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. How in the world did David Sconce manage to get away with this for so long? On Feb. 12, 1985, Waters was bloodied by Danny Galambos, a 245-pound ex-football player who carried business cards reading Big Men Unlimited. Galambos, who eventually pleaded guilty to assault, testified that David Sconce told him to make it look like a robbery, so he also stole Waters jewelry. About Us Our Family Our Facility Why Choose Us Testimonials The remaining ashes are then marked and stored individually. Then Charles retired, leaving the business to his son, Lawrence, who would then pass it on to his daughter Laurieanne and her husband. 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. 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. 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. Fantastic. Others prefer the elegance provided by grave headstones though. David Wayne Sconce. On the morning of Sunday, November 23, 1986, the Altadena crematorium burned down after employees tried cramming in a record 38 bodies at once. So, the fire meant they were out of business, right? somethings not right, he said. A businessman recalled that David looked him up and down one day and declared him a one-hander. That meant David wouldnt even need two hands to sling his small body into the oven. He knew what Sconce was up to with his cremation racket, and threatened to out him in the industry newsletter, Mortuary Management, which was run by a fellow mortician, Ron Hast, and published local gossip and stories about the latest trends in the funeral business. A double-oven structure built in 1895, it was known among funeral directors as the oldest crematorium west of the Mississippi. Property Type. Michael Bradbury with the recommendation that David Sconce be prosecuted, a spokesman said. No algorithms. In late 1982, he used the industry contacts andthe two crematory furnaces from his familys funeral home business to start his own company, Coastal Cremations Inc., even though he didnt officially file the paperwork on the business until two years later. He even used such colorful terms for this act as popping chops and making the pliers sing. Hed then sell the gold to a jeweler buddy of his, which reportedly netted him an additional $6,000 a month. But David lacked the compassion and the charisma necessary to work with bereaved people. 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. 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. 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. This is a great book for funeral collectors. In 1990, while Sconce was still in prison, new charges were brought against him for Waterss death, but the case was ultimately dismissed after three separate toxicologists, including Dr. Fredric Riederswho later testified in the O. J. Simpson casecould not agree if there was oleander poison in Waterss blood. Frustrated and bored, he and his friends egged houses and beat up homeless drunks for fun. Somehow, gum made out of tree bark is still softer than Bazooka. In fact, the family once appeared in magazine ads,. There was jovial Jerry Sconce, 55, the Bible college football coach, his church organist wife, Laurieanne Lamb Sconce, 52, and their son David, 32, a charming ex-football player who had plans to grab a big piece of Californias booming cremation industry. 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). 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. In California at the time, and elsewhere, it was illegal to remove things from corpses. Last week, prosecutors filed two new charges against David Sconce, accusing him of soliciting the murder of Elie Estephan, owner of the Cremation Society of California. Twenty percent of them.. Sconce said his words were misinterpreted. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!. Homes for sale: Nadezhda Sofia City - 0 listings Show Filters Close Filters Close Map. A crowbar cracked open sternums in order to access organs. Sconce had bulldozed the front- and backyards of the house before leaving town, but he hadnt completely covered his tracks. Eyes, brains and gold-filled teeth were sold without the knowledge of relatives, while workers competed to see who could stuff the most bodies into the ancient crematory ovens, according to witnesses. 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. Featured on ABC-TV's Nightline. Every person should get the burial they want, so money can be raised online to help with this. By 1913, when the Cremation Association of America was founded, there were 52 crematoriums across the nation, including the Pasadena Crematorium, which would later be purchased by the Lamb family. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. The floors were laid with new wood and a kitchen was added, with white granite countertops, a subzero fridge, and a wine cooler. Cindy testified she worked for her father, Frank Strunk, at his business, the Cremation Society of California (CSC). 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. David didnt last long in college, dropped out after his teams losing streak started hurting his prospects. Presents an account of the gruesome crimes committed by the Lamb Funeral Home, describing how David, Jerry, and Laurieanne Sconce were involved in such crimes as mutilation of corpses and murder Print length 364 pages Language English Publisher St Martins Pr Publication date January 1, 1992 Dimensions 4.5 x 1.25 x 7 inches ISBN-10 0312928203 But Dr. Thomas Weber, owner of the Telephase Society, a pioneer in the field of low-cost burial, said the deal was too good to be true. The license was sacrificed in the 1990s, and the building in which such desecrations took place still stands empty in Pasadena, the furnaces forever silent. It blew over the mountains and nestled into the Los Angeles Basin, where it mingled with the air breathed in by kids smoking joints in Mustang convertibles in the parking lot of Hollywood High, and by linen-clad housewives watering their roses in the gardens of their San Fernando Valley mansions. - 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. Another reason: The low, low prices weren't all that was helping Sconce corner the SoCal cremation market. A coroner attributed the official cause of death to buildup of fatty tissue in Waterss kidneys. The tissue harvesting itself was, unsurprisingly, not handled delicately. Death Facts: Part 72. The embalming business boomed. The dead body became an incorruptible image of a peaceful afterlife. 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. 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. Oscar Ceramics was the latest in a string of shady money-making schemes for David Sconce, a failed college football player and fourth-generation crematory owner. 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. 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. By the time of the Hesperia raid, the Sconces had built a business empire collecting human remains from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Show Filters Close Filters Close Map. However, funerals do tend to cost a lot of money, which is why people tend to opt for a cheaper option. Ever protective of his mother, David Sconce became angry and said he was going to have his boys pay the editor a visit, Dame said. The final chapter in the story opened Nov. 23, 1986, when a fire destroyed the crematory in Altadena. He violated this probation by moving to Montana without permission in 2006, and again by stealing a neighbors rifle in 2012. 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. Just in case the universe hadnt made it obvious enough what was reallyhappening in that warehouse, when Wentworth opened one of the kilns, a human foot fell out still burning. Among these things were any body parts not necessary for removal prior to cremation. 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. A proliferation of people and cars had led to the citys signature smog, and gridlock gripped the streets. Soon, the two ovens at the family crematory in Altadena, the oldest cremation furnaces west of the Mississippi, were running 16 to 18 hours a day. As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. AndCalifornia would rewrite their laws and regulations regarding crematories. 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. Laurieanne Lamb Sconce and her husband, Jerry, former operators of the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, were arrested in 1987, with their son, David, after investigators alleged that they. 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. 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 ashes are then removed and strained to remove large pieces of bone, medical pins, etc. Brown witnessed David Sconces downfall in closer proximity than mostthe Lamb family crematorium shared property lines with Mountain View. 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. David Sconce was a bully, says mortician Jay Brown, who started working at his own familys business, Mountain View Mortuary in Altadena, in 1971, when he was 12. Area. Good evening, and welcome to another episode of Lawyers & Liquor Presents Freaky Friday. As the director of the funeral home, Laurieanne was the first person to greet guests with a box of tissues and a comforting lilt. having his employees rough up three rival morticians. Sconce and his employees used crowbars, screwdrivers, pliers, or any other common hardware tool they had handy to extract the organs they planned to sell. 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. (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.). With the help of her husband, a glad-handing former football coach at Azusa-Pacific College, Laurieanne began taking control of the business from her parents about a decade ago, just as the publics interest in cremation blossomed. The Lamb Funeral Home in Fontanelle is assisting the family. In 1929, Charles F. Lamb opened a funeral home in Pasadena, California in a building that resembled a cross between a Spanish mission and a fortress. We consider it an honor to serve the families of these communities and the communities that surround them and promise to do our very best to guide families through every step of the funeral process, from preplanning a funeral, to celebration of life services, to choosing a monument. He was a little too slick in my opinion, but some people are attracted to that. 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. When you make your funeral plans, choosing a proper funeral home is important. At the time, brains could sold for about $80, hearts for $95, lungs for $60. 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. His employees called him Little Hitler because of the number of bodies he burned. All good? 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. But he recalled that on the night the business was transferred to him, several people broke into the offices. Price . 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. 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. 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? Its resulted in a great tragedy for them, for a third-generation business and for the families of the deceased. During the questioning, the couple threw their son under the bus, blaming him for the cremation conspiracy. His business plan was simple enough: Sconce would obtain a license from the Department of Health to operate a crematorium. David's mother Laurieanne Lamb Sconce and her husband Jerry bought out the family business from her father in 1985. In a lengthy conversation at County Jail, David conceded that he wrote Lewis will die on the wall of the jail but insisted it was part of a larger message, intended as a joke, that was erased by jail snitches. They wanted the Laurieanne Lamb to make sure they were laid to rest peacefully. Between 1985 and 1986, Coastal Cremations gross income from cremations would top over $1 million. 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. 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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. 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. 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. 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. To make the company seem official, he and his cronies rigged up a telephone line that they attached directly to a nearby phone pole, stretching a long wire to a receiver on the dashboard of a car, from which they took calls. After dropping out of college, David spent a few years working various jobs and mostly being a shiftless layabout. One of Sconces boys would later testify in court that Sconce had bragged to him about putting something in Waterss drink in a restaurant, leading the state to charge Sconce with the poisoning in 1990. 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. Atty. They were burned, and the ashes placed in a barrel together. By 1982, 32 percent of people who died in California were cremated, the highest rate in the nation. On November 23, 1986, the crematorium caught fire after two employees tried to break the company record by putting nineteenbodies in each furnace. I dont think so, its a ceramics shop, Wentworth replied. They were each sentenced to three years and eight months in prison. The drawing room chapel of his Spanish mission-style building was filled with comfortable sofas and arm chairs. The autopsy report found traces of the heart medication digoxin in his bloodstream, only Waters was not on any heart medication. Yet, somehow Sconce continues to make news 22 years after authorities discovered burning body parts in a ceramics kiln Sconce was using as a makeshift crematory. 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. 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. His business plan caught on, and business boomed. In the outcome, Sconce and his parents were arrested and tried for their crimes. For sixty years, families in Southern California trusted the Sconce-owned Lamb Funeral Home with their loved ones' remains. The Lamb Funeral Home was founded by Lawrence Lamb. The $15.5 million suit in 1991 involved 20,000 relatives of people cremated at the funeral home. In the course of her duties at CSC, she met Sconce whose family owned the Lamb Funeral Home (LFH) and the Pasadena Crematorium. They would then dump all of the ashes together in huge barrels. Depicted by friends of his parents as the mastermind behind the assembly-line cremations, David Sconce is being held without bail. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz, the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled. Instead, David quietly installed crematory ovens in a suburb, licensing the facility as a ceramics shop. And two aged ovens. Sunday, May 29 . The mortuaries, in turn, would charge customers anywhere from $265 to $1,000 for cremation services. Dubbed the Cremation King of California by a journalist, Davids cash-paid employees would tell horrific tales of Little Hitlers (as they called him) joy at popping chops, his term for extracting gold teeth, which hed sell to a local jeweler for an extra $6,000 each month. They said David would lift and carry cardboard-enclosed corpses around the facility for exercise, use a crowbar to crack open sternums, and store eyeballs in used cola cans. But with only two investigators covering 180 cemeteries and 45 crematories, they had a lot of other work. He is currently incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, and is eligible for parole in 2022. 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. 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. 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. . Traditionally, Cemetery Board investigators have spent more time looking at audits than on enforcement, Gill said. Thats the way it was supposed to be done. His tale of deception, greed, and complete disregard for tradition, decency, and even the law is disgraceful. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. 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. About Us. In May 1988, a pile of charred bones, teeth, and prosthetic devices was found in the crawl space beneath David Sconces former rental home in Glendora, where he had lived until early 1987. This was especially true in Southern California, he said, where price competitiveness in low-cost cremation was fierce.. You can toss money at this site and its author on Ko-Fi, Patreon, or just through PayPal. What could have been (and should have been) a career-ending calamity was no problem for David Sconce. A burning foot fell out. 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. A very aggressive market came about, said the Cemetery Boards Gill. In 1986, David Sconce and his parents expanded the family enterprise with the creation of Coastal International Eye and Tissue Bank. 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.. An unsettling look at the Sconce family from the acclaimed true crime author of Deadly Lessons. 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.. After stealing their stereo equipment, he coolly joined them in their pew at church. Many of his employees, nearly all of whom were paid under the table, later told authorities of Sconce gleefully pulling gold fillings out of the mouths of the bodies. 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. It is a home in every sense of the word.. 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. 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. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. 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. 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. In addition to his effective salesmanship. In Sweden, they send you a thank-you text when they use your blood. Well spare you from doing the math. He told his parents that he wanted to start his own cremation company, working as an affiliate to the family funeral home. 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. Due to various plea deals, Sconce would ultimately serve only two and a half years of his sentence.
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