david sconce lamb funeral home
In the 1980s, cremations were just coming into vogue as an inexpensive option for the funeral of a loved one. Yet authorities were stymiedattempts at inspections were rebuffed by the lack of a warrant when the funeral board came out to visit. 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. 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. However, funerals can be funded by asking friends and family to donate to an online GoFundMe page that could start raising money to help families cover the funeral costs. 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. Chop Shop - Kathy Braidhill - Google Books The sole purpose of the company was to facilitate Davids already-flourishing side gig trafficking organs hed removed from soon-to-be-cremated bodies. Before we begin, lets get something serious out of the way. somethings not right, he said. Los Angeles in the 1980s was a lush, neon, dusty city. He found embalming school to be boring, and that wasnt where the money was anyway. Sconce himself served 5 years before being released. 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 would keep a large jar in the preparation room and, with a pair of pliers, yank gold fillings from the teeth of the deceased, dropping them in the jar and, once it was full, taking it to a jeweller he knew who was willing to overlook the situation in return for a steady supply of gold at a discount. Families were invited to rest as needed as he and his staff moved throughout the home clad in black, passing condolences and caring for both the bereaved and the bereft of life with compassion and dignity. 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. It was time for him to learn a trade, they believed, and what better business than that of the dead? Well, for one, Sconce had no reason to fear any serious repercussions. A respected industry family is tangled in a ghoulish, still-unfolding tale of organ theft and, perhaps, homicide. 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. They were the owners of funeral homeand organ harvesters. 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 is a great book for funeral collectors. Bear in mind that the inside of these furnaces were only slightly larger than a phone booth, and the world record for the number of livepeople stuffed into one of those is only fourteen. He spread rumors that the Sconces were cremating more than one body at a time, according to Richard Gray, who runs Aftercare Funeral Service in Van Nuys. Theyre dead.. Sconce said his words were misinterpreted. 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. And if that wasnt enough to supplement Davids lifestyle, there was always the gold jar. When Dan Fritschie isnt reminding everyone that monsters still exist in this world, he can occasionally be seen performing stand-up comedy somewhere. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. 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. The cost? His business plan was simple enough: Sconce would obtain a license from the Department of Health to operate a crematorium. 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. 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. David Sconce, horoscope for birth date 27 March 1956, born in Santa Belgrade, Kragujevac) Enquiry type Country. People v. Sconce (1991) :: :: California Court of Appeal Decisions But, as if the organ theft and filling sales werent enough, there was yet another black mark to discuss. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!. 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. The Sad, Sordid Saga of Criminal Cremator David Sconce They say they do not believe all of the accusations, but they admit that there is too much evidence to deny something went very wrong at the funeral home. So, the fire meant they were out of business, right? At 300 pounds, the 24-year-old was considered morbidly obese. Show Filters Close Filters Close Map. The $15.5 million suit in 1991 involved 20,000 relatives of people cremated at the funeral home. Lamb Funeral Home | 3911 Lafayette Rd | Hopkinsville, KY 42240 | Tel: 1-270-889-9393 | | Lamb Funeral Home | 3911 Lafayette Rd | Hopkinsville, KY 42240 | Tel: 1-270-889-9393 | Fax: 1-270-886-5262 | Home. Homes for rent in Nadezhda Sofia City | Srbija-nekretnine This led the state to charge Sconce with poisoning Waters the following year, but those charges were dropped after multiple experts failed to agree on whether or not oleander was actually present in Waters system. For just $55 per body, he was now offering lower prices than every other crematorium in the region, if not the entire country. Wentworth was still skeptical when he drove out to Oscar Ceramics and opened one of the massive brick furnaces. David sconce lamb funeral home. Couple Blame Son in Funeral Home A573819 (the funeral home case). 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. As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. Thats the way it was supposed to be done. 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. The Lamb Family Funeral Home still stands on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Estephan said he never had any run-ins with David Sconce. He even took the test to become a police officer, but was rejected when a vision test determined he was colorblind. In Davids first year in the operation, cremations went up nearly 1,000%, from 194 to 1,675. (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 Ventura County coroners office re-examined tissues saved from the original autopsy of Waters and changed the cause of death to poisoning by oleander, a common plant in California. Sconces employees were cremating anywhere from five to eighteen bodies at a time and thats perfurnace. 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. Prosecutors said the crematory was part of the family-owned Lamb Funeral Home in nearby Pasadena. 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. 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. 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. Blake Lamb Funeral Home/Lisle. 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. But David lacked the compassion and the charisma necessary to work with bereaved people. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. David Sconce had hundred of bodies, though. Michael Bradbury with the recommendation that David Sconce be prosecuted, a spokesman said. Just the best television + film hand-picked from around the globe. But he was denied entrance to the Altadena facility because he did not have a search warrant. 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. The Mortician and the Murderer | Topic No algorithms. 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. 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. A crowbar cracked open sternums in order to access organs. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 embalming business boomed. 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. But then the man said, Dont tell me theyre not burning bodies. 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. That infamous title belongs to David Wayne Sconce. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. Well spare you from doing the math. Lamb served as president of the state Funeral Directors Assn. 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. However, funerals do tend to cost a lot of money, which is why people tend to opt for a cheaper option. Charged with four felonies, he was extradited to California, and sentenced to 25 years to life. 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. He was sentenced to five years in prison and released in 1991 after serving two and a half years. 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. In 2006, Sconce violated his probation by selling forged bus tickets in Arizona, moving to Montana without permission, and stealing/pawning a neighbors rifle. All the work of a ruthless mortician who would stop at nothing to corner the market on death in the City of Angels. David Wayne Sconce, 56, made headlines in the late 1980s when he pleaded guilty to the gruesome charges of commingling bodies and taking gold from the dead. Frustrated and bored, he and his friends egged houses and beat up homeless drunks for fun. 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. But what really sets this story apart is the thousands of dead bodies involved. It was horrific, says Jay Brown. After being extradited back to California, he was sentenced to 25 to life and will be eligible for parole in 2022, just in time to appear on a new show were pitching called Where Are They Now? 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. 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. 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. Better run your business honestly, because you dont want the media to mention you alongside thatguy! 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. The ovens went from barely used to running for upwards of 18 hours a day to handle the load of up to a hundred bodies in storage, awaiting their final disposition in David Sconces flames. 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. For more information please contact your local David Funeral Home location or call toll free 1-888-806-6336. 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. 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. Others prefer the elegance provided by grave headstones though. 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. Somehow, gum made out of tree bark is still softer than Bazooka. What curse was placed on the O'Brien family that would give them a son with a webbed foot? 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. Six law firms, including Melvin Bellis in San Francisco, have filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of relatives of 16,000 decedents, accusing 100 mortuaries of sending bodies to the Sconces despite indications that something was wrong. Business started booming! He was a nasty, horrible individual to have any interaction with.. Ode to the Professional Mourner. 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. 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. In addition, there was no extra charge for picking up a body and returning the ashes. 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. George Deukmejian at the end of the summer session. 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. And Sconce would charge the funeral homes the low, low price of $55 per body, half of what his competitors offered. 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. Figure in Lamb Funeral Home Case Heads Back to California 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. Fantastic. But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. 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. David Sconce originally wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps and become a football player. A very aggressive market came about, said the Cemetery Boards Gill. A proliferation of people and cars had led to the citys signature smog, and gridlock gripped the streets. 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. Other funeral homes bear some blame for not being more wary of the low-cost, high-volume operation, according to representatives of the families who were shocked to learn what happened to their deceased relatives. All Obituaries. Its not like Sconce knew where or even howto draw the line on depravity at this point. Traditionally, Cemetery Board investigators have spent more time looking at audits than on enforcement, Gill said. A Ghoul is defined by Websters dictionary as a legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses. David Sconce certainly fit that definition. The autopsy report found traces of the heart medication digoxin in his bloodstream, only Waters was not on any heart medication. 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. Price . 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. They would then dump all of the ashes together in huge barrels. No matter how weird you think a story about the funeral business could be, prepare to be surprised and pretty grossed out. 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. It was designed to be elegant but comfortable, filled with sofas and armchairs. 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. . 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. 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. The final chapter in the story opened Nov. 23, 1986, when a fire destroyed the crematory in Altadena. About Us Our Family Our Facility Why Choose Us Testimonials They were, for lack of a better term, working in bulk. He had even tried to enlist in the police academy, but failed to get in when the vision test showed him to be colorblind. Only much later did police begin looking into the death after David Sconce was heard bragging about poisoning him. SCONIERS FUNERAL HOME - Columbus - Legacy.com this is a true crime case that involves illegal body harvesting and the possible murder of timothy waters. He had veered towards his fathers interests more than his mothers, and had played football. Its a true shame that his name has to be connected to the funeral industry at all. Hast recalled that he and a friend were attacked by two men posing as policemen, who threw ammonia and jalapeno sauce in their eyes. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.. 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. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. 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. Former Altadena Crematory Operator Sentenced to Prison 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 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. This was especially true in Southern California, he said, where price competitiveness in low-cost cremation was fierce.. After stealing their stereo equipment, he coolly joined them in their pew at church. 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. A single body goes into the oven. Now, they are facing trial Jan. 23 on 69 criminal counts--including unlawful removal of body parts from human remains, multiple cremation of human remains and assault on rival morticians--that depict their family business as a cut-rate body factory in which the dead were mined like ore deposits. In the outcome, Sconce and his parents were arrested and tried for their crimes. 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. For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. In March of 1985, Careless Whisper by George Michael was a Billboard hit single. About Us. But under the then-current California regulations, their crimes weremisdemeanors. As the director of the funeral home, Laurieanne was the first person to greet guests with a box of tissues and a comforting lilt. On so many levels, David Sconces story is one that deathcare professionals dont like to hear. 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.