The owner of a US funeral home and his wife have been arrested after the decaying remains of at least 189 people were found at his premises in Colorado last month.
Jon and Carie Hallford were detained in Wagoner, Oklahoma, on suspicion of abuse of a corpse, money laundering and forgery, according to an email sent by authorities to aggrieved families.
Mr Hallford owns Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, a small town about 160km south of Denver.
The remains were discovered on 4 October by authorities responding to a report of an "abhorrent smell" inside the company’s decrepit building.
Officials initially estimated there were about 115 bodies inside, but the number later increased to 189 after they finished removing all of the remains in mid-October.
A day after the odour was reported, the director of the state office of Funeral Home and Crematory registration spoke by phone to Mr Hallford.
He tried to conceal the improper storage of corpses in Penrose, acknowledged having a "problem" at the site and claimed he practiced taxidermy there, according to an order from state officials dated 5 October.
The company, which was started in 2017 and offered cremations and "green" burials without embalming fluids, kept doing business even as its financial and legal problems mounted in recent years.
The owners had missed tax payments in recent months, were evicted from one of their properties and were sued for unpaid bills by a crematorium that quit doing business with them almost a year ago, according to public records and interviews with people who worked with them.
Colorado has some of the weakest oversight of funeral homes in the United States with no routine inspections or qualification requirements for funeral home operators.
There is no indication that state regulators visited the site or contacted Mr Hallford until more than ten months after the Penrose funeral home’s registration expired last November.
State legislators gave regulators the authority to inspect funeral homes without the owners’ consent last year, but no additional money was provided for increased inspections.
