David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. The drawing room chapel of his Spanish mission-style building was filled with comfortable sofas and arm chairs. Wentworth was still skeptical when he drove out to Oscar Ceramics and opened one of the massive brick furnaces. In the slumber rooms, families were encouraged to make themselves as much at home as though they were in their own residence, according to an old company brochure. Cue dramatic organ music. . Without further adieu, lets fire up the crematory ovens as we step back in time thirty years to sunny Pasadena, California and the Lamb Funeral Home, where in the depths of the ovens something sinister has begun. This was an indelicate, bone-shattering operation that David allegedly referred to as making the pliers sing.. Cindy testified she worked for her father, Frank Strunk, at his business, the Cremation Society of California (CSC). When Hesperia, California assistant fire chief received a call in January 1987 from a man complaining about noxious smoke pouring from a neighboring industrial building, he scoffed at the mans accusation that the smoke smelled like burning flesh. Obsessed with fellow morticians, whom he regarded as business rivals, Sconce assembled a team of beefcake lackeys that he met at LA Kings hockey gamesa group of ex-football players he called his boys. They were tasked with traveling throughout Southern California, ferrying bodies to the crematorium, running errands, and roughing up other morticians to discourage them from competing with Sconces business. A Ghoul is defined by Websters dictionary as a legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses. David Sconce certainly fit that definition. In 1982, encouraged by Jerry and Laurieanne, the 26-year-old decided to obtain his embalming license and join the family business. We would like to just close it., Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Desperate mountain residents trapped by snow beg for help; We are coming, sheriff says, Hidden, illegal casinos are booming in L.A., with organized crime reaping big profits, Look up: The 32 most spectacular ceilings in Los Angeles, Elliott: Kings use their heads over hearts in trading Jonathan Quick, Newsom, IRS give Californians until October to file tax returns, This fabled orchid breeder loves to chat just not about Trader Joes orchids. Sure, the inspectors had their suspicions that something wasnt right, but every time they tried to inspect the facility, they were turned away and told to come back with a warrant, which was hard to acquire because all of Coastal Cremations (forged) paperwork made everything appear legit. Sconce would arrange to pick up a body, transfer it to the Lamb familys crematorium in Altadena, wait the two hours it took to cremate a single bodyone hour to burn, one hour to cool the ovenand bring the ashes back to the funeral home. David, however, was aware that there was a lucrative, and underserved, market for human organs for research and educational purposesand the form signed by family members would only need a little re-working to authorize their removal without explicitly informing a bereaved family that anything other than a pacemaker would be removed. In 1974, as a freshman planning to major in business, he robbed a former girlfriends house twicethe second time on Christmas Eve, while she was at church with her familyas revenge for breaking up with him. AndCalifornia would rewrite their laws and regulations regarding crematories. And that was enough to spur the fire department into action, stopping by for an administrative inspection of the premises and, upon opening the oven, being greeted with the sight of a wall of bodiesand a partially burned foot falling to the floor in front of the chief. There have been three books published on the Lamb Funeral Home scandal and I have all of them. Los Angeles in the 1980s was a lush, neon, dusty city. No matter how weird you think a story about the funeral business could be, prepare to be surprised and pretty grossed out. But still he set out to corner the market, offering cremations for $55 to other funeral homes and undercutting the prices to the public, sending a fleet of trucks all throughout Southern California to pick up bodies and bring them back to the two creaking, ancient cremation ovens in the back of the family funeral home. Just the best television + film hand-picked from around the globe. That broke the previous record of 18 bodies in one furnace, the employee said. For sixty years, families in Southern California trusted the Sconce-owned Lamb Funeral Home with their loved ones' remains. If consent for the removals was not offered, Davids mother would forge the signature of a family member. When you make your funeral plans, choosing a proper funeral home is important. But cremation alone wasnt enough to float the business, and other funeral homes began to wonder how David could undercut the competition by so much and not lose moneyand the answer is simple. A single body goes into the oven. Under the state Health and Safety Code, it is a misdemeanor to cremate more than one body at a time. On September 1, 1989, Sconce was sentenced to a five-year prison term after pleading guilty to 21 charges, including mutilating corpses, conducting mass cremations, and hiring hit men to attack the competing morticians Ron Hast, his partner Stephen Nimz, and Timothy Waters. They were, for lack of a better term, working in bulk. Ex-mortician who committed bizarre Calif. crimes decades ago could get life sentence Associated Press LOS ANGELES - David Wayne Sconce's past life as a mortician has come back to haunt him. David Wayne Sconce made headlines in the late 1980s when he pleaded guilty to the gruesome charges of commingling bodies and taking gold from the dead. His company, Coastal Cremations Inc., would advertise itself to funeral homes in Los Angeles that didnt have access to a crematorium. By 1985, the man who journalist Ken Englade would later dub the Cremation King of California displayed his sick sense of humor with a vanity plate on his Corvette that read I BRN 4 U, while Coastal Cremations employees zipped up and down the coast, shoving bodies packed in cardboard into the back of company vans and station wagons. Laurieanne, one of Lawrences two daughters, was bright and so pretty that a rival mortician would describe her as movie star beautiful. She carried herself with a touch of gentility befitting the familys position in the community, sprinkled her conversations liberally with Biblical quotations and wrote sacred songs for her own gospel group, The Chapelbelles. Her fathers favorite, she demonstrated a gift for consoling survivors at the mortuary, some of whom gave her money to save for their own funerals. Featured on ABC-TV's Nightline. Shed dropped out of college to marry Jerry Sconce, a charismatic and gregarious six-foot, 200-pound football player at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whom shed met at Sunday school. During David Sconces trial for the mass cremations and corpse mutilations in 1989, one of his associates testified that Sconce had bragged about slipping something into Waters drink at a restaurant shortly before he died. They were burned, and the ashes placed in a barrel together. Belgrade, Kragujevac) Enquiry type Country. He was described as brash and blunt, difficult to get along with, and sometimes more than a little intimidating. Skilled in consoling the grief-stricken, she had customers sign complicated and sometimes forged documents which enabled her son to mine the bodies of their recently deceased for organs, which could then be sold to medical schools and research centers. What curse was placed on the O'Brien family that would give them a son with a webbed foot? In the rear of the funeral home was the so-called Ash Palace, where employee Jim Dame testified that he sifted ashes trucked in from the crematory in big barrels. Twenty percent of them.. It was time for him to learn a trade, they believed, and what better business than that of the dead? He had to operate the new business under the license of a ceramics factory, because thats what the massive diesel fueled kilns he was using were designed for. - David Wayne Sconce, the former Pasadena mortician who went to prison for stealing and selling body parts and dental gold and performing mass cremations, has waived extradition. After looking into similar poisonings, the Ventura County coroner drafted an official report for the prosecution: If an individual were poisoned with an oleander leaf [or an alcoholic beverage in which an oleander leaf had been soaked], he could die from this, and the findings in the blood of digoxin would be about that of the blood level of Mr. Waters.. About Us. His wife and children helped in the business of burials, and over the years and decades that would follow from taking in that first corpse Charles became a big name in California funerals. In the 1980s, cremations were just coming into vogue as an inexpensive option for the funeral of a loved one. Sconce, who worked at the funeral home, is serving a five-year state prison term after pleading guilty in April 1989 to 21 criminal counts involving the mingling of human remains, the theft. Because Grandpa had no eyes. Frustrated and bored, he and his friends egged houses and beat up homeless drunks for fun. The floors were laid with new wood and a kitchen was added, with white granite countertops, a subzero fridge, and a wine cooler. With the help of a lawyer friend, David altered the form to add the word tissues before the word pacemaker in the authorization form, letting families believe they were only authorizing him to remove any tissue necessary to remove the pacemaker. Like A Lamb to Slaughter Are you being placed on the altar. The bank, run out of the Pasadena funeral home, in a three-month period sold 136 brains, 145 hearts and 100 lungs to a North Carolina firm supplying organs for research to medical schools, according to records presented at the preliminary hearing. It all began with the Lamb Family Funeral Home, a decades-old business that serviced its clientele from a gracious Spanish Revival building on busy Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, bounded by a strip mall on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other. For years, thousands of bereaved family members dealing with funeral plans for their loved ones had no idea that a Scorsese movie was taking place behind the scenes. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. What they did is, they tried to corner the market, said Joe Estephan, funeral director of the Cremation Society of California. I said, I dont think so, its a ceramics shop, the chief later told the Los Angeles Times. When the Coen Brothers needed someone to show The Dude how to really roll, they could turn to only one man: Hall of Fame professional bowler Barry Asher. Thats the way it was supposed to be done. By the time of the Hesperia raid, the Sconces had built a business empire collecting human remains from San Diego to Santa Barbara. The cost benefit for Coastal Cremations came with the sheer number of bodies Sconce intended to burn: he would keep the fires going all day, planning to burn multiple bodies at once, sometimes five or six at a timea misdemeanor in the state of California. Coastal Cremations Inc., of which David Sconce was president, dealt mainly as a wholesaler to other mortuaries, charging only $55 for each cremation, about half what competitors charged. Sensing an opportunity, David Sconce set out to command the market. What did Disney actually lose from its Florida battle with DeSantis? They doubled and redoubled, reaching 8,173 in 1985, as a fleet of vans, station wagons and trucks fanned out, picking up cadavers throughout Southern California. David Sconce originally wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps and become a football player. He is currently incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, and is eligible for parole in 2022. Dorothy Stegeman, a former bookkeeper, testified that David Sconce told her that he made $5,000 to $6,000 a month pulling gold teeth and selling them to a Glendora jeweler. Im your host, the BOOzy Barrister, here to guide you through the dark world of human, and not-so-human, nature as we explore the paranormal, the macabre, the spooky, and the downright sickening aspects of the law. Things that are acceptable to remove are medical devices, such as pacemakers, that may explode in the heat of the flames, and a form existed authorizing the crematory to remove exactly those items. Its not like Sconce knew where or even howto draw the line on depravity at this point. Another part of his cover story was that they were using the ovens to make heat shield tiles for the Space Shuttle. As the business grew, rumors spread through the industry. After being extradited back to California, he was sentenced to 25 to life and will be eligible for parole in 2022, just in time to appear on a new show were pitching called Where Are They Now? He liked to attend hockey games with a bunch of beefy, ex-football players that he called his boys. Sconces boys testified that they listened to his boasts, ran his errands and roughed up his enemies. Two books, entitled Chop Shop and A Family Business, have been written about David Sconces escapades. Edwards testified that Sconce told him he had dropped something into Waters drink at a restaurant--authorities later decided it was in Simi Valley--a month before the Burbank mortician died. He violated this probation by moving to Montana without permission in 2006, and again by stealing a neighbors rifle in 2012. .more Get A Copy Now, they are facing trial Jan. 23 on 69 criminal counts--including unlawful removal of body parts from human remains, multiple cremation of human remains and assault on rival morticians--that depict their family business as a cut-rate body factory in which the dead were mined like ore deposits. David Sconce used to test his strength, according to one former employee, by heaving bodies in their cardboard boxes around the mortuary like bags of grain. Jerry Sconce oli toiminut aiemmin muun muassa jalkapallovalmentajana ja Laurianne Lamb Sconce oli toiminut kirkon urkurina. Accumulating the emblems of success as his business took off, David flashed wads of money and cruised around in a candy-apple-red Mercedes-Benz and a white Corvette with a personalized license plate that displayed his macabre sense of humor. He had veered towards his fathers interests more than his mothers, and had played football. Tissue donations required the consent of the next of kin, so Davids mother Laurieanne was in charge of getting the deceaseds family members to sign the proper paperwork or sometimes trick them into signing the paperwork and if they refused, hell, theyd just forge the signatures anyway. Sconce, 56, is to be sentenced Monday for a case that could keep him behind bars . However, funerals can be funded by asking friends and family to donate to an online GoFundMe page that could start raising money to help families cover the funeral costs. How in the world did David Sconce manage to get away with this for so long? The ovens are cleaned, and the process can begin again. The sole purpose of the company was to facilitate Davids already-flourishing side gig trafficking organs hed removed from soon-to-be-cremated bodies. When the editor of a mortuary industry newsletter started asking too many questions about the companys business practices, Sconce sent two of his boys over to the mans house dressed as policemen. There was no information about how much more money they had made selling parts on the black market, because people in those circles arent that keen on paper trails. Sconce burned bodies 24 hours a day, churning out so much black smoke that neighbors routinely called the fire department, thinking the mortuary was on fire. The first crematorium in the United States was built in 1876 in Pennsylvania. In 1985 Estephan and Cindy Strunk (Cindy) were separated. He had to operate the new business under the license of a ceramics factory, because that's what the massive diesel fueled kilns he was using were designed for. She thought it was crucial to look your best when you met your maker. What could have been (and should have been) a career-ending calamity was no problem for David Sconce. George Deukmejian at the end of the summer session. Atty. When family members came to pick up the remains of their loved ones, they were handed a box with the ashes of hundreds of people, scooped from the drum and measured out by weight according to the gender of the deceased. 5-7 pounds of ashes for men, 3-4 pounds of ashes for women. The history of funerary practices in America reflect a complex evolution of the relationship between death and money. He was a nasty, horrible individual to have any interaction with.. Every person should get the burial they want, so money can be raised online to help with this. In the course of her duties at CSC, she met Sconce whose family owned the Lamb Funeral Home (LFH) and the Pasadena Crematorium. Valley girls took up residence at film-famous malls like the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and boys in metal bands snorted cocaine inside nightclubs up and down the Sunset Strip. Instead, David quietly installed crematory ovens in a suburb, licensing the facility as a ceramics shop. somethings not right, he said. After graduating from high school in Glendora, he enrolled in Azusa Pacific, the Christian college where his father worked, with the hopes of becoming a football star and playing for the Seattle Seahawks. As if David Sconces special place in hell wasnt already bought and paid for, he found other sick ways to squeeze every nickel out of the corpses. At the warehouse, the soles of their shoes stuck to floors slick with human fluids, and when they pried open one of the hinged doors of Sconces kilns, the remains of a human foot fell out, engulfed in flames. However, one substance that closely mimics the effects of digoxin is oleander, a poisonous tree commonly found in California. Cremation was once a niche business. MISSOULA, Mont. His daughter Laurieanne Lamb Sconce began assuming control in the mid-'70s. About Us Our Family Our Facility Why Choose Us Testimonials David Sconce, former operator with his parents of Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, pleaded guilty Wednesday in an Arizona courtroom to fraudulently selling phony bus coupons. It is a home in every sense of the word.. The insane true story of the 1980s mortician who turned his familys funeral home into a nightmare cremation factorypulling gold teeth, harvesting organs, and threatening anyone who got in his way. This is probably the worst scandal Ive ever seen, or that I could ever imagine, said John W. Gill, executive officer of Californias Cemetery Board. On November 23, 1986, the nearly century-old facility burned to the ground after Davids employees somehow shoved 19 bodies into each of the ovens at once. His reputation was sterling, even among his bitter rivals in the rough-and-tumble world of mortuary services, and at one point he headed the funeral directors association for the state. LOS ANGELES (AP) -- David Wayne Sconce's past life as a mortician has come back to haunt him decades after he gained notoriety for stealing body parts from corpses and plotting to kill a funeral business rival. David Wayne Sconce, 56, made headlines in the late 1980s when he pleaded guilty to the gruesome charges of commingling bodies and taking gold from the dead. The revelations have also prompted a new state law making it easier to police crematories and lawsuits against scores of other mortuaries that sent bodies to the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, attracted by its bargain-basement prices. In 1994, he was found guilty of selling fake bus tickets in Arizona. Charles F. Lamb, then-president of the California Funeral Directors Association, oversaw the building of the structure in 1929. Built in 1895, the Pasadena Crematorium offered only two ovens, each of which David would stuff with five, six, and eventually as many as 18 bodies at a time. Desperate for a job after leaving school, David found work as a dealer in a casino and as an usher at a hockey stadium. It all began with the Lamb Family Funeral Home, a decades-old business that serviced its clientele from a gracious Spanish Revival building on busy Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, bounded by a strip mall on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other. (Before Mitford died in 1996, she requested to be cremated, and had the bill for $475 sent to the corporate headquarters of a funeral home chain.). He said he never put the ashes from just one body in the urns that were returned to families. Laurieanne had given birth to her first child, a son, when she was just a few days shy of her 20th birthday, and it was this son, David, who would go on to both inherit Jerrys charm and take his talent for scheming to an entirely new level. They had initially faced 67 charges total, including charges relating to the mass cremations, but they escaped most of those counts after throwing David completely under the bus and then throwing thatbus under a bigger bus. You would think that any handling of human remains being offered at Burlington Coat Factory-level discounts would be an immediate red flag, but sadly no. Anyone who would look at Sconce at that time saw a blond-haired, blue-eyed, a kind of athletic physique, a very handsome, outgoing, kind of smarmy, and charming guy, says Braidhill. For many, cremation was becoming a cheaper and more attractive option. Davids big idea for generating business for Coastal Cremations Inc. was to offer the service for less than half what was considered the industry standard for the time. At the time Mitfords book was first published, the average bill from an undertaker was $750 ($6,300 today); by 1991, when the book was updated and revised, the cost had risen to $7,800 (now $14,500). But he had been in some trouble, notably when he admitted to police that he had broken into the house of a girlfriends parents when she refused to go out with him anymore. However, funerals do tend to cost a lot of money, which is why people tend to opt for a cheaper option. The embalming business boomed. He was a little too slick in my opinion, but some people are attracted to that. Well spare you from doing the math. Laurieanne was a bright, cheerful, God-fearing woman once described as movie-star beautiful by a rival mortician, and who played the church organ and wrote gospel songs with her choral group, the Chapelbelles. Two months later, after spending Easter ill in bed at his mothers house in Camarillo, Waters died of what was assumed to be a heart attack. Theyre dead.. One night in 1987, a survivor of Auschwitz called the fire chief and was adamant that was not a ceramics shop. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. Business started booming! Its a true shame that his name has to be connected to the funeral industry at all. An unsettling look at the Sconce family from the acclaimed true crime author of Deadly Lessons. Prosecutors said the crematory was part. The families of the deceased that had been cremated by Sconce would bring a class-action lawsuit against 100 funeral homes that had used his services for cremations, and would settle for approximately $16,000,000. Welcome To David Funeral Homes. Compromise is the language of the devil, Bruce Lamb said. Hast recalled that he and a friend were attacked by two men posing as policemen, who threw ammonia and jalapeno sauce in their eyes. She had a rapport with mourners, a way of comforting them, and indeed was so effective at the work that some mourners would return shortly after the funeral of a friend or loved one to start making arrangements for their own. Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth listened incredulously as a caller complained that the noxious black smoke pouring from a nondescript building in the desert carried the sickeningly sweet smell of burning human flesh. When Dan Fritschie isnt reminding everyone that monsters still exist in this world, he can occasionally be seen performing stand-up comedy somewhere. As the director of the funeral home, Laurieanne was the first person to greet guests with a box of tissues and a comforting lilt. The tissue harvesting itself was, unsurprisingly, not handled delicately. The LA smog also concealed the smoke that mortician David Sconce pumped from a makeshift crematoriumtwo ceramic kilns housed in a corrugated metal warehouseway out in San Bernardino County. It was horrific, says Jay Brown. In case you were curious, the reader wrote, in a class action suit, the mishandling of your loved ones remains is worth about $1200 a body.. After Sconce took what he wanted from cadavers, he overloaded the old Altadena crematorium, whose stone, single-body retorts had been built at the turn of the century. But thats maybe not that surprising for a team that used nepotism as a recruitment tool. He denounced his industry as the most in-fighting, back-biting, rumor-spreading, lecherous, treacherous people youd ever want to meet in your life. With the family reputation tarnished, the Lamb brothers have agreed to surrender the funeral homes current license, and they have applied for another one to operate under a new name, the Pasadena Funeral Home. The autopsy also discovered digoxin, a common heart medication, in Waterss bloodthough Waters didnt take heart medication. As the story goes, Nimz opened the door to two large men posing as policemen who sprayed him in the eyes with a mixture of jalapeo juice and ammonia; they hoped to blind him, so they could beat him up without being identified. This is a great book for funeral collectors. Jerry Sconce told him to put in 3 1/2 to 5 pounds of ash if the deceased was a female and 5 to 7 pounds for a male, Dame said. Slumber chambers were available for families to rest in, if they so chose. Six law firms, including Melvin Bellis in San Francisco, have filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of relatives of 16,000 decedents, accusing 100 mortuaries of sending bodies to the Sconces despite indications that something was wrong. In February of 1985, Sconce sent another one of his thugs, this time an 245-pound ex-football player, to beat up a rival crematorium owner Timothy Waters, who had been threatening to spill allof the tea on Sconces operation. I was driving home from church and the fire department was there, explains Brown. A former employee testified that Sconce used a flathead screwdriver to pry open jaws to get to the gold fillings, a process he called making the pliers sing and popping chops. Sconce sold this gold to a company called Gold, Gold, Goldhelmed by one of his friendsnetting upwards of $6,000 a month. Others prefer the elegance provided by grave headstones though. Depicted by friends of his parents as the mastermind behind the assembly-line cremations, David Sconce is being held without bail.