Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This Funeral Director Lost 190 Bodies - The Jon Hallford Story

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Jon Hallford, co-owner of Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado, was sentenced in June 2025 to 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for misusing COVID-19 relief funds and defrauding grieving families

Predator Badlands, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. Here, you're not the predator. You're the prey, prey, prey, prey, prey, prey, prey, prey. Critics are saying it's epic, stunning, and breathtaking. Many have come here. None have survived. Predator Badlands, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus, rated PG-13. This is probably the weirdest crime I've ever heard of.

And it all starts with this guy, John. And John is around 40 years old during this time, living in Colorado. And John, he works with a lot of dead bodies. He's in the funeral business. And John, like a lot of people, he really wants to make money. Any way he can. And so one day in 2019, he finally gets that opportunity. Because at the funeral home, some of the makeshift refrigeration units they use for storing

the bodies, they stop working properly. And so the bodies, they're not being refrigerated like they're supposed to. And I guess John, he doesn't want to spend the money to fix all of this, because instead of making the repairs like a normal human being would, he just continues to store the bodies in this facility anyway. And so these bodies, which are not being properly refrigerated, they just start decomposing. And no one realizes this is what's going on because I think it's just him and his wife working there. And this is great for John because now he's making extra profit because he still charges clients the same amount he did before, but now he doesn't have to pay for the cost of refrigeration. And he must be saving a ton of money doing this because once

he starts doing it and he sees how easy it is to cut corners, he decides, this is great. I think I'll cut even more corners. So he does a complete overhaul and he starts running the whole funeral home differently. Like customers will pay him to cremate or bury their loved ones, and John will just straight up, not do it, because cremation and burial costs him money. So instead, he'll just take the body and store it in the funeral home warehouse to decompose with the others. But he'll tell the family of the deceased that he did properly dispose of the body. So basically, he doesn't dispose of the corpses, he lets them pile up in various states of decay while he pockets the service charges, which is just vile. Sometimes he'll go as far as to give the grieving family members

an urn that's supposed to be filled with loved one's ashes, but instead John will fill it with dry concrete mix. So these poor people think that they've got their grandma in an urn, and it's basically just sand and gravel. And at least two different times, he delivers the wrong body for burial, and he'll hide the mistake from the family because the caskets are closed, so they'll never know. So he's just like, here's your loved one's body, and it's another random person's body instead. So imagine that you buried your relative and you later find out that you didn't really bury them that there's actually a completely different person in that grave that you've been visiting. That is all kinds of messed up. But I guess it must be profitable because

bro keeps doing it. And he knows what he's doing is bad because he does whatever he can to hide it. Like he blocks out windows and doors to the place so that people can't see in. He restricts access to certain parts of the building. He's always making up bullshit excuses as to why people shouldn't go in. And over time, the funeral home starts to smell. Because of course it does. There are bodies constantly piling up and decomposing in there. And so he has to make up excuses as to where the smell is coming from. And he's like, oh, I've been studying taxidermy. That's why the place stinks all the time. And I guess people believe him. And if you think all that is bad, if you think that this guy can't sink any lower, it gets much worse. Because one day in 2020,

kaboom, the COVID-19 pandemic hits. And everyone is scrambling and people are out of work and a lot of businesses are suddenly closing down. And in order to prevent a lot of these businesses from closing shop for good and crashing our economy, the U.S. government starts providing emergency financial aid to a lot of these places, aka PPP loans, which were called loans but aren't really meant to be paid back. So if you qualify for the loan, it's kind of like free money. And so John decides to take advantage of this and he starts ripping off the U.S. government. And so John, along with his wife, this woman, Carrie, John and Carrie run the funeral home together. So she's involved in all this too, allegedly. And so John and Carrie,

they start submitting PPP loan applications using false information. But boom, it works. Suddenly they got free COVID-19 relief money in their pockets. And then in 2021, I guess they start to run out a room from all the bodies piling up. And so they go and they buy a second funeral home location. I assume with some of that PPP money, which, speaking of PPP, they also get another big payment of COVID relief money that same year. Then the next year in 2022, they get a third payment from the PPP loan program, giving them a grand total of 800 and 880. $82,000 in government relief funds alone over the past three years. So now, of course, John and Kerry have a lot of money.

Money that they scam from the government, money that they saved from not properly storing the bodies they're supposed to store. And you know, they're not going to spend this money on repairing the refrigeration equipment or whatever. No, no, no. They're spending it on some bullshit for themselves. Like they got a new GMC Yukon and a new infinity. They buy themselves stuff from Gucci and from Tiffany's.

They buy $31,000 in crypto. They take trips to Las Vegas and trips to Florida. They even blow some of that money on laser body sculpting, which I don't even know what the hell that is. All the while, their customers' loved ones' bodies rot in their unrefrigerated buildings. And so like John and Kerry are so shameless that they're buying luxury things for themselves and no one appears to notice. so it seems like these two are just never going to get caught.

Until... Until... Until... ...when it all starts to fall apart. Because John and Kerry apparently run a green funeral home, which is supposed to be environmentally friendly, which means they don't use regular embalming fluids. So, like, these bodies stink, like really bad.

Like, they apparently stink way more than normal bodies would. And one day, the sheriff's office in the... county where John and Kerry's second funeral home is located, they get a call from someone reporting about a horrific odor, an odor coming from the funeral home. The next day, the Colorado state government hits John up, and they want to check out John's funeral home, because there had been a report that it stinks. And John, he tries to bullshit them like, oh, no, I was learning taxidermy there. But whatever, eventually they get a warrant to search the place, and the FBI from Denver shows up one day, and they finally

get inside and they find 190 bodies. 190 bodies all stack up on top of each other in this small bug infested building. Some of them had been dead for years. Some of them had been sitting there since 2019

which means that they had been sitting there for over four years. And now allegedly John and Carrie are like oh shit they're on to us and they flee from Colorado all the way down to Oklahoma. However, it is no use. They can't run. The FBI tracks them there. And so, bam, they get arrested. Here's John's mugshot. And also, here's Carrie's mugshot. And like, it's wild, because if you go to their Instagram account, by the way, because the funeral home,

I guess, has an Instagram account for some reason, you can see angry customers leaving comments, like, what did you do with my mother's body? And, bastard, those poor families are having to suffer, not knowing where their family members remains are. That's crazy. But anyway, in 2024, they get sued in a class action lawsuit, and they lose, and they're ordered to pay $950 million to the families that they've wronged. $950 million. They're never going to be able to pay that.

While in their criminal trial, which is a separate trial, John gets sentenced to 20 years in prison, and as of right now, Kerry has not done. been sentenced yet.