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His business plan caught on, and business boomed. It is believed that the fire was the result of the bodies being packed in there so tight that it clogged the chimney. After stealing their stereo equipment, he coolly joined them in their pew at church. 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. It was stupid but it was funny, he said. George Deukmejian at the end of the summer session. In one case, according to prosecutors, survivors were prevented from viewing their loved ones body because the eyes had already been taken. But the ovens were old, accidents happened, and no investigation began. Traditionally, Cemetery Board investigators have spent more time looking at audits than on enforcement, Gill said. by Caleb Wilde in Aggregate Death. 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 Sweden, they send you a thank-you text when they use your blood. - 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. 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. Jerry Sconce told him to put in 3 1/2 to 5 pounds of ash if the deceased was a female and 5 to 7 pounds for a male, Dame said. 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. In 1974, as a freshman planning to major in business, he robbed a former girlfriends house twicethe second time on Christmas Eve, while she was at church with her familyas revenge for breaking up with him. The dead body became an incorruptible image of a peaceful afterlife. Compromise is the language of the devil, Bruce Lamb said. 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. Presumably, their concerts were strictly dance-free, Many interesting behind-the-scenes bits have happened during the 20 years of telling tales about our favorite trailer-park residents, The assailant couldnt steal her good mood. Although he began his cremations in mid-1982, he didnt start his business on paper until 1984, doubling the number of bodies he cremated each year. even beating the immediate family to the funeral home door. 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. Sconce told locals he ran a ceramics studio, and claimed he was making tiles for space shuttles for NASA under a company he called Oscar Ceramics. 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. At the time, the charges wouldnt stick because three toxicologists couldnt agree that oleander was the cause of death. In California at the time, and elsewhere, it was illegal to remove things from corpses. As profits grew, so did Davids sick ego. In court, it was revealed that over a three-month period, they had sold 136 brains (at about $80 each), 145 hearts ($95 each), and 100 lungs ($60 each) for use in medical schools. 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. 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. Sconce himself served 5 years before being released. This was especially true in Southern California, he said, where price competitiveness in low-cost cremation was fierce.. Yet authorities were stymiedattempts at inspections were rebuffed by the lack of a warrant when the funeral board came out to visit. On August 30, 1989, Sconce pled guilty to 21 counts in the Lamb Funeral Home case, which involved charges of mishandling of human remains. 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. In 2006, Sconce violated his probation by selling forged bus tickets in Arizona, moving to Montana without permission, and stealing/pawning a neighbors rifle. In 1994, he was found guilty of selling fake bus tickets in Arizona. 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. 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. His tale of deception, greed, and complete disregard for tradition, decency, and even the law is disgraceful. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz, the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled. He was a nasty, horrible individual to have any interaction with.. Whilst cremation is definitely becoming more popular after people pass away, funerals still remain the traditional option for many people. Up until the night an Auschwitz survivor had enough. His company, Coastal Cremations Inc., would advertise itself to funeral homes in Los Angeles that didnt have access to a crematorium. Sconce operated the Lamb Funeral Home with his wife, Laurieanne Lamb Sconce. Can there be a better endorsement? 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. Honestly, if it werent for one Holocaust survivors sense memory and a call to the Air Quality Control hotline, theres no telling how much longer and further David Sconce wouldve taken this scam. We would like to get out of the Lamb Funeral Home business, Bruce Lamb said. Perhaps, Gill said. That morning, employee John Hallinan said, he and another worker loaded 38 bodies into the two furnaces, each measuring 3.5 feet high by 4 feet wide by 8 feet long. . Either those crimes were all unrelated to each other, or that was one hell of a road trip. Their conclusion so far is that large transgressions begin with small concessions. Coastal Cremations charged other mortuaries only $55 per cremation and sought business widely as the use of cremation boomed in California. 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. The ashes are then removed and strained to remove large pieces of bone, medical pins, etc. 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. As the Sconces awaited arraignment, the police made another morbid discovery. The autopsy report found traces of the heart medication digoxin in his bloodstream, only Waters was not on any heart medication. A proliferation of people and cars had led to the citys signature smog, and gridlock gripped the streets. LOS ANGELES (AP) -- David Wayne Sconce's past life as a mortician has come back to haunt him decades after he gained notoriety for stealing body parts from corpses and plotting to kill a funeral business rival. Davids parents, Jerry and Laurieanne Lamb Sconce, were convicted in 1995 on ten counts each of unlawfully authorizing the removal of eyes, hearts, lungs, and brains from bodies prior to cremation. They were each sentenced to three years and eight months in prison, and were left penniless after settling a $15.4 million lawsuit from the victims families. He said the full message was, Lewis will die of AIDS.. David wasnt too excited about embalming school, but he did see an opportunity to make money in the cremation business. 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. Fantastic. Twenty percent of them.. That infamous title belongs to David Wayne Sconce. He was released in 1991. 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. With the help of a lawyer friend, David altered the form to add the word tissues before the word pacemaker in the authorization form, letting families believe they were only authorizing him to remove any tissue necessary to remove the pacemaker. On so many levels, David Sconces story is one that deathcare professionals dont like to hear. (And lest you think stuff like this was confined to the barbaric past, uh, we have bad news. But they had aimed at Nimzs glass eye, foiling the plot, and at least one of Sconces associates later pleaded guilty to assault. by Caleb Wilde in Aggregate Death. 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. Ode to the Professional Mourner. Hallinan said he had to break the leg of one body to get it in and that it might have blocked up the chimney, starting the blaze. 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. Death Facts: Part 72. Sconce said his words were misinterpreted. Slumber chambers were available for families to rest in, if they so chose. Not yet. There have been three books published on the Lamb Funeral Home scandal and I have all of them. 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 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. 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. But thats maybe not that surprising for a team that used nepotism as a recruitment tool. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Others prefer the elegance provided by grave headstones though. Every person should get the burial they want, so money can be raised online to help with this. 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. Desperate for a job after leaving school, David found work as a dealer in a casino and as an usher at a hockey stadium. 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. A former employee testified that Sconce used a flathead screwdriver to pry open jaws to get to the gold fillings, a process he called making the pliers sing and popping chops. Sconce sold this gold to a company called Gold, Gold, Goldhelmed by one of his friendsnetting upwards of $6,000 a month. Cindy testified she worked for her father, Frank Strunk, at his business, the Cremation Society of California (CSC). Instead, the ashes were scattered in a vacant lot in the foothills. And two aged ovens. The grisly discoveries on Jan. 20, 1987, have touched off one of the most bizarre scandals in the history of the California funeral industry. The society has 5,000 members, who pay the society to arrange their cremations. They were, for lack of a better term, working in bulk. Well spare you from doing the math. 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. A double-oven structure built in 1895, it was known among funeral directors as the oldest crematorium west of the Mississippi. The songs maudlin sax solo wailed through the tinny speakers of corner liquor stores and poured from car stereos. This month, we have a real treat for you, a home cooked meal if you wish, arising from the curious case of Pasadena Californias Lamb Funeral Home and its erstwhile owner, David Sconce, whose attempts to make it exceedingly clear You cant take it with you led to a massive reform of the California mortuary laws and regulations. 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. The remaining ashes are then marked and stored individually. 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. But he recalled that on the night the business was transferred to him, several people broke into the offices. Theyre dead.. Price . That was a great step towards preventing another disaster like this from ever happening again, or at the very least ensuring it would be detected long before it could even remotely get this bad. By 1985, Coastal Cremations was burning over 8,000 bodies a year, they only had two furnaces at their location in Altadena, and those ovens were running upwards of 18 hours a day. These acts were done by their son, David, began Laurieannes defense attorney in his opening statement, describing the mass cremations and stealing of gold teeth. 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. Later, when investigators from several agencies showed up in Hesperia, only one employee was around and he let them in. Online condolences may be left to the family at www.lambfuneralhomes.com. I BRN 4U, it read. Braidhill details the twisted greed and blind ambition that drove the founder's son, David Sconce, to mutilate corpses and illegally sell their body parts--including the gold in their teeth.. 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. 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.. did david sconce the crematorium technician of the. 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. In April 1992, five years after their arrest, Laurieanne and Jerry Sconce, now 55 and 58, retired and living penniless in Arizona, walked through the doors of the Pasadena Superior Court to stand trial for their part in the conspiracyin particular, the forging of authorization forms to remove organs from the dead. In 1997, Sconce pleaded guilty to a 1989 charge of soliciting a hit man to murder a potential buyer of a rival funeral home, and was given the unusual sentence of lifetime probation in California. David Sconce originally wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps and become a football player. (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.). As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. Anita is the beloved mother of William Masters II and David Masters, loving sister of Aletha (Cooki) Bernardi and sister-in-law Donna Tomassone. . 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. He even took the test to become a police officer, but was rejected when a vision test determined he was colorblind. 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. For just $55 per body, he was now offering lower prices than every other crematorium in the region, if not the entire country. 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. Somehow, gum made out of tree bark is still softer than Bazooka. They then attacked the man and threw jalapeno sauce and ammonia into his eyes. But under the then-current California regulations, their crimes weremisdemeanors. Sconce, 56, is to be sentenced Monday for a case that could keep him behind bars . 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. Better run your business honestly, because you dont want the media to mention you alongside thatguy! The embalming business boomed. 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. 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. Prosecutors said the crematory was part. No matter how weird you think a story about the funeral business could be, prepare to be surprised and pretty grossed out. 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. Reasonable doubt can be a real dick punch sometimes. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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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. On February 19, 2019, a reader of the paranormal website commented on the blog about Lamb Funeral Home that his or her mother-in-laws body was one of those mistreated by David Sconce. Waters demonstrated his success with flamboyance, appointing his thick fingers with bejeweled rings and draping his neck with gold chains. What they did is, they tried to corner the market, said Joe Estephan, funeral director of the Cremation Society of California. He entered the plea pursuant to an agreement offered by California Superior Court Judge Terry Smerling. Laurieanne had always been her fathers golden child when it came to the care of the those who sought out the Lamb familys services.