When you hear someone has a hoarding problem, things like Pokemon cards, vintage antiques, or miscellaneous junk from eBay might come to mind, not dead people. As horrific as it might sound, a couple in Colorado has been stashing away corpses in a “bug-infested building” for almost half a decade. While they weren’t frightening serial killers or demonic cultists, the two were using their funeral business to make a lot of money, both unethically and illegally.
Instead of burning the bodies they received, Jon Hallford and his wife were storing the remains of their clients’ loved ones in a building in the small town of Penrose, Colorado. On top of defrauding the federal government, the couple was also making bank by not cremating the bodies but instead just letting them rot away. It was allegedly the decaying smell of the almost 200 corpses that finally got police to investigate the horror house of bodies. The two were arrested while visiting family in Oklahoma, per 1News.
The Colorado couple is now receiving their sentencing, but the husband had the audacity to request a plea deal for 20 years in prison instead of a harsher punishment. Unfortunately for him, the judge has rejected the plea deal, according to Denver7, meaning now he’s at the mercy of the court. Considering how many families he tricked, along with how inappropriately he’s been treating the deceased, things probably aren’t going to end well for him or his wife.
One Redditor points out how it “sounds like more work to manage and maintain than just cremating the bodies.” That might be true, but the extra money the funeral home operator was making by not doing so was much more tempting. Not to mention, the absolutely horrendous state of the bodies when they were found likely indicates they were being maintained very little, if not at all. That, or maybe the couple was just too lazy to do their job. But one thing’s certain: “I cannot imagine the stench of 200 bodies stacked in someone’s basement,” as one commenter put it.
