A Colorado funeral home owner who stashed nearly 190 dead bodies in a decrepit building and sent grieving families fake ashes received the maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison on Friday, for cheating customers and defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in Covid-19 aid.

Jon Hallford, owner of Return to Nature Funeral Home, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in federal court last year. Separately, Hallford pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse in state court and will be sentenced in August.

At Friday’s hearing, federal prosecutors sought a 15-year sentence and Hallford’s attorney asked for 10 years. Judge Nina Wang said although the case focused on a single fraud charge, the circumstances and scale of Hallford’s crime and the emotional damage to families warranted the longer sentence. “This is not an ordinary fraud case,” she said.

In court before the sentencing, Hallford told the judge he opened Return to Nature to make a positive impact in people’s lives, “then everything got completely out of control, especially me.” “I am so deeply sorry for my actions,” he said. “I still hate myself for what I’ve done.”

Hallford and his wife, Carie Hallford, were accused of storing the bodies between 2019 and 2023 and sending families fake ashes. Investiga­tors described finding the bodies in 2023 stacked atop each other throughout a squat, bug-infested building in Penrose, a small town about a two-hour drive south of Denver. The morbid discovery revealed to many families their loved ones weren’t cremated and the ashes they had spread or cherished were fake. In two cases, the wrong body was buried, according to court documents. Many families said it undid their grieving processes.