When Sheila Canfield-Jones’ daughter died in October 2019, she and her grieving family stumbled upon the website for Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose.

“They said they would give us a nice tree when they cremated her,” she told a room full of reporters Monday. 

Four years later, the FBI called.

“I found out our daughter had been in Penrose for four years, decaying, piled up on top of other bodies,” she said. “From that moment on, I started making phone calls — I said there’s a reason this happened. There’s something wrong.”

Canfield-Jones told her family’s story at the state Capitol on Monday during the unveiling of a new bill aimed at putting an end to the string of gruesome incidents of mishandled human remains by funeral homes in the state over the past few years.

The bill would address one glaring issue with the funeral home industry in Colorado: it’s the only state in the country that doesn’t license funeral home operators. 

“Colorado is the laughing stock of the industry because we don’t have licenses,” Canfield-Jones said. 

Two Western Slope lawmakers — Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Frisco Democrat, and Rep. Matt Soper, a Delta Republican — will sponsor the bill, which would create stringent requirements for licenses enforced by the state’s Department of Regulatory Agencies. 

“Too many Colorado families have had to face the gruesome and unacceptable reality that their loved ones’ remains have been mishandled, lost, improperly cared for, sold, and completely disrespected,” Roberts said Monday.

Roberts and Soper both represent parts of the state where high-profile funeral home incidents have taken place. In 2020, two funeral home operators in Montrose were charged with transferring bodies or body parts to third parties for research without families’ knowledge on dozens of occasions.

That same year, a woman reported receiving ashes from a Leadville funeral home that she thought were excessive for her five-pound baby. The ashes were found to also include remains from another, larger person, scrap metal, a piece of an earring and surgical staples. The operator, who also ran a funeral home in Silverthorne, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges related to the commingling of cremated remains last year. 

Also in 2023 in Penrose, in the case that included Canfield-Jones’ daughter’s remains, nearly 200 other decaying bodies were found in a building run by the Return to Nature Funeral Home, about two hours south of Denver.

Most recently, last month, a former funeral home owner in Denver was arrested on allegations of keeping a woman’s corpse in the back of a hearse for two years and hoarding the cremated remains of 35 people.

Bill details

The bill, which will begin in the state Senate, would require any funeral home operators in the state, including directors, embalmers, mortuary science practitioners, crematory operators and natural reductionists to have licenses. 

To get a license, applicants would have to submit an application, pay a fee and get a criminal background check. Anyone who has been convicted of crimes related to operating a funeral home in another state would be denied a license. 

Funeral directors, mortuary science practitioners and embalmers all would be required to have graduated from an approved mortuary science school, passed relevant sections of a national board examination and served apprenticeships of one year or longer. 

The bill would also give the director of DORA the ability to investigate and discipline license holders. 

The bill also includes a “grandfather in” option for those who already operating funeral homes but haven’t met the new requirements, which are set to kick in in 2026. The option would require 6,500 hours of work experience and a criminal background check to get a provisional license that would become a full license after two years without discipline. 

To renew a license, funeral home directors would have to retake short classes on the applicable law, ethics and public health requirements. 

The bill has bipartisan support in both chambers, with the other prime sponsors being Sen. Bob Gardner, a Colorado Springs Republican and Rep. Brianna Titone, an Arvada Democrat. 

While the Colorado Funeral Directors Association has come out in support of the bill, Service Corporation International, a company offering funeral services across North America, is asking lawmakers to make amendments. 

The company is concerned that creating mortuary science degree requirements for funeral home directors, who they say are essentially the salesmen of most operations, will deplete their workforce. 

“It’s like if I worked at a law firm, but I was the event coordinator, and you’re making me go to law school,” said Jason Hopfer, a lobbyist for Service Corporation International. 

They’re also concerned that the requirements for the “grandfathered in” option will force many from the industry. 

Patty Salazar, the executive director for DORA, spoke in support of the bill Monday. 

“We all know the several egregious incidents that have been highlighted on the national scale, which demonstrates how the legislative and regulatory framework has failed Coloradans,” she said. 

Last month, the House Business Affairs Committee unanimously voted to introduce another bill, which would bring Colorado’s regulations more in line with nearly all other states by requiring routine inspections of funeral homes, including after a home’s registration has expired. It would also give the agency that oversees the industry greater enforcement power.