Funeral home owners where 190 decaying bodies were found are set to appear in court over charges they abused corpses, laundered money and forged documents

A couple who promised grieving families a 'natural burial' for loved ones will go on trial today charged with leaving corpses stacked for years in their unrefrigerated compound outside Denver.

Jon and Carie Hallford face 250 charges of forgery, theft, money laundering and abuse of a corpse after nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered at their Return to Nature funeral home in Colorado Springs.

Investigators discovered 'abhorrent conditions' when they raided the property in October after repeated complaints from neighbors about the 'dead animal smell' sitting over the area.

Horrified police discovered 190 dead bodies abandoned in rooms where 'human decomposition fluids and insects lined the floors'.

Relatives who paid $1,290 for an eco-friendly cremation and the promise of a tree planting in the Colorado National Forest were allegedly handed 'concrete dust' rather than ashes while their loved ones were shelved and forgotten about.

'For four years, I've marched all over this country with this urn believing it to be my son,' said Crystina Page whose 20-year-old son, David, who was shot and killed by law enforcement in 2019.

'My son has been laying there rotting for four years. It's the most horrendous feeling I've ever had in my life.'

County coroners worked around the clock for a week in a bid to identify the bodies after the property was raided on October 4.

DNA testing had to be used on many due to the state of the bodies before they were returned to their families.

'To say my family is horrified and enraged is an understatement,' said Lindsay Maher when she discovered her grandmother Yong Anderson was among the dead.

'My grandma's last wishes were to be cremated and have her ashes spread in the ocean.

'It turns out the ashes we received from Return To Nature was actually just concrete dust and my grandma's body has been at the abandoned building this entire time.

'They falsified my grandmas death certificate and handed my grieving family concrete dust.'

The company opened for business in 2017 offering 'a natural way of caring for your loved one with minimal environmental impact.'

But by the time of the raid it owed more than $120,000 in unpaid bills and had been repeatedly taken to court over unpaid wages and disputes with local medical centers.

The company's operating license expired in November last year but the state has little regulation of funeral homes with no routine inspections or qualification requirements for operators.

Relatives said they raised their suspicions with the couple but were fobbed off each time.

When the family of retired Army officer Tanya Wilson received her ashes, her brother Elliot thought they were unusually heavy and confronted Carie Hallford.

'Jesse, of course, this is your mother,' Elliott recalled Hallford saying.

When he took them to a nearby funeral director he was told 'I've never seen anything that looks like that in the range of what cremated remains would typically expect to look like.'

Two families were so suspicious they mixed the 'ashes' with water and found that they solidified.

Samantha Naranjo discovered that the body of mother Dorothy had been warehoused for more than a year in the dilapidated building.

'We were hurt, we were frustrated, now we're angry,' she told KRDO.

'We want justice. Not just for us, but every single one of those victims. Every one of them. 

'Their family deserves to be at peace, the community deserves justice.'

The couple fled to Wagoner, Oklahoma, where they were arrested on November 8 and jailed on a bond of $2million each.

Grieving relatives and outraged locals have picketed the premises 100 miles south of Denver demanding justice for victims.

Joyce Pavetti, 73, can see the funeral home from the stoop of her house and said she caught whiffs of a putrid smell in the last few weeks. 'We just assumed it was a dead animal,' she said.

Neighbor Ron Alexander thought the smell was coming from a septic tank, adding that the blur of law enforcement lights during the police raid 'looked like the 4th of July.'

The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that the building will have to be demolished next month to 'safely remove biological and hazardous materials that were found'.

Court records say Jon Hallford is being represented by the public defender´s office, which does not comment on cases to the media. Carie Hallford is being represented by attorney Michael Stuzynski, who declined to comment on the case.