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. 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. For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. For two months, Sconce cremated bodies with diesel fuel in industrial-size ceramic kilns. Sconce burned bodies 24 hours a day, churning out so much black smoke that neighbors routinely called the fire department, thinking the mortuary was on fire. We would like to get out of the Lamb Funeral Home business, Bruce Lamb said. He decorated the interior with couches, chairs, and various other accoutrements to make mourners feel comfortable. And if that wasnt enough to supplement Davids lifestyle, there was always the gold jar. 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.. In the course of her duties at CSC, she met Sconce whose family owned the Lamb Funeral Home (LFH) and the Pasadena Crematorium. Should authorities have uncovered the familys activities sooner than they did? 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 first crematorium in the United States was built in 1876 in Pennsylvania. 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. 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. Depicted by friends of his parents as the mastermind behind the assembly-line cremations, David Sconce is being held without bail. A double-oven structure built in 1895, it was known among funeral directors as the oldest crematorium west of the Mississippi. 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. The mortuaries, in turn, would charge customers anywhere from $265 to $1,000 for cremation services. An unsettling look at the Sconce family from the acclaimed true crime author of Deadly Lessons. His daughter Laurieanne Lamb Sconce began assuming control in the mid-'70s. A burning foot fell out. 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. 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. There have been three books published on the Lamb Funeral Home scandal and I have all of them. Belgrade, Kragujevac) Enquiry type Country. 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. In addition to his effective salesmanship. Sconces employees were cremating anywhere from five to eighteen bodies at a time and thats perfurnace. 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. 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. They pulled out eyeballs, plopping them unceremoniously into Coke cans and paper towels. He would attract business from area funeral homes with his half-priced cremations and make up for the low cost with high volume. On November 23, 1986, the crematorium caught fire after two employees tried to break the company record by putting nineteenbodies in each furnace. Although he was caught, he avoided jail after leading police to the stolen equipment. Welcome To David Funeral Homes. 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. Before we begin, lets get something serious out of the way. On September 1, 1989, Sconce was sentenced to a five-year prison term after pleading guilty to 21 charges, including mutilating corpses, conducting mass cremations, and hiring hit men to attack the competing morticians Ron Hast, his partner Stephen Nimz, and Timothy Waters. Either those crimes were all unrelated to each other, or that was one hell of a road trip. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz! Wentworth, Wales, and investigators from Californias Cemetery and Funeral Boards drove over to Oscar Ceramics to investigate. .more Get A Copy Thirty-six charges had already been dismissed before the trial, and the couple was acquitted of three charges and a mistrial was declared for the other six. Cremations are now highly regulated affairs. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. At 300 pounds, the 24-year-old was considered morbidly obese. 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. 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. The sole purpose of the company was to facilitate Davids already-flourishing side gig trafficking organs hed removed from soon-to-be-cremated bodies. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. However, some people do prefer to be cremated. Another part of his cover story was that they were using the ovens to make heat shield tiles for the Space Shuttle. 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. Sensing an opportunity, David Sconce set out to command the market. 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. Sconce was involved in the. SCONIERS FUNERAL HOME - Columbus Send Flowers Publish an Obituary In any newspaper and Legacy.com (706) 322-0011 836 5TH AVE, Columbus, Georgia , 31901 Visit the Funeral Home's Website. 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. When family members came to pick up the remains of their loved ones, they were handed a box with the ashes of hundreds of people, scooped from the drum and measured out by weight according to the gender of the deceased. His tale of deception, greed, and complete disregard for tradition, decency, and even the law is disgraceful. 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. For many, cremation was becoming a cheaper and more attractive option. 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. But what really sets this story apart is the thousands of dead bodies involved. But they had aimed at Nimzs glass eye, foiling the plot, and at least one of Sconces associates later pleaded guilty to assault. This was especially true in Southern California, he said, where price competitiveness in low-cost cremation was fierce.. But under the then-current California regulations, their crimes weremisdemeanors. 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. Wentworth was still skeptical when he drove out to Oscar Ceramics and opened one of the massive brick furnaces. Best coffee city in the world? A single body goes into the oven. The tissue harvesting itself was, unsurprisingly, not handled delicately. 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. One night in 1987, a survivor of Auschwitz called the fire chief and was adamant that was not a ceramics shop. 8 pages of shocking photographs. 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. Only much later did police begin looking into the death after David Sconce was heard bragging about poisoning him. 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. 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. 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.