If you’re familiar with the story of Jon and Carie Hallford – two scumbag Colorado funeral home owners who stashed 200 unrefrigerated bodies in a decrepit building whose plea deal was rejected by a judge on Friday, per KKTV – you could be forgiven if you saw the Associated Press‘s headline from the same day, “Colorado governor demands coroner’s resignation after decomposing bodies found in funeral home,” and thought it was about the Hallfords since they were in the news that day.
It wasn’t.
No, this was a completely different funeral home, Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, owned by the county coroner himself, Brian Cotter. The Hallfords’ funeral home, Return to Nature, in Penrose. Cotter was present on Wednesday when investigators showed up at his funeral home and, in a nice touch by the AP, they write that “Cotter asked the inspectors not to enter the room” before they discovered at least 20 bodies stashed in there to rot, some possibly for as long as 15 years.
Now this isn’t anything new, and even though the Hallfords make Cotter look like an amateur they aren’t even the GOATs of American funeral home corpse piling as that title belongs to Ray Brent Marsh’s Tri-State Crematorium in Noble, Georgia. Marsh stashed 339 bodies that he took money to burn and just left them to rot in sheds and trailers in the woods until he was caught in 2002.
While it seems simple enough – Take money to do job, hand people an urn filled with concrete dust, stash body – it just kind of actually doesn’t though right? Like not even questioning it on moral or even really competency grounds, so much as just what the fuck? Why? Even writing something along the lines of “Actual murderers would LOVE to get their hands on a goddamned crematorium rather than risk dumping a body somewhere it could be found” is probably overthinking it, as is going on a related spiel about how it was more effort to stash the bodies than to burn them.
It cannot in any fucking universe cost that much to operate a freaking crematorium relative to leaving it idle. This shit simply defies comprehension as a value proposition.