**In an effort to do our part regarding public safety and provide families with our services, we at David Funeral Home will abide by all local, state, federal, and public health mandates. But he recalled that on the night the business was transferred to him, several people broke into the offices. 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. In 1985 Estephan and Cindy Strunk (Cindy) were separated. Well spare you from doing the math. Should authorities have uncovered the familys activities sooner than they did? Theyre dead.. 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 had not been raised in the funeral business. As the business grew, rumors spread through the industry. All Obituaries. There was no information about how much more money they had made selling parts on the black market, because people in those circles arent that keen on paper trails. His company, Coastal Cremations Inc., would advertise itself to funeral homes in Los Angeles that didnt have access to a crematorium. But he was denied entrance to the Altadena facility because he did not have a search warrant. Operating under a license for a ceramics factory, David cremated bodies in the facilitys massive brick kilns until the fire chiefs gruesome discovery in January 1987. And then his employees broke the record, fitting 38 bodies in a single ovenbreaking the leg of one, blocking the chimney, and setting the premises aflame. David wasnt too excited about embalming school, but he did see an opportunity to make money in the cremation business. Between 1985 and 1986, Coastal Cremations gross income from cremations would top over $1 million. I could see smoke from a mile and a half away.. 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. 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. Ode to the Professional Mourner. At 300 pounds, the 24-year-old was considered morbidly obese. 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. It would pass to his two grandsons, who gamely kept it afloat for a year before deciding, as they had years before, that the funeral business was not for them. 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. The Lamb Family Funeral Home still stands on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Prosecutors said the crematory was part. But cremation alone wasnt enough to float the business, and other funeral homes began to wonder how David could undercut the competition by so much and not lose moneyand the answer is simple. 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. Better run your business honestly, because you dont want the media to mention you alongside thatguy! 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. 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. The ashes are then removed and strained to remove large pieces of bone, medical pins, etc. Its not like Sconce knew where or even howto draw the line on depravity at this point. They would then dump all of the ashes together in huge barrels. By 1913, when the Cremation Association of America was founded, there were 52 crematoriums across the nation, including the Pasadena Crematorium, which would later be purchased by the Lamb family. He is currently incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, and is eligible for parole in 2022. In fact, the family once appeared in magazine ads, flanking their old reliable Maytag washer while dads football team uniforms flapped in the breeze. 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. Belgrade, Kragujevac) Enquiry type Country. In 2006, Sconce violated his probation by selling forged bus tickets in Arizona, moving to Montana without permission, and stealing/pawning a neighbors rifle. 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. Under the state Health and Safety Code, it is a misdemeanor to cremate more than one body at a time. 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. Cindy testified she worked for her father, Frank Strunk, at his business, the Cremation Society of California (CSC). by Caleb Wilde in Aggregate Death. 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 songs maudlin sax solo wailed through the tinny speakers of corner liquor stores and poured from car stereos. 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. The ovens are cleaned, and the process can begin again. Michael Bradbury with the recommendation that David Sconce be prosecuted, a spokesman said. 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. He even took the test to become a police officer, but was rejected when a vision test determined he was colorblind. 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. 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. He entered the plea pursuant to an agreement offered by California Superior Court Judge Terry Smerling. I was driving home from church and the fire department was there, explains Brown. . He was sentenced to five years in prison and released in 1991 after serving two and a half years. An unsettling look at the Sconce family from the acclaimed true crime author of Deadly Lessons. For many, cremation was becoming a cheaper and more attractive option. 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. They pulled out eyeballs, plopping them unceremoniously into Coke cans and paper towels. This is a great book for funeral collectors. The remaining ashes are then marked and stored individually. He had veered towards his father's interests more than his mother's, and had played football. Today, Laurieanne Sconces two brothers, Kirk and Bruce Lamb, are attempting to restore the business to its original purpose as a quiet family funeral home. 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. Charles F. Lamb, then-president of the California Funeral Directors Association, oversaw the building of the structure in 1929. 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. On November 23, 1986, the crematorium caught fire after two employees tried to break the company record by putting nineteenbodies in each furnace. 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. Obsessed with fellow morticians, whom he regarded as business rivals, Sconce assembled a team of beefcake lackeys that he met at LA Kings hockey gamesa group of ex-football players he called his boys. They were tasked with traveling throughout Southern California, ferrying bodies to the crematorium, running errands, and roughing up other morticians to discourage them from competing with Sconces 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. 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. 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. Gill said the state investigator in Southern California was suspicious of the Sconce crematory and began trying to find out how the cremations were being done. He denounced his industry as the most in-fighting, back-biting, rumor-spreading, lecherous, treacherous people youd ever want to meet in your life. However, theres something else that can mimic digoxin in the bloodstream: oleander, one of the most common and most poisonous trees in Southern California. 7 years ago. 5-7 pounds of ashes for men, 3-4 pounds of ashes for women. 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. For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. Hissentence also carried the caveat of lifetime probation, which he violated often in multiple ways, including selling forged bus tickets in Arizona and attempting to pawn a stolen rifle in Montana (he and his parents were penniless after settling a $15.4 million dollar lawsuit out of court in 1992). 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. 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. On so many levels, David Sconces story is one that deathcare professionals dont like to hear. 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. It is used, but in great shape. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. He simply shifted operations to a metal warehouse hed already purchased in Hesperia. 8 pages of shocking photographs. 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. 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. 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. The bank, run out of the Pasadena funeral home, in a three-month period sold 136 brains, 145 hearts and 100 lungs to a North Carolina firm supplying organs for research to medical schools, according to records presented at the preliminary hearing. 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. Waters demonstrated his success with flamboyance, appointing his thick fingers with bejeweled rings and draping his neck with gold chains. somethings not right, he said. 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. What the authorities found when they raided the warehouse in January 1987 was beyond imagination: outside, a sludge pit of liquid human waste, mingled with dirt; inside, gallon cans filled with human ash, bone, and partially cremated body parts. 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. She thought it was crucial to look your best when you met your maker. 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. The history of funerary practices in America reflect a complex evolution of the relationship between death and money. 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. 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. 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. 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. The final chapter in the story opened Nov. 23, 1986, when a fire destroyed the crematory in Altadena. 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. 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. A double-oven structure built in 1895, it was known among funeral directors as the oldest crematorium west of the Mississippi. 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. It was horrific, says Jay Brown. George Deukmejian at the end of the summer session. 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. Instead, the ashes were scattered in a vacant lot in the foothills. Then Charles retired, leaving the business to his son, Lawrence, who would then pass it on to his daughter Laurieanne and her husband. He was a nasty, horrible individual to have any interaction with.. 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. . A burning foot fell out. Two months later, Waters was dead, presumably of a heart attack. 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. 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. 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. His daughter Laurieanne Lamb Sconce began assuming control in the mid-'70s. 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. But with only two investigators covering 180 cemeteries and 45 crematories, they had a lot of other work. A respected industry family is tangled in a ghoulish, still-unfolding tale of organ theft and, perhaps, homicide. They were, for lack of a better term, working in bulk. Can there be a better endorsement? 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. 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. 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. At the warehouse, the soles of their shoes stuck to floors slick with human fluids, and when they pried open one of the hinged doors of Sconces kilns, the remains of a human foot fell out, engulfed in flames. After dropping out of college, David spent a few years working various jobs and mostly being a shiftless layabout. Sunday, May 29 . Charged with four felonies, he was extradited to California, and sentenced to 25 years to life. They said David would lift and carry cardboard-enclosed corpses around the facility for exercise, use a crowbar to crack open sternums, and store eyeballs in used cola cans. They then attacked the man and threw jalapeno sauce and ammonia into his eyes. The dead body became an incorruptible image of a peaceful afterlife. Criteria Reorder Criteria. 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. For just $55 per body, he was now offering lower prices than every other crematorium in the region, if not the entire country. He was released in 1991. What curse was placed on the O'Brien family that would give them a son with a webbed foot? It was stupid but it was funny, he said. 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. Price . Instead, David quietly installed crematory ovens in a suburb, licensing the facility as a ceramics shop. 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. The sole purpose of the company was to facilitate Davids already-flourishing side gig trafficking organs hed removed from soon-to-be-cremated bodies. Dont tell me I dont know what burning bodies smell like! the man had reportedly yelled. However, some people do prefer to be cremated. 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. In Sweden, they send you a thank-you text when they use your blood. 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. 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. So, the fire meant they were out of business, right? 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. 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. He said he never put the ashes from just one body in the urns that were returned to families. Before we begin, lets get something serious out of the way. 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. Several funeral directors named in the lawsuit said they were reassured by the sterling Lamb name. Prosecutors said the crematory was part of the family-owned Lamb Funeral Home in nearby Pasadena.

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