Cops hunt funeral home owner who kept a woman's body in a hearse for two YEARS and stashed remains of 30 people in crawl space at his Denver house

Cops have launched a hunt to find a former funeral home owner who they say kept a woman's body in a hearse for two years and stored the cremated remains of at least 30 people in a crawl space at his Denver property.

The 63-year-old woman's body and the cremains were found on February 6 during a court-ordered eviction of a house rented by Miles Harford, the 33-year-old owner of Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services in the suburb of Littleton.

The woman died in August of 2022. Police said Harford was cooperating 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 hasn't turned himself in to authorities and are unable to find him.

Harford appeared to have experienced financial trouble in his business and was at times not able to complete cremations to provide remains to families for services.

The 63-year-old woman's body and the cremains were found on February 6 during a court-ordered eviction of a house rented by Miles Harford (pictured), the 33-year-old owner of Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services in the Denver suburb of Littleton 

On occasion, he might have provided family members with another person's ashes instead of the ashes of their loved ones, Denver Police Commander Matt Clark said.

Temporary urns - plastic boxes the size of a shoe box - were found in the crawl space of the house while a Denver sheriff's deputy oversaw the removal of Harford's belongings. Some of the boxes were empty.

Other urns were found in a moving truck parked outside and still others were in the hearse where investigators found the woman's body covered with blankets.

Charges of abuse of a corpse, forgery of the death certificate and theft of the money paid for the woman's cremation are listed on the warrant.

Other charges are possible as the investigation continues, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said last week.

The recovered cremains appear to be associated with individuals who passed away between 2012 and 2021, Clark said.

Harford's business performed cremations for people who were low on money and those whose next of kin were unknown.

Officials were working to return labeled cremains to families, but they said they would not conduct DNA tests because the 'extreme temperatures involved in the cremation process alter the molecular structure of DNA, often rendering it fragmented and highly degraded'.

'It's a very resource-intensive process with a very low likelihood of success,' Clark said. 'We don't have the ability at this point to undertake that.'

The residence where the woman's body was stored in a hearse for two years

Denver Police Department Major Crimes Division Commander Matt Clark and Denver District Attorney Beth McCann answer at a news conference at the Denver Police Crime Lab in Denver last Friday

Clark said last week that the woman's family is devastated.

'They're shocked. They were hurt by this,' he said. '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.'

The case is the latest to underscore lax oversight of Colorado's funeral industry.

A married couple is awaiting trial in Colorado Springs following their arrest last year for allegedly abandoning almost 200 bodies over several years inside a bug-infested facility and giving fake ashes to family members of the deceased.

The operators of another funeral home in the western Colorado city of Montrose received federal prison sentences last year for mail fraud after they were accused of selling body parts and distributing fake ashes.

More than two dozen additional criminal cases and complaints involving Colorado funeral homes since 2007 were detailed in a January report to lawmakers from state regulators.

The cases included bodies being mishandled, thefts of personal effects, improper embalming of bodies, mislabeled remains and remains never returned to families.

The report concluded that additional regulation for the industry was 'necessary to protect the public'.