Funeral home owner 'left corpse in the back of a hearse for more than a year'

A funeral home owner accused of leaving a woman's remains in the back of a hearse for over a year has plead guilty to corpse abuse and theft.

Miles Harford was arrested in 2024 after the body of a woman named Christina Rosales, who died of Alzheimer's at age 63, was found in the back of a hearse, covered in blankets. The body was discovered along with cremated remains of up to 30 other people stashed throughout Harford's rental property, including in the crawlspace, as police carried out a court-ordered eviction in Littleton, Denver, on February 6 last year. Harford said the woman whose remains were found had died some years earlier in 2022.

Urns scattered throughout the home and in a moving truck were associated with individuals who passed away between 2012 and 2022. The owner of Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services, which closed in 2022, was hit with a dozen charges, including counts of forgery, theft and four counts of abuse of a corpse.

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Prosecutors said the bodies or remains were treated "in a way that would outrage normal family sensibilities". Harford has plead guilty to one count of corpse abuse and one count of theft in a plea deal which dismisses the rest of the counts.

But the judge said the agreement requires that all victims be named within the two charges Harford pleaded guilty to, and that he would be liable for restitution including for the dismissed counts.

Harford is represented by lawyers from the state public defender's office, which does not comment on its cases to the media. There were no other details in the court hearing on the charges, including how much money was taken from victims or how corpses were abused.

Mark Clark, the commander of Denver Police who oversaw Harford's arrest, said the family of the woman whose body was discovered was left devastated by the discovery. He said following the arrest last year: "They’re shocked. They were hurt by this. They believed that they were processing their grief with the remains they had, and had had services with that.

"And then they come to find out that that was not the person that was processed, and in fact, she was being held in that hearse there." In a press release, the Denver district attorney said Harford faces up to 18 months in prison.

His plea follows years of other gruesome funeral home cases in Colorado, including one where the owners were accused of storing nearly 200 bodies in a decrepit building and giving families fake cremated remains.

The funeral home cases over the years prompted lawmakers to pass sweeping new regulations of the funeral home industry in Colorado last year, which previously had some of the least funeral homes insight in the US.

Harford's sentencing is scheduled for June 9.