A former Colorado funeral home owner who helped her ex-husband hide nearly 200 decomposing bodies in a building is asking for leniency when she is sentenced Monday, saying she was a “scared and desperate mother” who was manipulated to keep the family business operating.
Carie Hallford, 48, faces up to 20 years in prison for taking over $130,000 from families for funeral services, including cremations, and often giving them urns full of concrete mix instead. In two cases, investigators found the wrong body was buried. In August, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and admitted that she and her ex-husband Jon Hallford cheated customers and also defrauded the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic small business aid.
Just imagine what kind of a shit person you have to be to save the cost of fuel for cremation, let the bodies rot, and hand the families a bag of concrete. “Scared and desperate?” More likely greedy AF.
On one hand - agreed, real piece of shit move, on the other hand it’s all symbolic anyway, it’s not like real ashes would make a difference for anything. ig my point is it’s not the worst thing in the world, although the monetary side of things makes it really ugly
In the 1980’s there was a crematory in California that started doing multiple cremations simultaneously. The man that did this claimed much the same, of remains being largely symbolic, and felt he was in the right because he was effectively providing a dozen cremations for the price of one.
HBO made a miniseries about it called The Mortician.
Thanks, I’ll check it out someday
Least she could have done is burnt some logs and gave em real ashes. The Quikrete 5000 high strength countertop mix would be obviously a bit on the heavy side to pass for remains
Minor point, but most people never open an urn unless it’s been damaged and the remains need transferring. It’d be simple enough to pour in a different powder and adjust volume to match the expected weight. Even if someone did happen to open the urn, they might not notice by eye that the material was wrong.
We opened an urn because we needed to scatter some of the ashes in a symbolic location as requested in the deceased’s will. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have. The other provision of the will was great: “In lieu of a memorial service, have a nice seafood dinner. I’ll pay.” And that’s what we did.