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ADD LOCATION (eg. Cindy testified she worked for her father, Frank Strunk, at his business, the Cremation Society of California (CSC). But the war had young men dying far from home, and families of dead Union soldiers begged the army to embalm their sons and send them hundreds of miles north. For just $55 per body, he was now offering lower prices than every other crematorium in the region, if not the entire country. 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. The $15.5 million suit in 1991 involved 20,000 relatives of people cremated at the funeral home. For more information please contact your local David Funeral Home location or call toll free 1-888-806-6336. 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. Twenty percent of them.. 364 pages,paperback. Price . 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. 7 years ago. Obituaries. (No, Seriously. At the Lamb Family Funeral Home, Laurieanne was the kindly, motherly face of Davids morbid scheme. 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. The drawing room chapel of his Spanish mission-style building was filled with comfortable sofas and arm chairs. Hast recalled that he and a friend were attacked by two men posing as policemen, who threw ammonia and jalapeno sauce in their eyes. 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. The embalming business boomed. 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. 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. 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. As the business grew, rumors spread through the industry. Dont tell me I dont know what burning bodies smell like! the man had reportedly yelled. 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. 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. 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. For two months, Sconce cremated bodies with diesel fuel in industrial-size ceramic kilns. By 1985, the man who journalist Ken Englade would later dub the Cremation King of California displayed his sick sense of humor with a vanity plate on his Corvette that read I BRN 4 U, while Coastal Cremations employees zipped up and down the coast, shoving bodies packed in cardboard into the back of company vans and station wagons. Somehow, gum made out of tree bark is still softer than Bazooka. Prosecutors said the crematory was part of the family-owned Lamb Funeral Home in nearby Pasadena. 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. That morning, employee John Hallinan said, he and another worker loaded 38 bodies into the two furnaces, each measuring 3.5 feet high by 4 feet wide by 8 feet long. 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. Instead, David quietly installed crematory ovens in a suburb, licensing the facility as a ceramics shop. Laurieanne had always been her fathers golden child when it came to the care of the those who sought out the Lamb familys services. 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. Sconce said his words were misinterpreted. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!. The Lamb Funeral Home building in Pasadena was sold to another funeral home in the mid-1990s; when that venture failed the facility stood vacant for several years. He decorated the interior with couches, chairs, and various other accoutrements to make mourners feel comfortable. .more Get A Copy Coastal Cremations charged other mortuaries only $55 per cremation and sought business widely as the use of cremation boomed in California. 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. He was a little too slick in my opinion, but some people are attracted to that. The Lamb Family Funeral Home still stands on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. 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. 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. A Ghoul is defined by Websters dictionary as a legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses. David Sconce certainly fit that definition. His dad, Jerry, had played for the University of California, Santa Barbara, and later became the head coach at Azusa Pacific College, where David enrolled in 1974. Sure, the inspectors had their suspicions that something wasnt right, but every time they tried to inspect the facility, they were turned away and told to come back with a warrant, which was hard to acquire because all of Coastal Cremations (forged) paperwork made everything appear legit. George Deukmejian at the end of the summer session. 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. 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. 7 years ago. It was horrific, says Jay Brown. 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. The impact David Sconce left on the funeral business is still being felt today. He had even tried to enlist in the police academy, but failed to get in when the vision test showed him to be colorblind. 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. I said, I dont think so, its a ceramics shop, the chief later told the Los Angeles Times. 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. In 1985 Estephan and Cindy Strunk (Cindy) were separated. In California at the time, and elsewhere, it was illegal to remove things from corpses. 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. Ron Hast, editor of a newsletter called Mortuary Management, whose Los Angeles mortuary used the Sconces, asked Laurieanne Sconce to state in writing in 1984 that her cremations were done individually. Davids mother Laurieanne Lamb Sconce and her husband Jerry bought out the family business from her father in 1985. But the ovens were old, accidents happened, and no investigation began. Laurieannes husband was considered a loser, a cheat, a layabout, and a hustler by her father, Lawrence; though Jerry had been gainfully employed as a football coach for a local Christian college, he quit the job in 1977 to run a sporting goods store, even though he had no previous experience in business. The Lamb Funeral Home was founded by Lawrence Lamb. Depicted by friends of his parents as the mastermind behind the assembly-line cremations, David Sconce is being held without bail. Anyone who would look at Sconce at that time saw a blond-haired, blue-eyed, a kind of athletic physique, a very handsome, outgoing, kind of smarmy, and charming guy, says Braidhill. The autopsy also discovered digoxin, a common heart medication, in Waterss bloodthough Waters didnt take heart medication. Visit Obituary Nancy Darling, 68, of Atlantic (formerly of Greenfield) Dec 20, 2022 Nancy Darling passed away on Tuesday, December 20, 2022, at her home. A single body goes into the oven. But what really sets this story apart is the thousands of dead bodies involved. 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. In the aftermath of Sconces capture and conviction, laws were proposed and passed that strengthened the ability of the state to watch over the businesses and inspect the premises. He found embalming school to be boring, and that wasnt where the money was anyway. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.. The autopsy report found traces of the heart medication digoxin in his bloodstream, only Waters was not on any heart medication. That infamous title belongs to David Wayne Sconce. But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. 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. But then the man said, Dont tell me theyre not burning bodies. His facility destroyed, David Sconce quietly moved the operation to Hesperia, 20 miles north of San Bernardino in the high desert, where he had installed ovens for what was listed on business permits as a ceramics factory. This led the state to charge Sconce with poisoning Waters the following year, but those charges were dropped after multiple experts failed to agree on whether or not oleander was actually present in Waters system. 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. Can there be a better endorsement? In court, it was revealed that over a three-month period, they had sold 136 brains (at about $80 each), 145 hearts ($95 each), and 100 lungs ($60 each) for use in medical schools. On November 23, 1986, the crematorium caught fire after two employees tried to break the company record by putting nineteenbodies in each furnace. He would attract business from area funeral homes with his half-priced cremations and make up for the low cost with high volume. 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. 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. Criteria More scrutiny is being given to the handling of bodies, however, in the wake of the Sconce revelations and two other scandals in recent years, including a Northern California case involving a firm hired to drop ashes over the Sierra. A573819 (the funeral home case). Sconce operated the Lamb Funeral Home with his wife, Laurieanne Lamb Sconce. With the help of her husband, a glad-handing former football coach at Azusa-Pacific College, Laurieanne began taking control of the business from her parents about a decade ago, just as the publics interest in cremation blossomed. 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. How in the world did David Sconce manage to get away with this for so long? even beating the immediate family to the funeral home door. They pulled out eyeballs, plopping them unceremoniously into Coke cans and paper towels. One of Davids boys, David Edwards, pleaded guilty to beating Hast, testifying that the younger Sconce had paid him $700 or $800 to do so. They ran for two months before authorities became suspicious that the business was not what it seemed. He had veered towards his father's interests more than his mother's, and had played football. A crowbar cracked open sternums in order to access organs. 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. When Assistant Fire Chief Will Wentworth went to investigate the facility, he found everything inside covered in soot, and trash cans filled to the brim with ashes and prosthetic devices. 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. 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.