In the course of her duties at CSC, she met Sconce whose family owned the Lamb Funeral Home (LFH) and the Pasadena Crematorium. By 1985, Coastal Cremations was burning over 8,000 bodies a year, they only had two furnaces at their location in Altadena, and those ovens were running upwards of 18 hours a day. 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. 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. 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. Literally flames and whatnot would be coming out of their chimney, says Jay Brown, whose familys mortuary was next to the Lamb crematory. Lamb Funeral Home ptyi liikekaupan seurauksena Davidin vanhemmille Laurieannelle ja Jerrylle sen jlkeen, kun pariskunta osti hautaustoimiston Lauriannen islt, Lawrencelta. 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. Death Facts: Part 72. It was stupid but it was funny, he said. 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. But then the man said, Dont tell me theyre not burning bodies. So, the fire meant they were out of business, right? However, some people do prefer to be cremated. 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. 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. 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. Cremations are now highly regulated affairs. The drawing room chapel of his Spanish mission-style building was filled with comfortable sofas and arm chairs. AndCalifornia would rewrite their laws and regulations regarding crematories. 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. In fact, the family once appeared in magazine ads,. He entered the plea pursuant to an agreement offered by California Superior Court Judge Terry Smerling. 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. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz! Wentworth, Wales, and investigators from Californias Cemetery and Funeral Boards drove over to Oscar Ceramics to investigate. by Caleb Wilde in Aggregate Death. Before we begin, lets get something serious out of the way. What did Disney actually lose from its Florida battle with DeSantis? For more information please contact your local David Funeral Home location or call toll free 1-888-806-6336. For many, cremation was becoming a cheaper and more attractive option. In court, it was revealed that over a three-month period, they had sold 136 brains (at about $80 each), 145 hearts ($95 each), and 100 lungs ($60 each) for use in medical schools. But David lacked the compassion and the charisma necessary to work with bereaved people. Sconces employees were cremating anywhere from five to eighteen bodies at a time and thats perfurnace. If consent for the removals was not offered, Davids mother would forge the signature of a family member. As profits grew, so did Davids sick ego. . 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 main competitor was Timothy R. Waters, who owned the Alpha Society, a Burbank-based cremation service, and who had a reputation for stealing business from other morticians. This was an indelicate, bone-shattering operation that David allegedly referred to as making the pliers sing.. For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. 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. He was released in 1991. For two months, Sconce cremated bodies with diesel fuel in industrial-size ceramic kilns. Michael Bradbury with the recommendation that David Sconce be prosecuted, a spokesman said. 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. No algorithms. David Sconce preferring to burn things into oblivion rather than preserve them would turn out to be an odd bit of foreshadowing for both the company and his family legacy. 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. The floors were laid with new wood and a kitchen was added, with white granite countertops, a subzero fridge, and a wine cooler. In the outcome, Sconce and his parents were arrested and tried for their crimes. Every person should get the burial they want, so money can be raised online to help with this. Operating under a license for a ceramics factory, David cremated bodies in the facilitys massive brick kilns until the fire chiefs gruesome discovery in January 1987. - 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. (A brochure described the funeral home as home in every sense of the word.) Lamb had also had the foresight to purchase the Pasadena Crematorium a few years earlier; it was located a few miles away, in the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena. The autopsy report found traces of the heart medication digoxin in his bloodstream, only Waters was not on any heart medication. On occasion, families would request to see the corpse of their beloved grandparents and be denied. But under the then-current California regulations, their crimes weremisdemeanors. 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. They pulled out eyeballs, plopping them unceremoniously into Coke cans and paper towels. About Us. By the time of the Hesperia raid, the Sconces had built a business empire collecting human remains from San Diego to Santa Barbara. The Lamb Family Funeral Home still stands on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Coke was originally supposed to make you smarter or something. 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. 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. After David dropped out of college, worked as a casino dealer and a hockey stadium usher, and was unable to pass the police departments vision test, his parents convinced him to get his embalmers license and join the family business at age 26. Reasonable doubt can be a real dick punch sometimes. In addition, there was no extra charge for picking up a body and returning the ashes. Laurieannes personal life was less charmed than her professional one. 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. Yet authorities were stymiedattempts at inspections were rebuffed by the lack of a warrant when the funeral board came out to visit. Simi Valley police plan soon to turned the case over to Ventura County Dist. That morning, employee John Hallinan said, he and another worker loaded 38 bodies into the two furnaces, each measuring 3.5 feet high by 4 feet wide by 8 feet long. 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. Its not like Sconce knew where or even howto draw the line on depravity at this point. This is a great book for funeral collectors. 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. And if that wasnt enough to supplement Davids lifestyle, there was always the gold jar. The ovens are cleaned, and the process can begin again. Between 1985 and 1986, Coastal Cremations gross income from cremations would top over $1 million. . 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. The autopsy also discovered digoxin, a common heart medication, in Waterss bloodthough Waters didnt take heart medication. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. For the following year we had about 1,500 to 2,000 people calling us to find out if Mountain View or the Lamb Family had cremated their loved ones. The investigators findings at both Oscar Ceramics and Sconces former Glendora home, about a 30-minute drive east from Pasadena, led to a class-action lawsuit filed by the relatives of 5,000 deceased people against the Lamb Family Funeral Home and other funeral homes that used its services; the lawsuit was settled out of court in 1992 for $15.4 million. 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. After dropping out of college, David spent a few years working various jobs and mostly being a shiftless layabout. Im certain that he used his good looks to sort of offset any suspicion about what he was up to., In addition to his effective salesmanship, David Sconce was also ruthless and intimidating. Sconce was involved in the. When he was extradited back to California for his parole violations, David pleaded guilty to conspiring to hire a hit-man to execute yet another rival and in 2013 was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. As the director of the funeral home, Laurieanne was the first person to greet guests with a box of tissues and a comforting lilt. Two months later, Waters was dead, presumably of a heart attack. 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. What they did is, they tried to corner the market, said Joe Estephan, funeral director of the Cremation Society of California. For sixty years, families in Southern California trusted the Sconce-owned Lamb Funeral Home with their loved ones' remains. But in recent years, as people searched for less expensive funeral arrangements, the figure has risen to nearly 40%, setting off a scramble for customers. 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. 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. The impact David Sconce left on the funeral business is still being felt today. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz, the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled. ADD LOCATION (eg. In 2015, an LA-based paranormal investigation group suggested in a blog post that the building may be haunted, but it was eventually purchased by a light bulb distributor which in 2018 turned the second floor into a three-bedroom apartment available for rent for $4,700 per month. 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. Show Filters Close Filters Close Map. In 1994, he was found guilty of selling fake bus tickets in Arizona. To many who knew him, David Sconce was the model youth, a one-time defensive back for his father at Azusa-Pacific with a surfers wave of blond hair. 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. 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. 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 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 Among these things were any body parts not necessary for removal prior to cremation. Thirty-six charges had already been dismissed before the trial, and the couple was acquitted of three charges and a mistrial was declared for the other six. 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. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. Hast recalled that he and a friend were attacked by two men posing as policemen, who threw ammonia and jalapeno sauce in their eyes. 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. One of Davids boys, David Edwards, pleaded guilty to beating Hast, testifying that the younger Sconce had paid him $700 or $800 to do so. In April 1992, five years after their arrest, Laurieanne and Jerry Sconce, now 55 and 58, retired and living penniless in Arizona, walked through the doors of the Pasadena Superior Court to stand trial for their part in the conspiracyin particular, the forging of authorization forms to remove organs from the dead. In March of 1985, Careless Whisper by George Michael was a Billboard hit single. But, for a time, the business continued as always. 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? 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.. 8 pages of shocking photographs. Waters demonstrated his success with flamboyance, appointing his thick fingers with bejeweled rings and draping his neck with gold chains. And then his employees broke the record, fitting 38 bodies in a single ovenbreaking the leg of one, blocking the chimney, and setting the premises aflame. Furniture salesman Ed Shain, who rented the house after Sconces departure, discovered the remains while replacing the screen on the crawl space and called the authorities, who then spent two days filling two large boxes full of bones, dentures, bridges, bits of skull, pacemaker wires, and a soda can packed with molars. A Family Business: A Chilling Tale of Greed as One Family Commits Unspeakable Crimes Against the Dead Ken Englade 3.53 244 ratings17 reviews They were the owners of funeral homeand organ harvesters. Cue dramatic organ music. 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. 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. Whilst cremation is definitely becoming more popular after people pass away, funerals still remain the traditional option for many people. He found embalming school to be boring, and that wasnt where the money was anyway. Scattered around the interior, caked black with the accumulated bodily grime from the brick ovens, were trash cans brimming with human ashes and prosthetic devices. 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. Finding embalming school boring, David decided to leverage the familys crematorium as an entrepreneurial opportunity. 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. About Us Our Family Our Facility Why Choose Us Testimonials 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. 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. Oh, they had always existed in one form or another, dating back really to prehistoric times, but mainly people wanted to bury their loved ones, not burn them. 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. by Caleb Wilde in Aggregate Death. David didnt last long in college, dropped out after his teams losing streak started hurting his prospects. Sconce operated the Lamb Funeral Home with his wife, Laurieanne Lamb Sconce. Sconce had bulldozed the front- and backyards of the house before leaving town, but he hadnt completely covered his tracks. Up until the night an Auschwitz survivor had enough. 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. What difference does it make? a witness recalled David Sconce saying. 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. Either those crimes were all unrelated to each other, or that was one hell of a road trip. A handwriting expert hired by the Los Angeles County district attorneys office said Laurieanne Sconce had signed the names of survivors on some of the forms permitting organ removal; it is a felony to take organs without permission. 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. His employees called him Little Hitler because of the number of bodies he burned. The embalming business boomed. They would then dump all of the ashes together in huge barrels. He had veered towards his father's interests more than his mother's, and had played football. It is used, but in great shape. At the Lamb Family Funeral Home, Laurieanne was the kindly, motherly face of Davids morbid scheme. Before the Civil War, most Americans died at home and were buried nearby, often in the local churchyard. After families signed paperwork with Laurieanne, the bodies of their loved ones were sent to the Altadena crematorium and housed in an elaborate refrigeration facility that Sconce called the cold room, where he and his cash-paid teamincluding a medical student he recruited from a tissue bankslipped rings off fingers and harvested organs to sell on the black market. 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. Greg Risling, Associated Press. 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. He would attract business from area funeral homes with his half-priced cremations and make up for the low cost with high volume. Dubbed the Cremation King of California by a journalist, David equipped his new Corvette with vanity plates reading I BRN 4 U.. 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. Braidhill details the twisted greed and blind ambition that drove the founder's son, David Sconce, to mutilate corpses and illegally sell their body parts--including the gold in their teeth.. You can toss money at this site and its author on Ko-Fi, Patreon, or just through PayPal. Belgrade, Kragujevac) Enquiry type Country. (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.). 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. The body would be burned, then wait for the oven to cool, collect the ashes, then the oven would have to be cleaned before moving on to the next one. Home. . 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. However, theres something else that can mimic digoxin in the bloodstream: oleander, one of the most common and most poisonous trees in Southern California. In California at the time, and elsewhere, it was illegal to remove things from corpses. 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. But what really sets this story apart is the thousands of dead bodies involved. Like A Lamb to Slaughter Are you being placed on the altar. Estephan said he never had any run-ins with David Sconce. Gill said the state investigator in Southern California was suspicious of the Sconce crematory and began trying to find out how the cremations were being done. The $15.5 million suit in 1991 involved 20,000 relatives of people cremated at the funeral home. David ultimately served only two-and-a-half years of his sentence and was released in 1991. Charged with four felonies, he was extradited to California, and sentenced to 25 years to life. 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. 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. Good evening, and welcome to another episode of Lawyers & Liquor Presents Freaky Friday. 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. 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 Sconce originally wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps and become a football player. 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. 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. David Wayne Sconce was the accused, and it was alleged that back in 1985 he had killed a rival mortician, Timothy R. Waters, to stop him exposing some dark and illegal activities at the Lamb Funeral Home, the family business where Sconce worked. And as for the Lamb Funeral Home, the business built by Charles Lamb in 1929? 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. That infamous title belongs to David Wayne Sconce. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business.