Criminal charges against former Pueblo County Coroner Brian Cotter, who owned a mortuary where state inspectors found 24 decaying bodies stashed in a hidden room, are likely still months away from being filed, law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
Colorado Bureau of Investigation and coroner’s officials have identified six of the two dozen bodies found at Davis Mortuary on Aug. 20, when staff from the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies arrived to inspect the facility for the first time under a new law passed by state legislators.
Cotter, who owns Davis Mortuary with his brother, resigned just over a week after state officials found the bodies and multiple containers of human remains at the funeral home.
He has not relinquished his license to operate a funeral home and the process to revoke that license is in the works, CBI Assistant Director of Investigations Clint Thomason said during a Wednesday morning news conference.
Investigators now believe most of the bodies found at Davis Mortuary belong to people who died between 2010 and 2012, Thomason said.
Fremont County Coroner Randy Keller, who is leading the identification effort, has exhausted all means other than DNA to identify the bodies, including fingerprints and dental records, Thomason said.
The lengthy process of DNA identification is one of the reasons the investigation is expected to continue for months, he added.
“We want to file all of the charges that we can at one time,” Thomason said. “That’s going to be the best way to handle this case and to deliver the justice that needs to be done.”
Pueblo County District Attorney Kala Beauvais on Wednesday repeated that she would not consider charges in the case until the CBI’s investigation is complete, which includes identifying all of the bodies.
It’s possible some of the remains will not be identified, but Beauvais said her office will “cross that bridge” if and when that happens.
“I know the community is outraged and feels betrayed, and despite wanting swift justice, the legal process is slow,” she said. “Because my office is dedicated to true justice, I’m determined to get this case right. The filing of charges will be done correctly the first time.”
Thomason said investigators do not yet have an answer for how many people’s remains were contained in the jars of bones and tissue recovered from the mortuary.
Cotter and his brother, Chris, have still not been questioned in the case because they have retained lawyers, Thomason said. They are not considered a flight risk, he said.
The brothers purchased Davis Mortuary in 1989. Brian Cotter was first elected as coroner in 2014 and retained his position until he resigned.
Brian Cotter initially told inspectors that the bodies stashed behind a hidden door were awaiting cremation, but later said some had been in the room for up to 15 years, predating his time as Pueblo County’s elected coroner.
He also admitted he may have given fake cremains to grieving families, police said.
The investigation at Davis Mortuary is one of several that put a national spotlight on lax regulations in Colorado’s funeral home industry in recent years.
Miles Andrew Harford, the funeral director of the now-defunct Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services in Jefferson County, took a deal and pleaded guilty to corpse abuse in April. Harford was accused of leaving a woman’s corpse in the back of a hearse in Denver for more than a year and improperly storing the cremated remains of at least 30 people in his home.
He was sentenced in June to 18 months in prison, court records show.
Investigators also found nearly 200 decomposing bodies piled up inside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in the southern Colorado town of Penrose in 2023.
Jon Hallford withdrew his guilty plea in September, after the judge rejected a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors, and is awaiting trial. His wife, Carie, previously pleaded guilty in the case and is awaiting sentencing.
In January 2023, a mother-daughter duo who operated the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose were sentenced to 15 and 20 years in federal prison for selling the body parts of more than 500 deceased clients.
Megan Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, dismembered bodies with power saws and sold the parts nationally and internationally from 2009 to 2018. The pair then provided families with fake cremains to cover for the missing body parts.
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