david sconce lamb funeral home david sconce lamb funeral home

May 6, 2013, 3:27 PM. He was a little too slick in my opinion, but some people are attracted to that. He found embalming school to be boring, and that wasnt where the money was anyway. In addition to his effective salesmanship. The Lamb Family Funeral Home still stands on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. having his employees rough up three rival morticians. His business plan caught on, and business boomed. 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. 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. 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. 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Just the best television + film hand-picked from around the globe. Yet, somehow Sconce continues to make news 22 years after authorities discovered burning body parts in a ceramics kiln Sconce was using as a makeshift crematory. 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. 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. Two months later, Waters was dead, presumably of a heart attack. No algorithms. David Sconce pleaded guilty to 21 charges of conducting mass cremations, mutilating corpses, and the aforementioned assaults-for-hire. 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. 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. And Sconce would charge the funeral homes the low, low price of $55 per body, half of what his competitors offered. The license was sacrificed in the 1990s, and the building in which such desecrations took place still stands empty in Pasadena, the furnaces forever silent. At the time, brains could sold for about $80, hearts for $95, lungs for $60. He said he never put the ashes from just one body in the urns that were returned to families. Instead, David quietly installed crematory ovens in a suburb, licensing the facility as a ceramics shop. Eyes, brains and gold-filled teeth were sold without the knowledge of relatives, while workers competed to see who could stuff the most bodies into the ancient crematory ovens, according to witnesses. 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. The drawing room chapel of his Spanish mission-style building was filled with comfortable sofas and arm chairs. The Lamb Funeral Home had only two cremation ovens. About Us. Price . Cremations are now highly regulated affairs. 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. 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 A single body goes into the oven. But with only two investigators covering 180 cemeteries and 45 crematories, they had a lot of other work. Sconces thugs had also gone after Ron Hast and his partner Stephen Nimz the year before at their home in the Hollywood Hills. 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. 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. 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. David Wayne Sconce. He would attract business from area funeral homes with his half-priced cremations and make up for the low cost with high volume. Somehow, gum made out of tree bark is still softer than Bazooka. On the morning of Sunday, November 23, 1986, the Altadena crematorium burned down after employees tried cramming in a record 38 bodies at once. Because Grandpa had no eyes. 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.. He said the full message was, Lewis will die of AIDS.. 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. He simply shifted operations to a metal warehouse hed already purchased in Hesperia. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. By 1982, 32 percent of people who died in California were cremated, the highest rate in the nation. While family friends blame David Sconce for the scandal, employees at the preliminary hearing also implicated his parents--who are free pending trial on several dozen counts--in the operation of the tissue bank. 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. It was done without their permission or knowledge. What lay behind the screen was more contentious and corrupt. Home. Area. Theyre dead.. 5-7 pounds of ashes for men, 3-4 pounds of ashes for women. 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). The reason Sconce had escaped notice for so long were the lax laws surrounding the regulation of crematories and the lack of funding for enforcement of those same laws. 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. The society has 5,000 members, who pay the society to arrange their cremations. 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. 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. 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. But David lacked the compassion and the charisma necessary to work with bereaved people. In California at the time, and elsewhere, it was illegal to remove things from corpses. This is a great book for funeral collectors. When the editor of a mortuary industry newsletter started asking too many questions about the companys business practices, Sconce sent two of his boys over to the mans house dressed as policemen. And as for the Lamb Funeral Home, the business built by Charles Lamb in 1929? Now, they are facing trial Jan. 23 on 69 criminal counts--including unlawful removal of body parts from human remains, multiple cremation of human remains and assault on rival morticians--that depict their family business as a cut-rate body factory in which the dead were mined like ore deposits. Cremation was once a niche business. Coastal Cremations Inc., of which David Sconce was president, dealt mainly as a wholesaler to other mortuaries, charging only $55 for each cremation, about half what competitors charged. But he had been in some trouble, notably when he admitted to police that he had broken into the house of a girlfriends parents when she refused to go out with him anymore. Among these things were any body parts not necessary for removal prior to cremation. 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. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. This is probably the worst scandal Ive ever seen, or that I could ever imagine, said John W. Gill, executive officer of Californias Cemetery Board. He had even tried to enlist in the police academy, but failed to get in when the vision test showed him to be colorblind. 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. In fact, the family once appeared in magazine ads, flanking their old reliable Maytag washer while dads football team uniforms flapped in the breeze. Criteria Reorder Criteria. Atty. 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. 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 had veered towards his father's interests more than his mother's, and had played football. After looking into similar poisonings, the Ventura County coroner drafted an official report for the prosecution: If an individual were poisoned with an oleander leaf [or an alcoholic beverage in which an oleander leaf had been soaked], he could die from this, and the findings in the blood of digoxin would be about that of the blood level of Mr. Waters.. But still he set out to corner the market, offering cremations for $55 to other funeral homes and undercutting the prices to the public, sending a fleet of trucks all throughout Southern California to pick up bodies and bring them back to the two creaking, ancient cremation ovens in the back of the family funeral home. A573819 (the funeral home case). Cindy testified she worked for her father, Frank Strunk, at his business, the Cremation Society of California (CSC). The Internet Is Real Life: How A Lawyer Will Track You Down. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.. The songs maudlin sax solo wailed through the tinny speakers of corner liquor stores and poured from car stereos. 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. 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. The cost benefit for Coastal Cremations came with the sheer number of bodies Sconce intended to burn: he would keep the fires going all day, planning to burn multiple bodies at once, sometimes five or six at a timea misdemeanor in the state of California. Bobs never bought Christmas seals he told me he wouldnt know what to feed them. David Sconce had not been raised in the funeral business. Los Angeles in the 1980s was a lush, neon, dusty city. When it came time to collect the ashes for the families, employees were instructed to collect 3.5 to 5 pounds for female remains and 5 to 7 pounds for male. That infamous title belongs to David Wayne Sconce. Yet authorities were stymiedattempts at inspections were rebuffed by the lack of a warrant when the funeral board came out to visit. He was released in 1991. He was described as brash and blunt, difficult to get along with, and sometimes more than a little intimidating. He was sentenced to five years in prison and released in 1991 after serving two and a half years. 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. .more Get A Copy When Abraham Lincoln was shot, his embalmed corpse was beautified by Dr. Thomas Holmes, the father of embalming, and sent on tour across the nation. After graduating from high school in Glendora, he enrolled in Azusa Pacific, the Christian college where his father worked, with the hopes of becoming a football star and playing for the Seattle Seahawks. 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. Better run your business honestly, because you dont want the media to mention you alongside thatguy! Several funeral directors named in the lawsuit said they were reassured by the sterling Lamb name. Obituaries. 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. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth listened incredulously as a caller complained that the noxious black smoke pouring from a nondescript building in the desert carried the sickeningly sweet smell of burning human flesh. For years, thousands of bereaved family members dealing with funeral plans for their loved ones had no idea that a Scorsese movie was taking place behind the scenes. What could have been (and should have been) a career-ending calamity was no problem for David Sconce. 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. . Charged with four felonies, he was extradited to California, and sentenced to 25 years to life. Lamb Funeral Home | 3911 Lafayette Rd | Hopkinsville, KY 42240 | Tel: 1-270-889-9393 | | Lamb Funeral Home | 3911 Lafayette Rd | Hopkinsville, KY 42240 | Tel: 1-270-889-9393 | Fax: 1-270-886-5262 | Home. Criteria At 300 pounds, the 24-year-old was considered morbidly obese. It is believed that the fire was the result of the bodies being packed in there so tight that it clogged the chimney. Twenty percent of them.. . As for David Sconce, he would return again and again to court, with new charges and new parole violations. (No, Seriously. Estephan said he never had any run-ins with David Sconce. In 1985 Estephan and Cindy Strunk (Cindy) were separated. 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. Instead, the ashes were scattered in a vacant lot in the foothills. He denounced his industry as the most in-fighting, back-biting, rumor-spreading, lecherous, treacherous people youd ever want to meet in your life. In July of 1986, David (along with his parents) created a new side business: Coastal International Eye and Tissue Bank. Twenty years ago, only 10% of the dead were cremated. 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. The tissue harvesting itself was, unsurprisingly, not handled delicately. Sensing an opportunity, David Sconce set out to command the market. As profits grew, so did Davids sick ego. Its a true shame that his name has to be connected to the funeral industry at all. But under the then-current California regulations, their crimes weremisdemeanors. It all began with the Lamb Family Funeral Home. Homes for sale: Nadezhda Sofia City - 0 listings Show Filters Close Filters Close Map. and passed on the business to his son, Lawrence, who became president of the Pasadena school board. 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. But, for a time, the business continued as always. Two months after Waters was assaulted, he mysteriously died at his mothers home in Camarillo while he was visiting for Easter. The remaining ashes are then marked and stored individually. 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. It was designed to be elegant but comfortable, filled with sofas and armchairs. They were, for lack of a better term, working in bulk. 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. Sconce himself served 5 years before being released. The autopsy also discovered digoxin, a common heart medication, in Waterss bloodthough Waters didnt take heart medication. David Sconce was a bully, says mortician Jay Brown, who started working at his own familys business, Mountain View Mortuary in Altadena, in 1971, when he was 12. 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. Under the state Health and Safety Code, it is a misdemeanor to cremate more than one body at a time. 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. The Ventura County coroners office re-examined tissues saved from the original autopsy of Waters and changed the cause of death to poisoning by oleander, a common plant in California.