Their conclusion so far is that large transgressions begin with small concessions. 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. even beating the immediate family to the funeral home door. I BRN 4U, it read. California passed new laws (and may have inspired other states to follow suit) that expanded the resources for state inspectors and authorized them to be able to inspect these facilities on demand. It is a home in every sense of the word.. They were each sentenced to three years and eight months in prison. By all accounts a beefy man with a love for money, when other options ran dry for him his parents decided to bring him into the family business. Price . If consent for the removals was not offered, Davids mother would forge the signature of a family member. Fantastic. The autopsy also discovered digoxin, a common heart medication, in Waterss bloodthough Waters didnt take heart medication. 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. Can there be a better endorsement? The final chapter in the story opened Nov. 23, 1986, when a fire destroyed the crematory in Altadena. Families were invited to rest as needed as he and his staff moved throughout the home clad in black, passing condolences and caring for both the bereaved and the bereft of life with compassion and dignity. 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. Others prefer the elegance provided by grave headstones though. The Sconces were arrested on numerous charges relating to forgery of donor consent forms, removal of organs and body parts from the dead and selling them to organ banks and for scientific research, removal of gold dental fillings, and theft of funds from trust accounts. What they did is, they tried to corner the market, said Joe Estephan, funeral director of the Cremation Society of California. But he was denied entrance to the Altadena facility because he did not have a search warrant. As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. Bear in mind that the inside of these furnaces were only slightly larger than a phone booth, and the world record for the number of livepeople stuffed into one of those is only fourteen. The Lamb Funeral Home had only two cremation ovens. David's mother Laurieanne Lamb Sconce and her husband Jerry bought out the family business from her father in 1985. But the war had young men dying far from home, and families of dead Union soldiers begged the army to embalm their sons and send them hundreds of miles north. He would attract business from area funeral homes with his half-priced cremations and make up for the low cost with high volume. All good? Wales had received a call from a neighbor, a veteran of World War II, who complained about the smell of the smoke coming out of the factory. Laurieanne had always been her fathers golden child when it came to the care of the those who sought out the Lamb familys services. How in the world did David Sconce manage to get away with this for so long? 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. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. There have been three books published on the Lamb Funeral Home scandal and I have all of them. These acts were done by their son, David, began Laurieannes defense attorney in his opening statement, describing the mass cremations and stealing of gold teeth. 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. The scandal that surrounded David Sconce back in the late 1980s has all of the hallmarks of a riveting true crime story: greed, corruption, theft, fraud, murder, strange plot twists, all centered around a fourth-generation family business. 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. At the time, brains could sold for about $80, hearts for $95, lungs for $60. In 1997, Sconce pleaded guilty to a 1989 charge of soliciting a hit man to murder a potential buyer of a rival funeral home, and was given the unusual sentence of lifetime probation in California. But wait, it somehow gets worse! But, as if the organ theft and filling sales werent enough, there was yet another black mark to discuss. Hast recalled that he and a friend were attacked by two men posing as policemen, who threw ammonia and jalapeno sauce in their eyes. 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. 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. Sconce was involved in the. 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. David didnt last long in college, dropped out after his teams losing streak started hurting his prospects. At the Lamb Family Funeral Home, Laurieanne was the kindly, motherly face of Davids morbid scheme. 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. In Davids first year in the operation, cremations went up nearly 1,000%, from 194 to 1,675. . No matter how weird you think a story about the funeral business could be, prepare to be surprised and pretty grossed out. That was a great step towards preventing another disaster like this from ever happening again, or at the very least ensuring it would be detected long before it could even remotely get this bad. When the neighbor was told it was just a ceramics factory, he shouted, Dont tell me I dont know what burning bodies smell like! Ron Hast, editor of a newsletter called Mortuary Management, whose Los Angeles mortuary used the Sconces, asked Laurieanne Sconce to state in writing in 1984 that her cremations were done individually. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. But then the man said, Dont tell me theyre not burning bodies. And if that wasnt enough to supplement Davids lifestyle, there was always the gold jar. 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? After burning, cremains were sifted together according to weight in what was called the ash palace, a dusty room that was also filled with trash cans full of human fat and spare dental parts such as bridges or dentures. David ultimately served only two-and-a-half years of his sentence and was released in 1991. 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. David Wayne Sconce was a hothead and a creepa golden boy turned failed college football player, with sparkling blue eyes that led some to compare him to Paul Newman. (And lest you think stuff like this was confined to the barbaric past, uh, we have bad news. Just $4,700 a month, a little more than the average cost of a cremation nowadays. Prosecutors declined to discuss the evidence, but Estephan said that before he took over the business in 1986, Sconce had been negotiating for it with the intention of moving more aggressively into the retail end of the cremation business. A polite, articulate man with penetrating blue eyes, David Sconce complained in the jailhouse interview that the case against him and his family was trumped up by prosecutors and funeral industry bigwigs, people with big places, expensive caskets, who want to squash innovators. MISSOULA, Mont. On the morning of Sunday, November 23, 1986, the Altadena crematorium burned down after employees tried cramming in a record 38 bodies at once. They pulled out eyeballs, plopping them unceremoniously into Coke cans and paper towels. David played defense on the Azusa Pacific football team, the Cougars, but they lost game after game, and David soon dropped out of college. 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. While he would be placed on lifetime probation for plotting to kill a rival funeral director, it seemed like small justice for the despair he had caused mourners. More scrutiny is being given to the handling of bodies, however, in the wake of the Sconce revelations and two other scandals in recent years, including a Northern California case involving a firm hired to drop ashes over the Sierra. Before the fire that forced the Lamb Funeral Home to move its crematory services off-site, the record was 18 bodies in the oven at once. David Wayne Sconce. His business plan caught on, and business boomed. Two months after Waters was assaulted, he mysteriously died at his mothers home in Camarillo while he was visiting for Easter. Depicted by friends of his parents as the mastermind behind the assembly-line cremations, David Sconce is being held without bail. 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. He employed many of his old football buddies as muscle, not just to transport and handle the dead bodies, but also to intimidate funeral home directors into doing business with Coastal Cremations and scare/beat the crap out of anyone who could potentially expose their misdeeds. In the 1960s only 10% of all bodies were cremated, but by the 1980s it had become a big business, with nearly half of all deceased relatives being barbecued and placed into an urn. .more Get A Copy About Us Our Family Our Facility Why Choose Us Testimonials In 1985, Charles Lambs granddaughter Laurieanne Lamb Sconce, 49, scraped together $65,000 as a down payment and bought out the family business from her father, Lawrence, who had succeeded Charles. Best coffee city in the world? It would pass to his two grandsons, who gamely kept it afloat for a year before deciding, as they had years before, that the funeral business was not for them. Laurieannes husband was considered a loser, a cheat, a layabout, and a hustler by her father, Lawrence; though Jerry had been gainfully employed as a football coach for a local Christian college, he quit the job in 1977 to run a sporting goods store, even though he had no previous experience in business. What the authorities found when they raided the warehouse in January 1987 was beyond imagination: outside, a sludge pit of liquid human waste, mingled with dirt; inside, gallon cans filled with human ash, bone, and partially cremated body parts. **In an effort to do our part regarding public safety and provide families with our services, we at David Funeral Home will abide by all local, state, federal, and public health mandates. 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. Visit Obituary Nancy Darling, 68, of Atlantic (formerly of Greenfield) Dec 20, 2022 Nancy Darling passed away on Tuesday, December 20, 2022, at her home. This was especially true in Southern California, he said, where price competitiveness in low-cost cremation was fierce.. His great-grandfather, Lawrence Lamb, purchased the Pasadena Crematorium in Altadena, California a few years before starting Lamb Funeral Home in 1929 just two miles away. somethings not right, he said. However, funerals do tend to cost a lot of money, which is why people tend to opt for a cheaper option. It was time for him to learn a trade, they believed, and what better business than that of the dead? But he recalled that on the night the business was transferred to him, several people broke into the offices. 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. This means you can plan for you, or your loved one, to be cremated at Riemann family funeral homes or others without the concerns that may be raised by reading on. having his employees rough up three rival morticians. 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. Sconce had bulldozed the front- and backyards of the house before leaving town, but he hadnt completely covered his tracks. 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. Frustrated and bored, he and his friends egged houses and beat up homeless drunks for fun. In 1985 Estephan and Cindy Strunk (Cindy) were separated. Its not like Sconce knew where or even howto draw the line on depravity at this point. But with only two investigators covering 180 cemeteries and 45 crematories, they had a lot of other work. Well, for one, Sconce had no reason to fear any serious repercussions. Under the state Health and Safety Code, it is a misdemeanor to cremate more than one body at a time. According to state law, standard procedure for cremating a dead body was that only one body could be burned at a time, a process that took several hours per body. A respected industry family is tangled in a ghoulish, still-unfolding tale of organ theft and, perhaps, homicide. Coke was originally supposed to make you smarter or something. It is used, but in great shape. David wasnt too excited about embalming school, but he did see an opportunity to make money in the cremation business. Sconce, 56, is to be sentenced Monday for a case that could keep him behind bars . In July of 1986, David (along with his parents) created a new side business: Coastal International Eye and Tissue Bank. But what really sets this story apart is the thousands of dead bodies involved. Charged with four felonies, he was extradited to California, and sentenced to 25 years to life. 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. As the business grew, rumors spread through the industry. attempting to pawn a stolen rifle in Montana, in 2013 was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison, an LA-based paranormal investigation group suggested in a blog post, a reader of the paranormal website commented on the blog about Lamb Funeral Home that his or her mother-in-laws body, Keeper Memorials Unveils Obituary Writing Assistant Powered by ChatGPT AI, For Ben Wasserman and his Surprising Audiences, Comedy is a Natural Way to Grieve. The Ventura County coroners office re-examined tissues saved from the original autopsy of Waters and changed the cause of death to poisoning by oleander, a common plant in California. Lawyers & Liquor is run out of my pocket, so every bit helps me do shit. It was purchased by another funeral home, and then sat abandoned for years, and is today a showroom and storage space for a light bulb distributor. 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. By the time of the Hesperia raid, the Sconces had built a business empire collecting human remains from San Diego to Santa Barbara. When Abraham Lincoln was shot, his embalmed corpse was beautified by Dr. Thomas Holmes, the father of embalming, and sent on tour across the nation. And hundreds of bodies. 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. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz, the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled. The brothers, who have not been accused of any wrongdoing, are left to wrestle with a conundrum: How could the ingredients for an American success story, ambition, hard work and a professed respect for family and God, be twisted into a tragedy of such perverse dimensions? Cue dramatic organ music. Obituaries. That broke the previous record of 18 bodies in one furnace, the employee said. No algorithms. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!. 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 city of movie magic and Hollywood weirdos, the 33,000-square-mile Greater Los Angeles area was a sprawling film set, where the silhouettes of palm trees lay flat against a gradient wash of wide-angle sunsets. Before the Civil War, most Americans died at home and were buried nearby, often in the local churchyard. The three bedrooms available for rent in the former funeral home were given walk-in closets, and the master bedroom outfitted with a freestanding soaking tub. 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. This led the state to charge Sconce with poisoning Waters the following year, but those charges were dropped after multiple experts failed to agree on whether or not oleander was actually present in Waters system. His great-grandfather, Lawrence Lamb, purchased the Pasadena Crematorium in Altadena, California a few years before starting Lamb Funeral Home in 1929 just two miles away. Only much later did police begin looking into the death after David Sconce was heard bragging about poisoning him. 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. Cindy testified she worked for her father, Frank Strunk, at his business, the Cremation Society of California (CSC). Like A Lamb to Slaughter Are you being placed on the altar. did david sconce the crematorium technician of the. David Sconce originally wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps and become a football player. The reason Sconce had escaped notice for so long were the lax laws surrounding the regulation of crematories and the lack of funding for enforcement of those same laws. The Lamb Funeral Home was the essence of an old-style mortuary, operated by a family that was the All-American stuff of advertising copy. David Sconces 1989 trial resulted in a five-year prison term for mutilating corpses, conducting mass cremations, and having his employees rough up three rival morticians. Get the best of Cracked sent directly to your inbox! He even took the test to become a police officer, but was rejected when a vision test determined he was colorblind. 8 pages of shocking photographs. SCONIERS FUNERAL HOME - Columbus Send Flowers Publish an Obituary In any newspaper and Legacy.com (706) 322-0011 836 5TH AVE, Columbus, Georgia , 31901 Visit the Funeral Home's Website. Slumber chambers were available for families to rest in, if they so chose. 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. Next Freaky Friday: Silence of the Lamb Funeral Home This wider lens gives you a glimpse of a dark place where sociopathy meets capitalism and legal dysfunction. Because Grandpa had no eyes. Reasonable doubt can be a real dick punch sometimes. 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. What lay behind the screen was more contentious and corrupt. Luckily, Sconce had already scouted a second crematory location, and he quickly reassembled his operation in a corrugated metal warehouse in Hesperia, a way-out desert town populated mostly by veterans and retirees, located in San Bernardino County, some 70 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In the aftermath of Sconces capture and conviction, laws were proposed and passed that strengthened the ability of the state to watch over the businesses and inspect the premises. A very aggressive market came about, said the Cemetery Boards Gill. Twenty percent of them.. Criteria Reorder Criteria. Dont tell me I dont know what burning bodies smell like! the man had reportedly yelled. Honestly, if it werent for one Holocaust survivors sense memory and a call to the Air Quality Control hotline, theres no telling how much longer and further David Sconce wouldve taken this scam. The previous owner, Frank Strunk, who lived on the premises in Los Angeles, drove them off by shouting that he had a gun, he said. 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. His business plan was simple enough: Sconce would obtain a license from the Department of Health to operate a crematorium. By all accounts, Charles F. Lamb had no such grand designs in 1929 when he built the Lamb Funeral Home on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. - 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. Traditionally, Cemetery Board investigators have spent more time looking at audits than on enforcement, Gill said. 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. 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. A coroner attributed the official cause of death to buildup of fatty tissue in Waterss kidneys. But they had aimed at Nimzs glass eye, foiling the plot, and at least one of Sconces associates later pleaded guilty to assault. They say they do not believe all of the accusations, but they admit that there is too much evidence to deny something went very wrong at the funeral home. Tim Waters was a 300-pound Burbank mortician who had a reputation for honesty but was unpopular among competitors in the cremation trade because he aggressively took business away from them. While serving his sentence, he narrowly escaped charges for the murder of the owner of a local crematorium, although David had openly bragged to his lackies that hed slipped deadly oleander into the mans drink the day he died. Estephan said he never had any run-ins with David Sconce. 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. The Lamb Funeral Home in Fontanelle is assisting the family. The grisly discoveries on Jan. 20, 1987, have touched off one of the most bizarre scandals in the history of the California funeral industry. Sconces employees were cremating anywhere from five to eighteen bodies at a time and thats perfurnace. He had veered towards his father's interests more than his mother's, and had played football. A double-oven structure built in 1895, it was known among funeral directors as the oldest crematorium west of the Mississippi. 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. On January 20, 1987, Richard Wales, an air quality engineer with the San Bernardino Air Pollution Control District, called the Hesperia fire marshal and assistant fire chief, Wilbur Wentworth, and asked him to meet about the situation at Oscar Ceramics. He entered the plea pursuant to an agreement offered by California Superior Court Judge Terry Smerling. I could see smoke from a mile and a half away.. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz! Wentworth, Wales, and investigators from Californias Cemetery and Funeral Boards drove over to Oscar Ceramics to investigate.