DENVER (CN) - When Tanya Wilson's mother died, she and her brother took seriously their responsibility to send off Yong Anderson into the afterlife.

The siblings washed their mother's body and moisturized her skin. They dressed her in traditional Hmong clothing, with thick socks to keep her feet warm and her favorite gold bracelet on her wrist.

The send-off didn't end there. Wilson flew to Hawaii, chartering a boat to scatter what she thought were her mother's ashes in the Pacific Ocean.

"My mother deserved peace in death," Wilson told a federal judge Friday, recalling how her mother worked three jobs to provide for the family and didn't have the luxury to complain.

Wilson thought she'd done everything she could to honor her mother. But she soon learned that the owners of the funeral home she'd used, Return to Nature in Colorado Springs, had defrauded grieving customers by taking their money and leaving their loved ones to decompose in a warehouse.

The severity of the fraud hit Wilson when the FBI brought her a red plastic biohazard bag. It contained her mother's golden bracelet, which her brother painstakingly cleaned.

"Jon and Carie Hallford didn't just break the law," Wilson told a court - "they shattered lives."

Wilson was one of a dozen victims who testified in federal court in Denver on Friday. There, they asked the court to impose the maximum sentence against Jon Hallford, owner of the Return to Nature Funeral Home.

Given the circumstances, U.S. District Judge Nina Wang opted to give Hallford 20 years on a single charge of conspiracy to commit write fraud. That was five years more than prosecutors had asked for and double what the defense had requested.

"You defrauded [grieving relatives] into believing you were helping to fulfill promises they made to loved ones at their end of life," the Joe Biden appointee said. "You took the money and you did not fix Penrose, but you spent it on personal gain."

Jon and Carrie Hallford opened the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs in 2017. Jon Hallford told local press he'd dreamed of providing eco-friendly end-of-life services to the community.

A second location opened in Penrose in 2019. The Gazette, Colorado Springs' paper of record, in 2020 named the business the best funeral home around.

The funeral home's legal troubles wouldn't come to light for three more years - but prosecutors say the couple had already began defrauding customers.

Jon Hallford's double life finally unraveled in 2023, when the Fremont County Sheriff's Office investigated a foul odor at the Penrose location. They discovered 191 decomposing bodies stacked like lumber.

"These were not individuals to you. They were not people. They didn't have names," Wang said. "The sheer number, and the fact that the court cannot read them all because of timing, reflects the seriousness of the offense."

In court, U.S. Attorney Tim Neff described the graphic state of the building.

It defied what even a Hollywood director could imagine, he said, with bodies left naked, wrapped in body bags or tarps, and haphazardly strewn about the building as decomposition liquid seeped around.

The smell was so strong that FBI agents copied their notes from the building onto clean paper. They also replaced cameras used to photograph the space. Insects, rats, mold and fungus feasted on the bodies, Neff said.

"This is not just wire fraud: It goes into a whole other realm of crime that needs to be addressed with the court's sentence," Neff said. "This crime was a violation of all societal norms of decency."

The Hallfords were first arrested in November 2023 on more than 100 state charges.

Among them: abuse of a corpse, theft, money laundering and forgery. The couple pleaded guilty to several last year. Federal prosecutors then filed additional charges in April 2024 over false statements made on an application for federal Covid-19 aid in 2020.

From September 2019 through October 2023, the couple defrauded hundreds of people who sought funeral services. Charging between $900 and $1,400 for cremations and even more for burials, investigators said the Hallfords collected $193,000 from the 191 named families over four years. But instead of burying or cremating the deceased as contracted, they left them to rot in the Penrose warehouse.

Federal prosecutors characterized Carie Hallford as running the front end of the business, interacting with customers and keeping the books. Jon was responsible for transporting and preparing bodies for cremation or cemetery burial.

"It wasn't just 191 bodies left in the building; it was a community that has been changed by the actions of Jon Hallford, and no sentence can change that," said Chrystina Page, who had trusted Return to Nature to cremate her son David.

To visualize all 1,178 bodies entrusted to the funeral home - not just the 191 found in the Penrose warehouse - Page stood in court, filling a fishbowl with thousands of colorful beads one by one.

"I stand before you not just as a grieving mother, but as one voice of thousands forever altered by the actions of Return to Nature Funeral Home," Page said.

Federal prosecutors' case against Jon Hallford centered around an application for Covid-19 relief funds. In that application, he falsely represented the business wasn't in violation of any law.

With $882,300 obtained from the Small Business Administration, Hallford and his wife then purchased "a vehicle, multiple vacations, entertainment, dining, tuition for a minor child, cryptocurrency, cosmetic medical procedures, jewelry, various goods and merchandise from Amazon, and payments to other vendors unrelated to their business," prosecutors said in a grand jury indictment.

In October 2024, both Hallfords pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, after which the federal government filed to dismiss a dozen other related charges, including outright wire fraud and aiding and abetting.

Carrie Hallford rescinded her guilty plea after Wang refused to limit herself to prosecutors' recommended sentence of seven to 15 years of incarceration. The premade deal was not in the public's best interest, Wang concluded.

Jon Hallford agreed to proceed with his plea, knowing the judge could impose on him any sentence she saw fit under the law.

"I am so deeply sorry for my actions. Please believe that Penrose is not who I am," Hallford told the court, wearing a khaki jumpsuit at the defense table.

"Living with the guilt of my actions changed my soul. I still hate myself for what I have done," Hallford said. "I [would] disrespect or dishonor any victim [by] blaming my actions on someone else. I am responsible for my actions."

Federal public defender Laura Hayes Suelau had urged the court to stick to sentencing guidelines. She argued her client took responsibility for his actions and had suffered an immense amount of public shame, including having life-sized voodoo dolls made in his likeness.

After Wang read her sentence aloud, Suelau stood to express an objection.

"I object to your honor's sentence as substantively unreasonable," Suelau said.

Restitution will be determined in a separate hearing.

Source: Courthouse News Service