david sconce lamb funeral home
In 1989, defendant and appellant David Wayne Sconce pled guilty to multiple counts relating to the improper handling and disposition of human remains in Los Angeles Superior Court case No. Coke was originally supposed to make you smarter or something. At 300 pounds, the 24-year-old was considered morbidly obese. 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. Los Angeles, 17 things to do in Santa Cruz, the old-school beach town that makes for a charming getaway, 12 reasons why Sycamore Avenue is L.A.s coolest new hangout, K-Pop isnt the only hot ticket in Koreatown how trot is captivating immigrants, Los Angeles is suddenly awash in waterfalls, Officials admit being unprepared for epic mountain blizzard, leaving many trapped and desperate, This is me, this is my face: Actress Mimi Rogers on aging naturally, without cosmetic surgery, The Week in Photos: California exits pandemic emergency amid a winter landscape. Homes for rent: Nadezhda Sofia City - 0 listings. David played defense on the Azusa Pacific football team, the Cougars, but they lost game after game, and David soon dropped out of college. 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. He had veered towards his fathers interests more than his mothers, and had played football. Lamb served as president of the state Funeral Directors Assn. It all began with the Lamb Family Funeral Home, a decades-old business that serviced its clientele from a gracious Spanish Revival building on busy Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, bounded by a strip mall on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other. As the director of the funeral home, Laurieanne was the first person to greet guests with a box of tissues and a comforting lilt. Not yet. 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. On August 30, 1989, Sconce pled guilty to 21 counts in the Lamb Funeral Home case, which involved charges of mishandling of human remains. Belgrade, Kragujevac) Enquiry type Country. She loved funeral work, especially the task of beautifying the dead: applying makeup to the waxen skin of the embalmed. For just $55 per body, he was now offering lower prices than every other crematorium in the region, if not the entire country. 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. It was time for him to learn a trade, they believed, and what better business than that of the dead? 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. The Lamb Family Funeral Home still stands on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Prosecutors said the crematory was part of the family-owned Lamb Funeral Home in nearby Pasadena. His dad, Jerry, had played for the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later became the head coach at Azusa Pacific College, where David enrolled in 1974. In 1994, he was found guilty of selling fake bus tickets in Arizona. Just $4,700 a month, a little more than the average cost of a cremation nowadays. Should authorities have uncovered the familys activities sooner than they did? But, for a time, the business continued as always. Welcome To David Funeral Homes. 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. As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. Los Angeles in the 1980s was a lush, neon, dusty city. She thought it was crucial to look your best when you met your maker. 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. His employees called him Little Hitler because of the number of bodies he burned. 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. (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.). . But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. 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. Over the next century, the American funeral industry would upsell grieving families with services such as embalming and makeup, mahogany caskets, expensive headstones, and elaborate funeralsa practice later exposed by journalist and activist Jessica Mitford in her groundbreaking 1963 book, The American Way of Death. 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. 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. On so many levels, David Sconces story is one that deathcare professionals dont like to hear. 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. Several funeral directors named in the lawsuit said they were reassured by the sterling Lamb name. But under the then-current California regulations, their crimes weremisdemeanors. And with this new surge in interest came an opportunity for money, an opportunity that David Sconce sniffed out and latched on todespite the fact the Lamb Funeral Home had only two crematory ovens, and both of them were old and, until now, rarely used. 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. In the 1980s, cremations were just coming into vogue as an inexpensive option for the funeral of a loved one. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!. As if David Sconces special place in hell wasnt already bought and paid for, he found other sick ways to squeeze every nickel out of the corpses. The Lamb Funeral Home had only two cremation ovens. 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.. 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. And Sconce would charge the funeral homes the low, low price of $55 per body, half of what his competitors offered. 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. Dubbed the Cremation King of California by a journalist, David equipped his new Corvette with vanity plates reading I BRN 4 U.. 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. - 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. On the morning of Sunday, November 23, 1986, the Altadena crematorium burned down after employees tried cramming in a record 38 bodies at once. He was a nasty, horrible individual to have any interaction with.. 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. Due to various plea deals, Sconce would ultimately serve only two and a half years of his sentence. MISSOULA, Mont. 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. On occasion, families would request to see the corpse of their beloved grandparents and be denied. His tale of deception, greed, and complete disregard for tradition, decency, and even the law is disgraceful. At the peak of his business in 1986, according to state cemetery board reports, Sconce burned 8,000 bodies a year. 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. He said the full message was, Lewis will die of AIDS.. Sunday, May 29 . I said, I dont think so, its a ceramics shop, the chief later told the Los Angeles Times. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz! Wentworth, Wales, and investigators from Californias Cemetery and Funeral Boards drove over to Oscar Ceramics to investigate. But wait, it somehow gets worse! Charged with four felonies, he was extradited to California, and sentenced to 25 years to life. 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. 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. Price . 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. . Two months after Waters was assaulted, he mysteriously died at his mothers home in Camarillo while he was visiting for Easter. 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. Their conclusion so far is that large transgressions begin with small concessions. In the outcome, Sconce and his parents were arrested and tried for their crimes. But still he set out to corner the market, offering cremations for $55 to other funeral homes and undercutting the prices to the public, sending a fleet of trucks all throughout Southern California to pick up bodies and bring them back to the two creaking, ancient cremation ovens in the back of the family funeral home. His business plan caught on, and business boomed. It all began with the Lamb Family Funeral Home. Making sure your will and testament is in place before you pass away gives you the choice of where youll go after you pass away, and the horrific events that are detailed in this story no longer come to pass thanks to a change in the law. 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 pleaded guilty to 21 charges of conducting mass cremations, mutilating corpses, and the aforementioned assaults-for-hire. But possibly, just possibly, watched over by those denied a final rest. 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. 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. The final chapter in the story opened Nov. 23, 1986, when a fire destroyed the crematory in Altadena. He was described as brash and blunt, difficult to get along with, and sometimes more than a little intimidating. 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. 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. Greg Risling, Associated Press. somethings not right, he said. You're the first one to shed a tear and the last one to leave the post-funeral . 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.