COLORADO SPRINGS — As the co-owner of the Nolan Funeral Home, once one of the city’s most respected mortuaries, Neva Nolan spent her days as a compassionate professional, a woman in skirts, blazers and heels. Today, she wears an orange jumpsuit. No longer does she visit hair salons or buy antiques from the Ross Auction house. At 71, she passes her days playing spades with fellow inmates at the El Paso County Jail.
Since 1935, the people of Colorado Springs turned to the Nolan Funeral Home in their darkest hours. Nolan now awaits some of her own dark days — up to six years in a Colorado prison.
She pleaded guilty to one count of felony theft for stealing from an elderly woman who pre-paid for funeral arrangements, and one count of misdemeanor abuse of a corpse for keeping a man’s ashes in a storage unit instead of sending them to a requested cemetery.
Investigators say she stole more than $140,000 from at least 60 victims. Last summer, they found 63 boxes of cremated human remains stacked in storage units in Colorado Springs.
In an interview from jail, Nolan maintains she has done nothing wrong.
“The hardest thing I had to do was to swear to a lie,” she said of her guilty plea. The only reason she did it, she said, was to spare her husband from a long, drawn-out legal battle. Joe Nolan is 74 and in failing health.
Joe Nolan’s parents established Nolan Funeral Home in Las Vegas, N.M., in 1905. Twenty years later, they moved to Colorado Springs. Nolan’s mother was the first woman to be certified as an embalmer in Colorado and New Mexico.
Over the years, the funeral home made news not for crime, but charity. The Nolans donated services for poor people, including “Baby Snowflake,” an infant abandoned during a snowstorm in 1988.
Somehow in recent years, Neva Nolan’s charitable heart became corrupted by greed and she committed financial and emotional fraud on people when they were most vulnerable, her victims say.
Doing business after eviction
In 2003, Marcia Fields’ elderly mother paid nearly $4,000 to pre-arrange her funeral.
A year later, the funeral home was evicted from its North Weber Street location, where it had done business for almost 70 years, for failure to pay rent. In 2005, Nolan met clients in their homes and had bodies embalmed at funeral homes in Florence or Pueblo. But by November 2005, the funeral home was defunct.
In June 2006, the Colorado Insurance Division ordered Nolan to stop selling pre-arranged funeral contracts. Nolan did not possess the required license and had not set up a trust account to hold the money.
A few months later, Neva Nolan was charged with more than 90 criminal counts.
Fields’ attorney wrote to Nolan demanding a refund. There was no response. Fields’ mother died April 30, and the family paid another funeral home $8,000 to handle arrangements.
Nolan maintains that she was providing services for people who had pre-paid until she was locked up in August.
But according to court documents, Costas Rombocos, owner of Shrine of Remembrance, called the district attorney’s office on April 7, 2006, after families came to him and said Nolan Funeral Home would not honor pre-paid contracts.
Nolan said she sent the money to an overseas account.
“I sent that money overseas because the banks here pay 3 percent on your money, and I can make 15 over there. The problem is, they grabbed me before I could get it back out of there,” Nolan said.
Larry Martin, a Colorado Springs district attorney investigator, said he doesn’t believe the money will be found.
“It’s gone,” Martin said. He said he could not elaborate because Nolan’s Jan. 25 sentencing is pending.
Though 63 boxes of remains were found in the storage shed, Nolan pleaded guilty to one count of abuse of a corpse, a misdemeanor.
“We were supposed to send him to Fort Logan, then she (the widow) called. She said she didn’t want him at Fort Logan,” Nolan said. “I didn’t know until a year ago this month, when one of the nephews called after he checked Fort Logan, that he was supposed to go to Fort Logan. And I said: ‘I’m sorry, she is the legal next of kin, and she has not made up her mind. At least, she hasn’t called.’ ”
Nolan said she is being unfairly targeted. “Every funeral home in this state has cremated remains that have not been picked up.”
She said that before the Nolan Funeral Home was evicted, she had a cabinet full of remains, one dating back to 1948.
“My conscience would not allow me to (dispose of them) because I always had hope that somebody would finally show up to pick those cremated remains up, ” Nolan said.
Ashes remain unclaimed
Linda Dix, an investigator with the 4th Judicial district attorney’s office, said victims believed their loved ones’ ashes had been taken care of with dignity.
The DA’s office still has 41 boxes of remains and is asking people who had loved ones cremated at Nolan Funeral Home to call the office so the remains can be disposed of properly.
Linda Carnell, whose brother William Elson II was cremated 15 years ago, said the family paid a fee to Nolan Funeral Home to have the ashes spread on Pikes Peak. When they received a letter from the district attorney in July saying the ashes were in a storage shed, they were crushed.
“My brother and I, when we got the letter, we immediately started crying. It was shocking that all these years, he was just sitting down there in this storage shed,” Carnell said.
“Through all these years, every time I looked at Pikes Peak, when I felt sad, I just thought, ‘Well, that’s where Willy’s at. ‘
“And I know that’s not his soul, but when people go to a grave site every Memorial Day, they get comfort from that. Well, this is where we got our comfort, knowing that he was free and in the mountains that he loved.”
Carnell, and many victims in the case, believe Nolan — who has been hospitalized three times, once for a heart attack, since she has been incarcerated — should be sentenced to prison.
“It’s shocking to me that somebody just did something like that with really no remorse. You don’t do something for 40 or 50 years. It’s not like a one-time mistake where you just said, ‘oops.’ ”
“Shame on her”
Glennis Willy’s mother lost more than $4,000 for a pre-paid funeral. The Nolan Funeral Home handled her father’s services in 2000. After the boxes of ashes were found in a storage shed, she wonders if it really was her father whose ashes were spread in Kansas.
“Shame on her. She is a nasty, nasty woman. She’s greedy. She’s quite delusional at this point if she thinks for one minute that she didn’t do anything wrong,” Willy said.
After pleading guilty last month, Nolan went back to jail, unable to make $50,000 bail. She was strolling through the jail in her orange jumpsuit when she caught a glimpse of a local news report on television about her guilty plea to felony theft and misdemeanor abuse of a corpse.
“All the news was hideous, just hideous,” Nolan said.
Her victims happen to agree.
Erin Emery: 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com
Lawmaker to push for licensing
A bill is expected in the next session to better oversee funeral homes. An industry group supports the idea.
Colorado is the only state that does not require funeral directors to be licensed, but a Colorado legislator hopes to change that.
Rep. Debbie Stafford, R-Aurora, plans to introduce legislation in the 2008 session that would call for more oversight of the funeral industry. She wants at least one person per funeral home to be a licensed funeral director, embalmer or cremationist.
“My intent is to introduce a bill that will, in fact, create a standard of training and care,” Stafford said.
Funeral directors in Colorado were licensed until 1982, when the industry was deregulated to make way for more competition.
That year, Colorado had 375 licensed funeral directors.
More than 1,000 people are operating in the funeral business. Only 216 have taken a voluntary certification course offered by the Colorado Funeral Directors Association.
The association has submitted a report to the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies that recommends licensing for the industry. That report is scheduled to be published Thursday.
“It actually helps all funeral homes around the state. It lends credibility to the profession of funeral service,” said Steffani Blackstock, executive director of the association, which represents 100 funeral homes and related businesses.
She said the annual license would cost about $140; the cost of the voluntary certification course is $65.
Blackstock said the downside of not having licensed funeral homes is that consumers have no place to file complaints, no recourse when there is a problem.
“There’s no teeth to anything,” Blackstock said. She said there’s nothing to prevent unethical operators or those with poor practices to continue their business.
Neva Nolan, for instance, who pleaded guilty to theft, can operate a funeral home from jail, if she has help on the outside.
If Colorado had licensing, hers could be revoked, preventing her from practicing in Colorado, said Blackstock.
