significantly more ashes than could fit in an infant-sized urn. An investigation revealed the cremated remains belonged to both an infant and an adult — a piece of an earring and surgical staples were also found in the ashes.Authorities subsequently searched two of Kent's funeral homes in Leadville and Gypsum that October, discovering the unrefrigerated, decomposing corpse of a man who had died three months prior and an abandoned stillborn infant. Officials also said they found numerous bags of unlabeled cremains and fluids from human and animal bodies leaking onto body bags and surgical equipment.
Several of Kent's funeral homes were shut down by the state in December 2020, and he resigned from his position as Lake County coroner in April 2021.
Kent was sentenced to 180 days in jail for unlawful cremation in February 2023. He was also sentenced to six months of probation in September 2021 for an unrelated charge of sending his wife, Staci, to several death scenes in 2019 even though she was not a deputy coroner at the time. Staci was sentenced to one year of probation for her role in the unlawful cremation.
Sunset Mesa Funeral Home
From 2010 to 2018, the operators of Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose illegally sold the bodies or body parts of hundreds of victims without the knowledge or consent of the victims' families. As the families paid for their loved ones to be cremated and returned, Megan Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, stole the bodies, giving the families fake ashes or the ashes of other people so they could sell the bodies for research purposes.The women collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from this scheme, in addition to charging families upwards of $1,000 for each cremation, many of which never occurred. In most cases, they wouldn't discuss donating body parts with the victims' families, but in others, the families explicitly rejected the proposal — only to be ignored by Hess and Koch. In the few instances when families agreed to donate some of their loved ones' body parts, Hess and Koch sold more of the bodies than was authorized.
The funeral home owners also shipped bodies that had infectious diseases like HIV and hepatitis, falsely telling the buyers that the remains were disease-free.
Hess and Koch were arrested and charged in 2020. They each later pleaded guilty to mail fraud and aiding and abetting. Hess was sentenced to twenty years in prison, and Koch was sentenced to fifteen years in January 2023.
These are only the most heinous crimes committed by Colorado funeral home owners. A December report from state regulators detailed dozens of additional criminal cases and complaints involving funeral homes since 2007, including mishandling bodies, mislabeling remains and failing to return ashes to families.
"Regulation is necessary to protect the public," the report concluded.
The proposed bill to require routine inspections of funeral homes is scheduled for its first committee hearing on March 7. Additional funeral home-related legislation will be introduced in the coming weeks, with legislators offering a preview at noon today, March 4.
