They would then dump all of the ashes together in huge barrels. ADD LOCATION (eg. Welcome to Lamb Funeral Homes, with facilities in Greenfield, Fontanelle and Massena, Iowa. It was done without their permission or knowledge. How in the world did David Sconce manage to get away with this for so long? In 1985 Estephan and Cindy Strunk (Cindy) were separated. The grisly discoveries on Jan. 20, 1987, have touched off one of the most bizarre scandals in the history of the California funeral industry. 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. 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. If somebody offers you a new Ford for $8,000 and Im paying $16,000 . He denounced his industry as the most in-fighting, back-biting, rumor-spreading, lecherous, treacherous people youd ever want to meet in your life. Twenty percent of them.. 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. 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. It was stupid but it was funny, he said. . He even used such colorful terms for this act as popping chops and making the pliers sing. Hed then sell the gold to a jeweler buddy of his, which reportedly netted him an additional $6,000 a month. In March of 1985, Careless Whisper by George Michael was a Billboard hit single. 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. You're the first one to shed a tear and the last one to leave the post-funeral . Can there be a better endorsement? A single body goes into the oven. In 1982, encouraged by Jerry and Laurieanne, the 26-year-old decided to obtain his embalming license and join the family business. At the time Mitfords book was first published, the average bill from an undertaker was $750 ($6,300 today); by 1991, when the book was updated and revised, the cost had risen to $7,800 (now $14,500). 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. 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. As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. Sconce was involved in the. 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. Depicted by friends of his parents as the mastermind behind the assembly-line cremations, David Sconce is being held without bail. One of the attackers later pleaded guilty to the assault and testified that Sconce paid him to do it, but theres no record of him explaining what the hell kind of message he was trying to send with the jalapeno sauce. Better run your business honestly, because you dont want the media to mention you alongside thatguy! 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. Coke was originally supposed to make you smarter or something. In the outcome, Sconce and his parents were arrested and tried for their crimes. And as for the Lamb Funeral Home, the business built by Charles Lamb in 1929? Lamb served as president of the state Funeral Directors Assn. That broke the previous record of 18 bodies in one furnace, the employee said. Kathy Braidhill, then a crime reporter for the Pasadena Star-News, followed the story of David Sconces crimes, and wrote a 1993 book, Chop Shop, about his cremation scheme. Either those crimes were all unrelated to each other, or that was one hell of a road trip. His tale of deception, greed, and complete disregard for tradition, decency, and even the law is disgraceful. Only much later did police begin looking into the death after David Sconce was heard bragging about poisoning him. On November 23, 1986, the nearly century-old facility burned to the ground after Davids employees somehow shoved 19 bodies into each of the ovens at once. Lamb Funeral Home ptyi liikekaupan seurauksena Davidin vanhemmille Laurieannelle ja Jerrylle sen jlkeen, kun pariskunta osti hautaustoimiston Lauriannen islt, Lawrencelta. But, as if the organ theft and filling sales werent enough, there was yet another black mark to discuss. An unsettling look at the Sconce family from the acclaimed true crime author of Deadly Lessons. There have been three books published on the Lamb Funeral Home scandal and I have all of them. Whilst cremation is definitely becoming more popular after people pass away, funerals still remain the traditional option for many people. Sconces thugs had also gone after Ron Hast and his partner Stephen Nimz the year before at their home in the Hollywood Hills. A very aggressive market came about, said the Cemetery Boards Gill. 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. 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. 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. 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. He was released in 1991. She gradually brought her husband Jerry into the business, and their son David, age 26, in 1982, when he became manager of a branch, the Pasadena Crematorium. For two months, Sconce cremated bodies with diesel fuel in industrial-size ceramic kilns. The autopsy report found traces of the heart medication digoxin in his bloodstream, only Waters was not on any heart medication. Reasonable doubt can be a real dick punch sometimes. by Caleb Wilde in Aggregate Death. 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 thats maybe not that surprising for a team that used nepotism as a recruitment tool. Sconce operated the Lamb Funeral Home with his wife, Laurieanne Lamb Sconce. . The dead body became an incorruptible image of a peaceful afterlife. Frustrated and bored, he and his friends egged houses and beat up homeless drunks for fun. Waters demonstrated his success with flamboyance, appointing his thick fingers with bejeweled rings and draping his neck with gold chains. Up until the night an Auschwitz survivor had enough. There was jovial Jerry Sconce, 55, the Bible college football coach, his church organist wife, Laurieanne Lamb Sconce, 52, and their son David, 32, a charming ex-football player who had plans to grab a big piece of Californias booming cremation industry. 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). 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. David didnt last long in college, dropped out after his teams losing streak started hurting his prospects. Soon, the two ovens at the family crematory in Altadena, the oldest cremation furnaces west of the Mississippi, were running 16 to 18 hours a day. In the 1980s, cremations were just coming into vogue as an inexpensive option for the funeral of a loved one. 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. Perhaps, Gill said. It is used, but in great shape. 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. 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. 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 information please contact your local David Funeral Home location or call toll free 1-888-806-6336. 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. But he was denied entrance to the Altadena facility because he did not have a search warrant. Later, Davids cash-paid employees would tell horrific tales of Little Hitlers (as they called him) joy at popping chops, his term for extracting gold teeth, which hed sell to a local jeweler for an extra $6,000 each month. Sunday, May 29 . 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. He even took the test to become a police officer, but was rejected when a vision test determined he was colorblind. A former Pasadena mortician is leaving Montana for California, where he was being sought for violating conditions of his lifetime parole, the Missoulian newspaper reported. Skilled in consoling the grief-stricken, she had customers sign complicated and sometimes forged documents which enabled her son to mine the bodies of their recently deceased for organs, which could then be sold to medical schools and research centers. To many who knew him, David Sconce was the model youth, a one-time defensive back for his father at Azusa-Pacific with a surfers wave of blond hair. 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. What difference does it make? a witness recalled David Sconce saying. This was an indelicate, bone-shattering operation that David allegedly referred to as making the pliers sing.. In 1985, David, Laurieanne, and Jerry set up Coastal International Eye and Tissue Bank, in order to help their son traffic organs; later, in court, former employees revealed that, over a three-month period between 1985 and 1986, the Lambs had sold 136 brains, 145 hearts, and 100 lungs to a firm supplying organs for research to medical schools. In 2006, Sconce violated his probation by selling forged bus tickets in Arizona, moving to Montana without permission, and stealing/pawning a neighbors rifle. One night in 1987, a survivor of Auschwitz called the fire chief and was adamant that was not a ceramics shop. 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. After burning, cremains were sifted together according to weight in what was called the ash palace, a dusty room that was also filled with trash cans full of human fat and spare dental parts such as bridges or dentures. MISSOULA, Mont. **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. The history of funerary practices in America reflect a complex evolution of the relationship between death and money. We would like to get out of the Lamb Funeral Home business, Bruce Lamb said. Should authorities have uncovered the familys activities sooner than they did? What lay behind the screen was more contentious and corrupt. 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. 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. After Sconce took what he wanted from cadavers, he overloaded the old Altadena crematorium, whose stone, single-body retorts had been built at the turn of the century. For sixty years, families in Southern California trusted the Sconce-owned Lamb Funeral Home with their loved ones' remains. They pulled out eyeballs, plopping them unceremoniously into Coke cans and paper towels. 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. 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. Featured on ABC-TV's Nightline. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.. The sole purpose of the company was to facilitate Davids already-flourishing side gig trafficking organs hed removed from soon-to-be-cremated bodies. Charles F. Lamb, then-president of the California Funeral Directors Association, oversaw the building of the structure in 1929. Not yet. 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. A burning foot fell out. But, for a time, the business continued as always. Scattered around the interior, caked black with the accumulated bodily grime from the brick ovens, were trash cans brimming with human ashes and prosthetic devices. Another part of his cover story was that they were using the ovens to make heat shield tiles for the Space Shuttle.