His instincts tried to warn him that something wasn’t right about Return to Nature, but Jesse Elliott’s grief had been so loud.

The Woodland Park man had just lost his 76-year-old mom, Yong Anderson, on June 2. He was in a fog and just trying to do the things one must after death leaves a hole in your world.

Like other families who turned to Jon and Carie Hallford’s Colorado Springs “green burial” business in the years after it on Platte Ave. in 2017, Elliott trusted his mom’s body was in the hands of a reputable business that would help carry out her final wishes. He assumed government agencies and laws existed to ensure that’s what happens.

Vigil scheduled after Penrose funeral home tragedy

The last week has been an exercise in how grief becomes anger, as Elliott and other families wait to learn whether their loved ones are among more than 115 bodies found decomposing inside Return to Nature’s Penrose property.

Many, like Elliott, now are doubting the ashes the company returned to them as cremains are genuine.

“My emotions are shot, they are. I can’t grieve for my mom. All I can do is want her body back,” Elliott said Tuesday. “We are hoping she is there… regardless of the condition. We just want her cremated and actually returned to us – her actual remains.”

That’s not all he wants from the only state where funeral directors aren’t required to pass even a “minimum level of education and training” to be licensed, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.

“I want the politicians to be held accountable,” Elliott said. “It’s the monsters that do these things, but it’s the state that allows it to happen.”

Elliott said his interactions with Return to Nature and funeral home owners Jon and Carie Hallford grew increasingly odd – and sparse – in the weeks after the company collected his mother’s body from Woodland Park, where Anderson had died in home hospice care. It began with a delay of the ashes he was told would be returned in “about a week,” then a series of excuses – a busy coroner, a flooded basement – for the delay, and why the Hallfords couldn’t meet with families at the funeral home.

Could they meet halfway? Or, how about a house call?

Return to Nature Funeral Home investigation: Remains transferred to El Paso, Douglas counties

Elliott said that despite repeated attempts, he never saw the inside of the company’s Platte Ave. offices, nor the location where the funeral home set up in an industrial park off Garden of the Gods Road before decamping to Penrose.

“They never called us, we had to call them. Every time we said ‘We’ll come in, there was always an excuse why we couldn’t come in,'” Elliott said.

He said the ashes Carie Hallford delivered to his home, felt far too heavy to be the petite Korean woman who had withered to 90 pounds by the time of her death.

“I said ‘Are you sure it’s my mother?’ She smiled and said ‘Of course it’s your mother, Jesse. We go through a very stringent process of quality assurance,'” Elliott said. “I had this really bad feeling, but I took her word for it.”

As he later learned, before embarking with his family for Hawaii in August to spread Anderson’s ashes off Oahu, his mom’s remains didn’t contain a metal tracking tag he knew should have been there.

During the memorial, his brother-in-law was immediately suspicious about the look of the ashes. The color and consistency were wrong, almost like powdered sugar.

“And he has 27 years in the military and been to quite a few funerals and spread the ashes of his comrades,” Elliott said. “This isn’t legit.”

His sister, Tanya Wilson, who lives in Georgia, took the cremains to a funeral director who told her he didn’t believe they were human. It was too late for her to cancel the order for keepsake gemstones pressed from what she’d thought were her mom’s remains.

Elliott said multiple attempts to follow up with Return to Nature after the Hawaii memorial, to get his questions answered about the ashes, the missing metal tag, all of it, went nowhere. In mid-September, he sent the company a final email asking for an update, which went unanswered, then he “went back to trying to put my life back together and move on.”

Authorities discovered the gruesome scene in Penrose on Oct. 4 while investigating neighbors’ complaints about an odor of decay coming from the property.

Elliott said he wishes he had thought to check his mother’s death certificate before the investigation, and what will certainly be a lengthy process of identifying bodies, prompted him to do so.

The document listed Return to Nature as the funeral home handling arrangements for Anderson, but a different business – Wilbert Cremations, in Commerce City – as the company that performed the cremation. 

Elliott called Wilbert Cremations. The woman on the phone told him the crematorium had severed ties with Return to Nature in November of 2022.

Court records show Wilbert won a default judgment of over $18,000 against Hallford and Hallfordhomes LLC in a lawsuit filed in Colorado’s 4th Judicial District Court.

Records reveal Return to Nature Funeral Home owner’s long legal history – including Oklahoma

“My communication, reaching out to Wilbert confirmed all of my bad feelings that my mom is possibly over at this location” in Penrose, Elliott said.

Double-checking the receipt – which lists the company as Hallfordhomes LLC, and the merchant type as “home furnishings and equipment stores” – drove the “surreal’ ‘ reality home.

“It’s like they were counting on people not reading these documents closely, and I didn’t because I was grieving,” he said. “This was all planned, this fraud, and it involved falsifying official documents. I just can’t believe they thought they could get away with it – and they did get away with it, for quite some time.”

The more research he did the more Elliott said he learned he shouldn’t be so surprised.

A 2018 investigation into Montrose funeral home owner Megan Hess found she’d dissected and sold the body parts of 560 corpses, without families’ knowledge or consent. Hess later was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Colorado legislation passed in the wake of that grisly revelation promised to add oversight, steps and teeth that would keep such things from happening again.

“It didn’t really do anything to protect anyone from predators, from monsters like this,” Elliott said.

“The last question and the final answer we should get in this investigation is. Why did this happen? Why are we not at the same level of protection that the other 49 states have? And why do politicians keep letting it happen?”