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. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. If somebody offers you a new Ford for $8,000 and Im paying $16,000 . 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. 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. And then her son, David, joined the family business. He was released in 1991. However, one substance that closely mimics the effects of digoxin is oleander, a poisonous tree commonly found in California. The only family member accused in the strong-arm tactics allegedly used against competitors, he is charged among other things with plotting to kill the prosecuting attorney, Walt Lewis. Instead, the ashes were scattered in a vacant lot in the foothills. 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. You can find him being mistaken on Google Search for a hockey player whose name is one letter off from his, or you can find him on Twitter. Home. That broke the previous record of 18 bodies in one furnace, the employee said. Los Angeles in the 1980s was a lush, neon, dusty city. . 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. Instead, David quietly installed crematory ovens in a suburb, licensing the facility as a ceramics shop. In addition, there was no extra charge for picking up a body and returning the ashes. 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. She loved funeral work, especially the task of beautifying the dead: applying makeup to the waxen skin of the embalmed. On February 12, 1985, Sconce sent a 265-pound ex-football player who carried a business card that read Big Men Unlimited to rob Waters and beat him to a pulp. May 6, 2013, 3:27 PM. 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. A burning foot fell out. 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. 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. 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. 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. Two months later, Waters was dead, presumably of a heart attack. He said he never put the ashes from just one body in the urns that were returned to families. Blake Lamb Funeral Home/Lisle. Davids mother Laurieanne Lamb Sconce and her husband Jerry bought out the family business from her father in 1985. The $15.5 million suit in 1991 involved 20,000 relatives of people cremated at the funeral home. When the neighbor was told it was just a ceramics factory, he shouted, Dont tell me I dont know what burning bodies smell like! In 1985 Estephan and Cindy Strunk (Cindy) were separated. After dropping out of college, David spent a few years working various jobs and mostly being a shiftless layabout. (No, Seriously. 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. (And lest you think stuff like this was confined to the barbaric past, uh, we have bad news. 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. As the business grew, rumors spread through the industry. 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. A respected industry family is tangled in a ghoulish, still-unfolding tale of organ theft and, perhaps, homicide. Welcome To David Funeral Homes. Yet authorities were stymiedattempts at inspections were rebuffed by the lack of a warrant when the funeral board came out to visit. Bobs never bought Christmas seals he told me he wouldnt know what to feed them. 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. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. His company, Coastal Cremations Inc., would advertise itself to funeral homes in Los Angeles that didnt have access to a crematorium. 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. Although he was caught, he avoided jail after leading police to the stolen equipment. You can toss money at this site and its author on Ko-Fi, Patreon, or just through PayPal. Two books, entitled Chop Shop and A Family Business, have been written about David Sconces escapades. (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.). COPYRIGHT 2005-2023 Cracked is published by Literally media Ltd., Every Purposefully Corny Joke from Norm Macdonalds Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget, Ranked, 15 Bits Of Trivia So Powerful, They Would Have Instantly Vaporized Our Ancestors, I Was the Bowling Consultant on The Big Lebowski, 15 Incredible Inventions That Were, Technically, Gigantic Failures, 5 Elaborate Mysterious Projects Carried Out Literally Underground, TRUE CRIME: THE CASE OF THE GHOULISH CALIFORNIA CREMATORIUM OWNER, 12 Healthcare Innovations That The US Needs To Adopt ASAP, Kevin Bacon Was in a Band Called Footloose When He Was 15, 15 Trivia Tidbits About Trailer Park Boys, Molly Shannon Got Hired on Saturday Night Live and Mugged on the Same Day, Five Times Michael Shannon Showed Up and Made Everything Better, Conan O'Brien Runs Down Every Hideous Mutation of His Hideous Body. He said the full message was, Lewis will die of AIDS.. 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. Wentworth was still skeptical when he drove out to Oscar Ceramics and opened one of the massive brick furnaces. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!. In the outcome, Sconce and his parents were arrested and tried for their crimes. Better run your business honestly, because you dont want the media to mention you alongside thatguy! What curse was placed on the O'Brien family that would give them a son with a webbed foot? About Us Our Family Our Facility Why Choose Us Testimonials In the winter of 2018, the owners saw an opportunity for the second floor of the building. A573819 (the funeral home case). 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. Sconce himself served 5 years before being released. But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. 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. 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. 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 In 1982, his parents encouraged him to go back to school, become an embalmer and join the family business on his mothers side: Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, founded by Davids great-grandfather back in 1929. 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. 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. They wanted the Laurieanne Lamb to make sure they were laid to rest peacefully. Meant to fit one body at a time, Sconce and his associates often filled the retorts with up to 18 bodies. 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. 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. For just $55 per body, he was now offering lower prices than every other crematorium in the region, if not the entire country. Up to 100 bodies would lie in the mortuarys cold room awaiting transportation to the crematory, where David used a wood 2-by-4 to pack them into the ovens like cordwood, according to witnesses at the Sconces preliminary hearing, which ended earlier this year. 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. Bodies were cremated there for two months until December 23, 1986 when a neighbor called in an air quality complaint over all of the horrible smoke the furnaces were belching out 24/7. 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. 7 years ago. 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. But he recalled that on the night the business was transferred to him, several people broke into the offices. All Obituaries. Under the state Health and Safety Code, it is a misdemeanor to cremate more than one body at a time. He violated this probation by moving to Montana without permission in 2006, and again by stealing a neighbors rifle in 2012. (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. This Guy Might Be Up To Something). His business plan caught on, and business boomed. But the ovens were old, accidents happened, and no investigation began. 7 years ago. David Sconce was notorious for multiple cremations, organ harvesting and crimes against persons. They then attacked the man and threw jalapeno sauce and ammonia into his eyes. The tissue harvesting itself was, unsurprisingly, not handled delicately. 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. Hast recalled that he and a friend were attacked by two men posing as policemen, who threw ammonia and jalapeno sauce in their eyes. 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. Online condolences may be left to the family at www.lambfuneralhomes.com. But it wasnt long until residents noticed the thick black smoke pouring night and day from the chimneys, the rancid oils that streamed from the building into a makeshift pit (the burning fat from the bodies), and the constant comings and goings. Several funeral directors named in the lawsuit said they were reassured by the sterling Lamb name. They would then dump all of the ashes together in huge barrels. But two years later, 34 of the original charges were reinstated by a state appellate court, and in 1995 the Sconces convicted with ten counts between them of unlawfully authorizing the removal of eyes, hearts, lungs, and brains from bodies prior to cremation, reported the Los Angeles Times. Sconces thugs had also gone after Ron Hast and his partner Stephen Nimz the year before at their home in the Hollywood Hills. Others prefer the elegance provided by grave headstones though. 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. Due to various plea deals, Sconce would ultimately serve only two and a half years of his sentence. 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. Later, when investigators from several agencies showed up in Hesperia, only one employee was around and he let them in. Criteria 364 pages,paperback. Frustrated and bored, he and his friends egged houses and beat up homeless drunks for fun. 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. Its not like Sconce knew where or even howto draw the line on depravity at this point. However, funerals do tend to cost a lot of money, which is why people tend to opt for a cheaper option. He knew, he said, the smell of burning bodies. But he was denied entrance to the Altadena facility because he did not have a search warrant. 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. At the Lamb Family Funeral Home, Laurieanne was the kindly, motherly face of Davids morbid scheme. And, with everything wrapped up in a semi-legal bow, David embarked on his next venture: scooping out eyes, hearts, and brains from the deceased and selling them to researchers throughout the country, having his mom forge the signatures of the next of kin on declaration forms, and making a tidy sum on the side. 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. MISSOULA, Mont. 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.. 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. 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. 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 floors were laid with new wood and a kitchen was added, with white granite countertops, a subzero fridge, and a wine cooler. This nightmare was finally over, right?!? Belgrade, Kragujevac) Enquiry type Country. 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. 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. As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. Good evening, and welcome to another episode of Lawyers & Liquor Presents Freaky Friday. Dont tell me I dont know what burning bodies smell like! the man had reportedly yelled. On November 23, 1986, the crematorium caught fire after two employees tried to break the company record by putting nineteenbodies in each furnace. In the 1980s, cremations were just coming into vogue as an inexpensive option for the funeral of a loved one. Obituaries. 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. David Sconce originally wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps and become a football player. 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. Perhaps, Gill said. Because Grandpa had no eyes. 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. The case involves the Lamb Funeral Home, was founded in 1929 by Mrs. Sconce's grandfather; Coastal Cremations Inc., of which David Sconce was president, and Coastal International Eye and Tissue Bank. 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. 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.. 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). I was at the ovens at Auschwitz! Wentworth, Wales, and investigators from Californias Cemetery and Funeral Boards drove over to Oscar Ceramics to investigate. It is used, but in great shape. Cue dramatic organ music. 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. David's mother Laurieanne Lamb Sconce and her husband Jerry bought out the family business from her father in 1985. 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. 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. ADD LOCATION (eg. 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. 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. Welcome to Lamb Funeral Homes, with facilities in Greenfield, Fontanelle and Massena, Iowa. David played defense on the Azusa Pacific football team, the Cougars, but they lost game after game, and David soon dropped out of college. 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. He was described as brash and blunt, difficult to get along with, and sometimes more than a little intimidating. The dead body became an incorruptible image of a peaceful afterlife. 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? 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. The risk of getting busted was low on account that California only had two state inspectors overseeing the funeral and cremation industry at the time. David Sconce pleaded guilty to 21 charges of conducting mass cremations, mutilating corpses, and the aforementioned assaults-for-hire. 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. But what really sets this story apart is the thousands of dead bodies involved. 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. Between 1985 and 1986, Coastal Cremations gross income from cremations would top over $1 million. Sconce had bulldozed the front- and backyards of the house before leaving town, but he hadnt completely covered his tracks. 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. 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. His employees called him Little Hitler because of the number of bodies he burned. Atty. 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. It was done without their permission or knowledge. Only much later did police begin looking into the death after David Sconce was heard bragging about poisoning him. So, the fire meant they were out of business, right? What could have been (and should have been) a career-ending calamity was no problem for David Sconce. I dont think so, its a ceramics shop, Wentworth replied. The Lamb Funeral Home building in Pasadena was sold to another funeral home in the mid-1990s; when that venture failed the facility stood vacant for several years. Either those crimes were all unrelated to each other, or that was one hell of a road trip. 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. A proliferation of people and cars had led to the citys signature smog, and gridlock gripped the streets. It was stupid but it was funny, he said. By the time of the Hesperia raid, the Sconces had built a business empire collecting human remains from San Diego to Santa Barbara. What they did is, they tried to corner the market, said Joe Estephan, funeral director of the Cremation Society of California. 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. He had even tried to enlist in the police academy, but failed to get in when the vision test showed him to be colorblind. Perhaps David Sconces most effective legacy in the funeral industry is being the boogeyman; the kind of monster that no funeral home director would ever want to be compared to. Sconce said his words were misinterpreted. The Lamb Funeral Home (the funeral home owned by Sconce) case led to a massive lawsuit that also involved 100 mortuaries that contracted with the funeral home for cremations. What difference does it make? a witness recalled David Sconce saying. The history of funerary practices in America reflect a complex evolution of the relationship between death and money. When you make your funeral plans, choosing a proper funeral home is important. Price . He simply shifted operations to a metal warehouse hed already purchased in Hesperia. David didnt last long in college, dropped out after his teams losing streak started hurting his prospects. Not yet. 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. The sole purpose of the company was to facilitate Davids already-flourishing side gig trafficking organs hed removed from soon-to-be-cremated bodies. 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. Michael Bradbury with the recommendation that David Sconce be prosecuted, a spokesman said. 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. The Lamb Funeral Home in Fontanelle is assisting the family. An unsettling look at the Sconce family from the acclaimed true crime author of Deadly Lessons. Up until the night an Auschwitz survivor had enough. . Lamb Funeral Home ptyi liikekaupan seurauksena Davidin vanhemmille Laurieannelle ja Jerrylle sen jlkeen, kun pariskunta osti hautaustoimiston Lauriannen islt, Lawrencelta. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.. 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.