Original subtitles

When you first are grieving a loss,

it's really difficult.

This is a time of saying goodbye to your loved one

and doing the best you can for them because you love them and they loved you.

My dad and I were very close.

He was my sweet loving daddy who just, you know,

stroked my head as a child and loved me so much.

He died in September of 1986.

He was taken to the Pasadena Crematory that the Lambs owned.

I trusted that the people would take care of him.

To have that trust be violated is unconscionable.

I received my dad's ashes in a white cardboard box,

still warm to the touch.

When I found out they violated and desecrated my father,

I was shocked, I was devastated.

It was just horrible.

David Sconce, he's just a monster.

He's evil.

Being in funeral service, we cannot bring our work home.

No one wants to talk over dinner about what we did during the day.

We see people in their worst situation.

We see them at the time of death,

and then we see them beyond death into decomposition.

Many people don't want that image.

In fact, we do our best as funeral directors

so that you don't have to see that image.

We embalm, we prepare, we dress, we casket, we cosmetize.

We do everything we possibly can

so that the client family can see their loved one

looking as though there was no pain or trauma.

In today's environment, we don't talk about death.

And those of us in funeral service, day in, day out,

a constant familiarity with death.

For funeral directors, trust is foundational.

It's the most prestigious of responsibilities.

The unfortunate reality is, like any other occupation,

there are some bad apples.

David Sconce had been a student here at Cypress College

and had taken some of the courses in the Mortuary Science program.

The scandal had huge reverberations.

But after all these years,

I don't think he's ever told his story.

Will you get an interview with David?

Are you really?

That would be phenomenal.

Yeah, I'm still in shock from being out of custody.

I can't believe somebody's actually taken an interest

in what I've known for so long.

I'm an open book for you guys.

There ain't... There's nothing you can't ask me.

Okay, going back to the start of it all.

Back when I was a kid,

my grandfather, Lawrence Lamb, owned the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena.

The family would spend all our time at the mortuary.

Even as a little kid,

being around death was not a big deal.

You know, I remember there's no reason to be afraid of anything.

The Lamb Funeral Home was a mortuary

that a lot of people used and trusted.

And even in the mortuary business, they were really well-known as a place

of family and Christian values.

The Lamb family did all of our business.

My grandfather was the first to use them, and that was in 1946.

If you were anyone, you used Lambs.

The Lamb family was an extremely prominent old Pasadena family.

Charles Lamb established his funeral home in the '20s.

He was a very dignified, respected member of the community.

And then, his son, Lawrence Lamb, took over the funeral home around 1950.

I knew Lawrence Lamb. Great guy. Well-respected family.

He managed the business until the 1980s.

His daughter, Laurieanne Lamb, and her husband, Jerry Sconce,

ultimately took over the family business.

And for many years, they operated it perfectly,

until their son, David Sconce, got involved in the family business.

I've had my grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousin, father,

they've all used Lamb, up until... Mother was the last.

When my mother died, I was just in pain.

And of course, I was elected to go up and visit with the Lambs.

I said, "I would like my mother's wedding ring with her."

But the lady I talked to said, "No, don't do it."

She was very adamant

and she said, "No, you would be much happier

and it will give you a lot of pleasure and memories to keep the ring."

And I thought that was odd.

I think she was trying to tell me something that she couldn't tell me.

Later, I realized she was right.

The funeral business,

it's a pretty lucrative business, and it can be.

I mean, it's steady. Everybody dies.

A funeral is, next to buying a house or a car,

the biggest expense that the average American

will ever have.

The questions around how we dispose of the dead

are a driving force in human history.

There's a desire, you know, if not a compulsion,

to commemorate the dead, to do right by the dead.

But for many years, Americans didn't have a funeral industry.

Family members and religious leaders took care of the body themselves.

It was very intimate.

During the Civil War,

the process of embalming takes hold,

and becomes known as the American way of death.

There's a great deal of ambivalence around the emergence of these new figures.

The funeral director, "the mortician," "the undertaker."

These entrepreneurs

who wanted to be understood by the public as professionals.

As people you can trust.

They modeled themselves off of doctors and lawyers,

and dressed the part.

Traditionally, funeral homes are family-run businesses.

It's what we think of as kind of mom-and-pop institutions.

And clearly, it worked.

Funeral service became a multi-billion-dollar business.

So, you see people turn to cremation as a low-cost alternative.

My family was heavily invested in the community in Pasadena.

You know, my mom's parents were loaded.

My mom, she was in the 1954 Rose Parade.

My dad played football in college,

and he was a PE instructor at a high school.

I dreamed of playing football.

I'd played for a while, but all my dreams ended

when I stepped in a gopher hole and tore my knee up.

I was crushed.

One day, my mom and dad called me and they said,

"Your mother's gonna buy the mortuary business from her dad.

"She's not gonna pay any money to do it.

She's just gonna come in there and run it,"

'cause he was getting older.

I never saw myself working in the funeral industry.

But, you know, they said, "Hey, look, there's this place, Cypress College.

Why don't you get your mortuary certification?"

You know, I wasn't interested in counseling families.

I already knew how to embalm from years ago.

Old trade guy taught me when I was about 12.

But at that time, cremation was increasing.

And we had this really old facility

that's run by diesel fuel and gravity, you know.

It was called the Pasadena Crematorium.

And it was up there at Mountain View.

Mountain View Cemetery actually was established in 1882

by my great-great-grandfather.

We have our own cemetery,

funeral home, and crematory.

The Lamb Funeral Home's cremation facility,

the Pasadena Crematorium, was located within our grounds.

It was a separate business right there on our property.

And they only cremated individuals that used the Lamb Funeral Home.

Well, when I started going to the mortuary school,

we got to talking.

It was like, you know, "Where are you guys from,"

or, "What mortuary you work for?"

I would just ask him, I'd say, "Who does your cremations?"

Because most places didn't have a crematory of their own.

"Oh, we send 'em to Grandview.

Oh, we send 'em to Angeles Abbey."

They would have to use their own manpower,

take it to wherever they were getting the case cremated,

spend the money, and have to come all the way back

and pick 'em up.

I go, "Well, what do you get charged?"

"Oh, 250, 300 bucks."

And I thought, "Wow.

We can cremate a whole lot more bodies than we're cremating now."

And I can pick up cremations.

I go, why wouldn't somebody be interested

in having me do their work at a lot lower price?

So, that's what it really started as.

And it took off.

Around 1982 was when David Sconce

started to offer their cremation services out to other funeral homes.

Because David's crematory operation

was right there on our property.

I do recall,

every time that crematory was used,

you could see a little smoke when they started it up.

Maybe it was used two times a week, maybe three times a week.

And then, we started to notice

they were doing 10 cremations a week.

It was in those early days that David Sconce

was the sole owner and operator. He was doing all the work.

He stayed pretty much to his business,

came in, unloaded the cases, did the cremations, and left.

Seemed like a nice fellow.

Every day, in my old Dodge van,

you know, I took the seats out, I'd drive around picking up dead folks.

I had pickups from probably 40, 50 mortuaries

from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

When he started the service, the way he generated business

was he came in and undercut everybody on their price.

My costs for each case...

a case is a body, a case is a dead body...

would have been the cardboard container

and whatever diesel fuel was used for the actual cremation.

The boxes were five bucks each, and the diesel fuel

was probably less than that.

I'd cremate the body,

and then return the ash to the mortuary or scatter at sea.

I charged 55 bucks.

It was a pretty good deal.

So, there was a reason my service business grew,

as it grew pretty much overnight.

I hired these huge guys.

Dave Edwards, Danny Galambos,

and Andre, former football players.

You know, I trained 'em to pick up cases.

Danny Galambos, loudmouth, unibrow, big Hungarian bodybuilder.

Danny's dad, he's an old mob guy

and he ran around with the Russians out in the valley.

I didn't know until after I hired him.

But anyway, Dave Edwards was much brighter and soft-spoken.

Andre came in, he was a friend of one or both of 'em.

Back in the day, I was a poor ex-college football player.

You know, bumming around at my parents' house,

you know, for six months a year, and I needed a job.

My friend David Edwards had started doing deliveries

and pickups for David Sconce in the crematorium,

and they needed somebody to drive the truck three days a week.

So, I started working for David Sconce.

I don't know anything.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do other than pick up the bodies.

I almost threw up the first day driving the truck.

I'm in a 14-foot box truck.

No lift gate, no air.

I had to go into the mortuary, help the guy push the gurney out,

and put the bodies in the back of the truck.

They had been out of the cold room for a while,

so there were odors.

There's no doubt about what it is you're smelling, you know?

The smell is death.

It was real hard.

The whole time, I'm like,

just be cool, you know.

Remember how much money you're making.

And you know, that's how you get through it, right?

Two-hundred-fifty bucks a day.

Once you got back to Pasadena,

the guys there check the paperwork,

check the tags, and then do what they did.

I saw some things that weren't nice.

But that wasn't really my business.

I just drove the truck, you know what I'm saying?

The business was going really good.

I had all these guys picking up cases to be cremated.

Everything went so quickly.

And then, right in the middle of all of it,

I met Barbara.

When I first met David?

He was very big. Big as life.

I was working retail, and he came in.

The first thing I remember was his white blonde hair,

and his massive physique, and the hair on his legs.

I don't know how specific you want me to get,

but he was just like this god to me.

I met Barbara at the mall.

And she's selling suits.

You know when you see somebody and you go in your head, you go,

"Ah, that's the woman that's gonna have my kids"?

Yeah, I really thought that.

So, I had a Black American Express card

and I thought, okay, I'm gonna impress her.

She looks at the card and she looks at me, and she looks at the card again.

So, she real quick writes her phone number down.

Then, we started dating after that.

He was funny. He was fun.

He had a beautiful family.

Jerry had been a football coach.

Laurieanne was very active in her church.

Laurieanne, and Jerry, and David,

and his brother Gary were the all-American family.

They had actually been in an ad for Maytag.

They were the Maytag family.

I was very infatuated, fell in love right away.

The day of the wedding, his grandfather, Lawrence Lamb, came to me and said,

"Are you sure you want to marry him?"

And I said, "Yes, I do. I'm so happy."

And then, Lucile Lamb, his grandma, came to me and said,

"Are you sure you wanna do this?"

His father, Jerry, says to me, "You know, you can back out."

Well, you know, the day of your wedding,

these are things you really don't wanna hear.

Three people ask you if this is exactly what you want to do?

I thought it was very strange,

but I didn't let it stop me.

I wanted to marry him.

I guess right-hand man

with David Sconce is probably what you would call me.

I was always with him.

I always did everything with him,

and I'm the only one that did cremations,

because, you know, I was the only one he trusted to do it.

I was from the north side of Pasadena.

I was a gang member. I was getting high,

having fun, doing stupid stuff, getting in trouble, going to jail.

Never thought of working at a crematorium.

But my cousin got a job working in the cemetery.

He introduced me to David.

I got hired to work there.

I went with Dave to the crematorium.

Dave showed me how it all went.

There was two ovens. Showed me how to load it,

how to close 'em, how to put the burners on.

So, and that was it.

He paid me cash for whatever I did, somewhere around $6,000 a month,

in my early 20s, which was a lot of money.

Being my background of not having the education or skills.

I was taking care of my family for the first time in a long time.

So, you know what I mean, it's like,

whatever he wanted me to do, I was gonna do.

As time went on, David's business seemed to ramp up steadily.

We never saw inside the building. All we saw was the truck coming and going

at all hours of the day and night.

It was like an assembly line.

Now, typically, a funeral home,

when they have a cremation case, will bring the remains

to the crematory in their own vehicle.

That individual is placed in a chamber.

And then, the process of cremation usually takes about two hours.

Because you have to allow the chamber to cool down,

before you can safely remove the cremated remains

of one individual and start cremating another one.

The Pasadena Crematorium had two chambers.

That would mean they could properly do four cremations

in an eight-hour day.

You just sort of had to scratch your head

and try to figure out how they could be unloading

15 and 20 individuals at a time, and then come back

five or six hours later with another 15 or 20.

They must have a pretty efficient way of doing their cremations.

David made everything seem quite normal. Everything.

He'd put like two or three bodies in each oven.

At a time.

I saw what they're doing.

They would break a collarbone, or a leg,

or an arm to get it in a position to be the most compact to fit in the oven.

They had this gaff hook used to move, you know,

sides of beef around.

You know, hooking the bodies under the armpit and dragging 'em in there.

And there was a running competition between David Sconce and Johnny,

on who was able to load the most bodies in the oven at one time.

Whoever had the record, they were proud of it.

So, it wasn't so, like, nasty, or scary, or spooky,

or ugly, or whatever it was, it was just part of the job.

This is just disposing of the rotten meat. The soul is gone anyway.

First thing I thought of was,

how do they know which ashes to put in which box?

And then I realize, oh, fuck, they don't know.

Sure.

Well, back then, because of the multiple cremations,

see, I could cremate one guy in, like, two hours,

or you could put ten of 'em in there and it takes two and a half hours.

So, what would be the difference?

There is none.

Hard-hearted as that sounds, there is none.

Anybody in this business who runs a crematory

can never get all of the ash out of that oven

before they put another body in there to be cremated.

It's a perforated kind of a brick floor,

and there's ash in there from dozens of people.

It's fact, it's how things are.

So, to me, commingling of ash is not a big deal.

I don't put any value in anybody after they're gone and dead,

as they shouldn't in when I'm gone and dead.

That's not a person anymore.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, I worried about, you know,

because like I said, it was a misdemeanor at the time.

And I stupidly justified it by saying,

"Oh, it's a misdemeanor and nobody cares about these people anyway."

Because most of my cases were scatter at sea.

It would show up on the disposition permit.

There's no visitors, there's no viewing, you know?

These relatives didn't want any part of that person back, okay?

I don't understand how they have a difficulty

with someone who's gonna go in the ocean

and be commingled with the other guy who goes in the ocean right after him.

You know, why is that so bad?

It's just not logical, it doesn't make any sense,

and I've never accepted that.

I just haven't.

You know what? There's no difference in anybody's cremated ash.

There's no difference. It's potash and lime.

That's it. A little bit of carb... I mean, it's all the same.

People just gotta be more in control of their emotions,

because that's not your loved one anymore, and it never has been.

Love 'em when they're here. Period.

Nancy and I lived in the same apartment building.

We met at the pool, and we just, we just clicked.

She was very, very good-hearted.

She taught English at Beverly Hills High.

And she loved her job.

I was in the restaurant business.

I worked at Chasen's.

Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.,

Alfred Hitchcock... everybody in show business was there.

We both worked very hard, but we also had a lot of fun together,

and made the most of the short time that we had together.

And then, she started to get really, really sick.

We went to a neurologist, and he told us straight out,

he says, "You've got some tumors in your brain."

I was shocked.

That's an understatement.

And did the best that we could to make her comfortable.

That lasted about a month before she passed.

Devastating.

She was 45 when she passed.

She didn't want to be put in the ground with all the bugs.

So, she wanted to be cremated.

One of our friends had given us the name, Lambs.

It was mentioned to me that it was the biggest and the best.

They just helped me pick out an urn.

We had a farewell get-together on their premises.

We paid our last respect.

It was heartbreaking.

How do I even know the ashes that they gave me was Nancy's ashes?

It could have been anybody.

Or it could have been ten people put in there together.

I didn't know, you know.

Even today, I still never know.

Everything with David was fast, fast, fast.

It was just one thing after another.

Moving, and building, and buying, and business.

And he had so many things on the fire all the time.

He would come home, and he would be on the phone,

watching TV, and reading at the same time.

His brain just never shut down.

David took me to the crematory three times total.

It didn't interest me. I didn't want to be there.

It was just this tiny little house that had a chimney.

I didn't know much about his work.

I just knew that business was going pretty well.

David's parents, Laurieanne and Jerry, were running the funeral home.

But they gave David complete oversight of the crematorium.

And they were very hands-off.

That was David's business.

He was charging so much less per body than anybody else.

It was, you know, it was a no-brainer.

Funeral homes all through the area flocked to him.

David became a real topic of conversation,

and all of a sudden, people started chit-chatting

about the number of cremations that Lamb Funeral Home was doing,

and that that crematory just couldn't handle

the volume of cremations.

"Well, you know, well, how many is he doing?

Is he doing 100 a year or 100 a month?"

Competitors were like, "What the hell," you know?

Just, "How can this be?"

And one of the people who was complaining most vociferously

was a guy named Tim Waters.

Tim Waters was in his early 20s.

He's this huge guy.

He's got these big, meaty hands with rings all over it,

covered in jewelry.

He was a brash kind of guy.

He was a go-getter who had plans to make it in the funeral business.

Tim owned Alpha Society in Burbank,

which was a cremation provider

offering these lower-cost cremation services.

He did not have his own crematorium.

And David Sconce was trying to get Tim's business.

The story was that Tim and David had a meeting.

Tim was a young guy, but he was an intelligent guy.

Now, David's offering to do his cremations very inexpensively.

Tim understood that the only thing

that could make up for that is high volume.

And after that, Tim started telling people

that he didn't trust David.

Tim was stirring things up,

and giving a black eye to David's operation.

I had no idea so many people died every day.

You know, you start tripping and everything,

like, with all these dead bodies around you.

Could've sworn that guy moved.

It could get bad.

Oh, my God, man, this is too much.

We had been married for a little while.

And David came home one day from work with a Styrofoam cup.

And it had "AU" written on the side of the cup.

I didn't even know what "AU" was.

Then, I found him with the cup

sitting on the floor in the garage cracking teeth with a hammer.

He just broke the tooth, grabbed the gold,

put it back in the cup, swept the teeth away.

"AU" means gold.

He sold the gold.

This is normal?

This is not normal. This is not normal.

I just sat there thinking, what world am I in?

What did I do? What did I do?

"Can you do this for me?" And I said, "I don't really want to do that, Dave."

So, he didn't make me do it. He did it himself.

He would have a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.

That's about it.

All the bodies were inspected for gold.

He was making $20,000, $30,000 a month

just from the gold.

Removing gold teeth. Removing gold teeth, okay?

You know, I can't say it wasn't done,

because my employees did it at length.

No, I did it on request a couple of different times.

Family request. Family wanted it back.

"Well, we just want 'em back." Okay. Who knows?

Dave was very free and open with spending money.

You know, he's buying everybody beers.

You know, food, "You want something to eat?"

David Sconce and I were very close. Not only at work, after work,

Throwing balloons at people.

He had this Corvette.

"I BRN 4U" was his license plate.

He's making a joke out of it.

"I own a crematorium and I burn bodies for a living."

Why would you put your business out,

like, on the street like that, for anybody to see?

Okay, there was a lot of money in our house.

We had nice cars, we had boats, we had jet skis.

It was good when it was good. It was very good.

I was working with David.

I had fun. David knew how to have fun.

Once a month we'd fly to Las Vegas, each put 100 bucks into a pot.

The last man left standing got the pot,

and that was our business meeting.

A lot of people were making money in the business.

But not the kind of money David Sconce was making.

So, how was he making it?

Tim Waters was asking questions.

He did his own little digging.

He was talking to other funeral directors.

And supposedly,

Tim was considering writing up a story about David Sconce

for this prominent funeral home magazine, Mortuary Management,

which was run by a guy named Ron Hast.

And Ron and Tim were ready to rock

with some really heavy allegations.

My mother gets a phone call from that magazine.

And she's got tears in her eyes.

You know, my mom would give anything to anybody.

I mean, she worked hard. She counseled families all the time.

She did the hair for all the funerals.

She played the organ for all the services.

She got all the flowers, she did the chapel.

She did everything for that place.

But with how the cremation facility ran,

that was my business.

So, she didn't need some windbag threatening her

with a bad article, you know, making her cry.

And I told her I'd take care of it.

David Sconce approaches us

and says, "Hey, I'm getting a problem from a couple of guys.

You know, I want you guys to go and send 'em a message."

He was impressed with Danny Galambos,

David Edwards, and myself because of our athletic backgrounds.

He liked having guys around him

that were... the perception was, "These are my friends,

"but if you get outta line and if I don't like you,

these guys will fuck you up."

There were business cards that Sconce made up.

He gave us a nickname, Big Men Unlimited.

He thought we were his henchmen.

So, one night, David Edwards, Danny Galambos, and myself

go to Ron Hast's residence.

We, you know, beat him up, rough him up.

You know, it's like, "Don't fuck with me, or you're gonna get more of the same."

Okay.

That one was Danny and another guy,

and I wasn't part of that.

So, I don't know anything about it, other than it happened.

Tim Waters got beat up, and I mean, really beat up.

David's guys showed up at his office late at night.

They came in

and beat the shit out of him.

David Sconce had this idea that,

"If my little operation, my empire of what I've got going

"is threatened, I'm gonna deal with it.

I've got this little mafia-like operation going."

I mean, who gets thugs in this day and age?

Waters was just a mess.

These guys really did a number on him.

And a lot of people believed that would be it.

And Tim, I guess, just wouldn't, you know, shut up.

Two months later...

he was dead.

The story was that he had gone out to eat,

supposedly with David,

and shortly thereafter fell very, very ill.

He died of what was apparently a heart attack.

At 24. Come on.

When I heard that Tim Waters had died...

'Kay. Well, I mean, it's not unexpected.

If you look at a guy who's maybe 350 pounds,

and he's five-foot whatever,

well, yeah, he's gonna have a heart attack, okay?

Waters didn't do anything to me.

I mean, I think I saw him one time in my life.

But other than that, I had no interaction with him.

I never went to lunch with him or whatever, you know.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

When I heard that Tim Waters had died,

you know, in my mind, I'm like,

"Fucking Sconce did that."