- The woman's body and remains were found on February 6 during a court-ordered eviction of a home rented by Miles Harford
Police have launched a hunt for a former funeral home owner who allegedly stored a woman's body in a hearse for two years and stored the cremated remains of at least 30 people in a crawlspace in his Denver home.
The 63-year-old woman's body and remains were found Feb. 6 during a court-ordered eviction of a home rented by Miles Harford, the 33-year-old owner of Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services, in the Denver suburb of Littleton.
The woman died in August 2022. Police said Harford cooperated with investigators when the arrest warrant was announced last Friday.
But yesterday they offered a $2,000 Crimestoppers award for information leading to his arrest because he failed to turn himself in to authorities and couldn't find him.
Harford appeared to have experienced financial difficulties with his business and was at times unable to perform cremations in order to provide families with their remains for religious services.
The 63-year-old woman's body and remains were found on February 6 during a court-ordered eviction of a home rented by Miles Harford (pictured), the 33-year-old owner of Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services in suburban Denver from Littleton
On occasion, he may have given family members another person's ashes instead of the ashes of their loved ones, Denver Police Commander Matt Clark said.
Makeshift urns — plastic boxes the size of a shoebox — were found in the home's crawl space while a Denver sheriff's deputy oversaw the removal of Harford's belongings. Some of the boxes were empty.
More urns were found in a moving truck parked outside and more were in the hearse where investigators found the woman's body covered in blankets.
The arrest warrant lists charges of abuse of a corpse, falsifying a death certificate and stealing money paid for the woman's cremation.
More charges are possible as the investigation continues, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said last week.
The recovered remains appear to be linked to people who died between 2012 and 2021, Clark said.
Harford's company performed cremations for people of little means and for people whose next of kin were unknown.
Officials were working to return labeled ashes to families but said they would not conduct DNA testing because the “extreme temperatures of the cremation process alter the molecular structure of DNA, often fragmenting and severely degrading it.”
“It’s a very resource-intensive process with a very low probability of success,” Clark said. “We are not in a position to do that at this time.”
The apartment where the woman's body was stored in a hearse for two years
Denver Police Major Crimes Unit Commander Matt Clark and Denver District Attorney Beth McCann respond at a press conference at the Denver Police Crime Lab in Denver last Friday
Clark said last week that the woman's family was devastated.
“They are shocked. “That hurt her,” he said. “They thought they were using the remains they had to process their grief and to worship with them.” And then they realized that it wasn't the person who was being dispatched, but that they were actually there in that Hearse was detained.”
The case is the latest to highlight lax oversight of Colorado's funeral industry.
A couple is awaiting trial in Colorado Springs after being arrested last year for allegedly leaving nearly 200 bodies in an insect-infested facility over several years and giving fake ashes to family members of the deceased.
The operators of another funeral home in the western Colorado town of Montrose were sentenced to federal prison on mail fraud charges last year after they were accused of selling body parts and distributing counterfeit ashes.
More than two dozen other criminal cases and complaints involving funeral homes in Colorado since 2007 were detailed in a report from state regulators to lawmakers in January.
The cases included mishandling of corpses, theft of personal items, improper embalming of corpses, mislabeled remains, and the fact that remains were never returned to families.
The report concluded that additional regulations for the industry were “necessary to protect the public.”