How Colorado funeral homes are rebuilding trust eroded by years of industry scandal

Mike Dudley can usually pick up on someone’s anxiety about dealing with Colorado’s funeral home industry the first time they sit down to talk.

It starts with pointed questions as he meets with families in the conference room at Rundus Funeral Home & Crematory in Broomfield, where Dudley is the general manager and funeral director. How is their loved one’s body going to be handled? Who will be caring for them? When, where and how will they be cremated or put in a casket?

Sometimes it comes out of the blue, like when a man called Dudley three years after Rundus cremated his loved one because he couldn’t stop thinking about whether or not he actually had the correct cremains.

“His mind just got wondering and he needed reassurance,” Dudley said. “Like, ‘How do I know this is in fact my person in the urn?’”

Whether it’s pointed questions from prospective clients or phone calls years after the fact, recent scandals in the state’s funeral industry have shaken Coloradans’ trust in the professionals who care for their deceased loved ones, funeral directors and industry experts told The Denver Post.

While Colorado lawmakers have made significant strides in adding state regulations to prevent future scandals, rehabilitating the funeral industry’s reputation is a more complicated task.

“The trust that’s been broken here, it’s going to take a long while for us to restore it,” said Matt Whaley, president of the Colorado Funeral Directors Association.

The effect of Colorado’s notoriously lax funeral home regulations burst into public view in 2018, when an FBI raid on Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors in Montrose found that mother-daughter team Megan Hess and Shirley Koch stole and sold hundreds of bodies around the world to turn a profit.

Hess is now serving a 20-year prison sentence and Koch is serving a 15-year sentence.

Coloradans are still seeing the fallout of more recent scandals, like the active investigation into Davis Mortuary owner (and former Pueblo County coroner) Brian Cotter, who operated the mortuary where state inspectors found 24 decomposing bodies in a hidden room in August.

Dudley is often at a loss for words when he thinks about the scandals, like what happened at the Return to Nature funeral home in Penrose, where owners Jon and Carie Hallford allowed 191 bodies, stacked on top of each other, to decompose for over four years while giving families fake cremains.

The Hallfords both face decades-long prison sentences after pleading guilty in their state criminal cases.

“Even when we’re transferring (the deceased) from a cot to a dressing table, we’re making sure their head doesn’t bang. We’re treating them as if they’re still alive, with care and respect. That you could let those people languish for years… how could you do that?” Dudley said. “How could you sit in front of a family and hand them an urn knowing full well it’s Quikrete?”

So when the man called him out of the blue asking about his loved one’s cremains, Dudley explained that every person who is cremated gets a metal disk with a unique set of numbers that stays with them through the whole process and is zip-tied to the bag of cremains that are returned to families.

“I said, ‘Tell me that number. Don’t tell me the name of your person. I’ll go back to our cremation log and tell you the name associated with the number,’” Dudley said. “I came back, said I have that number associated with this person, and he just said, ‘Oh, thank God.’”

Scandals had statewide, local ripple effects

Cases of industry workers mishandling bodies in Montrose, Penrose, Denver and Pueblo have had a far-reaching effect on Colorado’s funeral home industry, said Kim Bridges, who owns the parent company that oversees three metro Denver funeral homes, including Rundus.

“When these things started happening, it was awful for the industry,” she said. “It makes everyone look at the industry with skepticism and that’s a shame because you need to be able to trust the people you entrust your loved one to.”

Bridges Funeral Services, which Bridges owns with her husband, also oversees funeral and mortuary facilities in New Mexico, Tennessee and Florida.

The uptick in funeral directors and staff encountering families who are anxious about cremating or burying their loved ones is not limited to Rundus, said Whaley, who has worked in the funeral home industry for 38 years and is now market director at Dignity Memorial.

More people are also asking to witness cremations to make sure they know exactly what is happening to their loved one, he said.

When Dudley encounters people with questions or doubts about the funeral and cremation process, he tries to be as transparent as possible, answering their questions with as much detail as they want and offering tours of the facility.

For most, the offer is enough to calm their fears, Dudley said. But about a third of those want to see everything, from the plain-but-clean room lined with cabinets and counters where the deceased are prepared for services, to the massive, gray crematory that looks similar to a metal shipping container.

Whaley, Dudley and Bridges all shared the same sentiment: Families asking more questions about the funeral process is a good thing and should be welcomed.

“If someone doesn’t want to give a consumer all the information they’re asking for, shame on them,” Bridges said. “The consumer should go somewhere else and ask for a tour of the place.”

That kind of simple and up-front communication is the right way to rebuild trust with the community after a crisis, said Andy Boian, founder and CEO of the Colorado- and California-based public relations firm Dovetail Solutions.

Boian and other public relations experts who spoke to The Denver Post commented on the scandals hypothetically, as neither have worked directly with funeral homes on this issue.

Good communication includes walking people through the process, making sure they understand what’s happening and circling back regularly, he said.

“At the end of the day, that would ratify and settle a lot of people’s concerns,” Boian said.

That transparency now extends into Colorado’s industry regulations after state legislators, motivated by recent scandals, passed new laws to prevent the same kind of situation from happening at funeral homes or mortuaries ever again.

Passed in 2024, the three new laws require funeral directors and other industry professionals to obtain licenses; for state regulators to perform routine inspections at facilities; and for businesses to obtain consent and share more information about body donation.

Colorado officials say the new regulations are already making a difference — for example, bodies discovered in a hidden room at Davis Mortuary in Pueblo were found by state inspectors during their first-ever visit to the facility — though that impact isn’t necessarily felt by the people doing the work every day.

Bridges jokes that her staff are more nervous about a drop-by visit from her than from state inspectors.

“We welcome all oversight because we conduct ourselves in such a way that it’s not an issue,” she said. “If you have to run around and get things right before someone comes in, you’re doing something wrong.”

That ethos, Boian said, also represents another avenue for funeral homes to redeem themselves in the eyes of the community.

“There’s also an opportunity here as well, and that is to be the best and most proficient at your craft,” he said.

Overcoming scandal, moving forward

Crisis management experts told The Denver Post that while the public is usually willing to forgive and forget scandals if those involved do a good job communicating, the fraught nature of dealing with death makes this more complicated.

“It’s really tricky when it’s something sensitive like this,” said Kara Schmiemann, senior director of crisis communications at Red Banyan, a national crisis PR firm with offices in Denver. “When it has to do with our loved ones, these are the most difficult industries when they face a crisis because there’s a lot of emotion packed in there.”

And while the scandals at a handful of Colorado funeral homes may have sown skepticism among the general public, they had the opposite effect on Arapahoe Community College student Luke Olson.

Olson, who studies in the mortuary science program, was pursuing a mechanical engineering degree before he switched career paths. He said he was drawn to the hospitality of the field and the family connection — his grandfather was a mortician for a tiny town of 90 people.

“Going into the practice is emboldening to me and a new generation of death care practitioners who want to uphold the law and repair the damage that’s been done to Colorado’s reputation in the past,” Olson said.

Contrary to the stereotype about funeral home owners trying to profit off of the bereaved, people who get into the profession are not doing it for the money, Olson said, describing the wages as “very middle class.” (Funeral directors earn $51,607 per year on average, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.)

“You are going into it with the anticipation of serving your community and serving families,” he said.

Olson’s perspective is common among people studying mortuary science, said Faith Haug, mortuary science program chair at Arapahoe Community College.

“One of the things I appreciate with where the younger generation of funeral directors want to go is that it’s more family-centered, where things are not just spirited away to a back room and nobody knows what goes on,” Haug said.

And if there is a sliver of good to be found in the horrors carried out at a handful of Colorado funeral homes, it’s the chance that people will also want to be more involved in the death process for their loved ones as a result, Haug said.

“We have taken families out of the process in many ways, and all these things coming to light show that they deserve more transparency and more involvement if that’s what they want,” she said.

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