Colorado funeral home owners who allowed their bodies to decompose have pleaded guilty to 191 counts of abuse of corpses.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado. The owners of a Colorado funeral home who allowed nearly 200 bodies to decompose in a room-temperature building and gave grieving families artificial ashes pleaded guilty Friday to corpse abuse.

According to the charges, John and Carey Hallford, who own the Return to Nature funeral home, began storing bodies in a dilapidated building near Colorado Springs back in 2019 and providing families with dry concrete in lieu of cremated remains. A grim discovery last year has upended the grieving process for families.

The plea agreement reached between the defendants and prosecutors calls for John Hallford to receive 20 years in prison and Carey Hallford to receive 15 to 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors say the Hallfords spent money lavishly over the years. They used clients’ money and nearly $900,000 in pandemic relief funds to buy laser body sculpting, fancy cars, trips to Las Vegas and Florida, $31,000 in cryptocurrency and other luxury items, according to court records.

Even though the couple lived lavishly, prosecutors said the bodies in their funeral home were decomposing.

“Bodies were lying on the ground, stacked on shelves, left on gurneys, stacked on top of each other or simply stacked in rooms,” prosecutor Rachel Powell said. She said family members of the bodies found were “greatly and forever outraged.”

The Hallfords each pleaded guilty to 191 counts of abuse of corpses, 189 bodies found decomposing and two counts of burying the wrong bodies.

They also agreed to pay compensation, the amount of which has not yet been determined. Additional charges of theft, forgery and money laundering will be dropped under the agreements.