A Family Business (15 page)

While the wording of the form changed over the months, the need for having
some kind
of form did not. The forms
had
to be signed, and they were. Whether they were signed by the persons whose name appeared on the top of the document was another question. One such incident, for example, which later drew the attention of investigators, involved the death of a man named Frank Holzkamper. He died in November 1986, and the conservator of his estate, a woman named Carolyn Anderson Scholl, asked that his body be cremated by Coastal Cremation. When Holzkamper’s name later showed up on a list of bodies from whom tissue had been donated, Scholl protested. She denied ever signing a consent form. When the form itself was examined, it showed that the handwriting on the bottom not only was not hers, but whoever had signed it had misspelled Scholl’s name. The signature read S-c-h-
u
-l-l.

Perhaps by this time, too, all three of the Sconces were beginning to feel pressure from the authorities. It had been a long time coming, but people other than their competitors were beginning to get suspicious. If anything, this was significantly overdue.

In retrospect there were several reasons why David was able to get away with the multiple cremations for so long. One had to do with state law, or rather, the lack of it. A plethora of statutes governing funeral homes existed, but since cremation had not been very popular until recently, crematoriums had escaped rigid regulation. To complicate the issue, the Cemetery Board, which was the agency responsible for crematoriums—probably because most crematoriums were located in cemeteries—had too few regulators. As a result, the ones they did have were terribly overworked.

For this reason, authorities may have been slow to recognize the early signs that everything was not as it should have been at Lamb Funeral Home.

Within two years of taking over the cremation service, David was reporting more cremations than any other facility in the state. By the time his numbers topped 8000 a year—about four times the number of any other crematorium—authorities began getting suspicious. They should have. By looking a little further, it was easy to determine that Pasadena Crematorium had only two retorts. Then, all it took was a calculator to conclude that it was impossible to cremate that many people with that equipment in that amount of time, provided the cremations were done properly.

By 1986, David, in fact, already
was
under investigation by the Cemetery Board. But when one of the agents tried to inspect the Altadena crematorium, he was turned away on grounds that he did not have the authority to make inspections. The action was legal; state law at the time did not give Cemetery Board employees authority to demand to examine a facility.

But the number of cremations was not the only early indicator that something unusual was going on.

In the spring of 1986 a reporter from the San Diego
Union
, Rex Dalton, was working on a series of stories dealing with the sale of body parts to the University of California at San Diego. While he was researching his material, he got a tip that there was a woman who might be able to provide additional details about the subject. Her name: Lisa Karlan.

Karlan met with Dalton and told him the same thing she later told an examiner from the Department of Health Services, Leigh Dusatko. She said she had been fired from David’s CIE&TB because she was asking too many questions about the operation.

During the four months she worked there, she said, she saw workers remove almost two dozen whole eyes and box them for sale to UCLA, where they were to be used in research projects. There were at least two corneas removed as well, she said, and they were sold to the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena to be used as transplants.

Karlan added that she had seen the CIE&TB owner—David Sconce—remove gold-filled teeth from the mouths of cadavers. When enough had been collected to make a sale worthwhile, he took them to a gold dealer in Glendora, an old friend he dealt with regularly.

Particularly interesting to Dusatko were Karlan’s tales about remains being mixed together in large drums and then doled out whenever such material was needed to be returned to a family.

In his report to his boss, Roderick D. Hamblin, chief of Laboratory Field Services for the DHS, Dusatko recommended the department look more closely at Karlan’s accusations to see if criminal charges should be brought against David Sconce.

Ironically, the report was written on June 9, 1986, the same day that George Bristol formally applied for a permit to create the tissue bank. Despite Dusatko’s report, the department approved Bristol’s application less than a week later. Soon after that, on June 23 and again on July 2, state inspectors visited the CIE&TB site at Lamb Funeral Home and apparently found no evidence of wrongdoing.

About the same time, an investigator from the Pasadena Police Department, after talking to Karlan and Dusatko, tried to inspect Lamb Funeral Home, but, as with the Cemetery Board agent, he was turned away. The reason for refusing him entry was that he did not have a search warrant. Without sufficient cause to apply for such a document, he was forced to let the matter drop.

Pressure was building on another front as well. However, this time it did not involve David; it had to do with Laurieanne.

On August 13, 1986, an auditor from the state Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers named Skip Jones made a routine examination of Lamb Funeral Home’s books. He would not have been surprised to find a number of nonreportable trust accounts among the records, but he was definitely not prepared for what he actually discovered. As he flipped through the records, he was shocked to find 172 preneed accounts that had never been reported, an obvious violation of state law.

The accountant walked down the hall to Laurieanne’s office, then spent the next ninety minutes with her going over state regulations and explaining why such accounts had to be recorded. He followed up the visit with a letter, which Laurieanne responded to on September 12. In an ingratiating mea culpa response, Laurieanne apologized for the errors and promised to “rectify” the situation. As one step toward a solution, she said, Lamb’s was discontinuing its preneed policy. If any of her customers demanded preneed services, they could open their own accounts listing Lamb’s as beneficiary, which would be virtually the same thing except Lamb’s would not have access to the money until after the account holder died. To demonstrate her contrition for violating the law, Laurieanne also enclosed a check for $50 toward payment of the penalty for not reporting the accounts.

During his examination of the books, Jones also found that Laurieanne had not claimed what was allowed the funeral home under the law as a fee for administering the accounts. During their conference he pointed this out to her as well, explaining that she was shortchanging herself by not taking advantage of the permissible expense.

However, what he did
not
know, was the fee that she was extracting was much higher than that prescribed in the statutes. Auditors did not learn until much later that Laurieanne had been transferring actual interest from those accounts—rather than the relatively minuscule 2.5 percent allowed—to her own special account, and that the transferal was being done automatically every quarter. The amount that Laurieanne siphoned off eventually totalled $100,365, of which all but $15,365 was split up among the Sconces. Lamb Funeral Home—Jerry and Laurieanne—received $27,000 of the money. Their younger son, Gary, got $20,000. David got $4000 directly, plus another $34,000 which was listed as being paid to Coastal Cremation. The only nonfamily disbursement was to a firm called Cremation Equipment Service, which got $15,000 for supplies. The remaining $365 stayed in the account. There was no indication of any wrongdoing by Gary Sconce or Cremation Equipment Service in connection with the payments they received, plus David was never charged.

Except for one thing, Laurieanne may have been able to claim later that the transfers were done innocently, in her ignorance of the law. While that would not have removed her responsibility, she could have claimed it as a mitigating circumstance. But even after her long session with Jones in which he carefully explained the law, the transfers were not stopped. Between the day Jones made his initial examination and the time the auditors found the transactions, an additional $7500 was transferred from preneed accounts into Laurieanne’s special account.

As if things were not bad enough, they soon got worse.

Back in October 1984, David had applied for permission to build his second crematorium near Shafter, outside Bakersfield, in the San Joaquin Valley. It was there that he planned to freight bodies from the San Francisco area for cremation.

In David’s mind, that was to be the facility that would put him over the top; it was going to help him permanently secure his position as the crematorium king of California. But the one thing he had failed to figure into his plans was opposition in Shafter. The local citizens did not like the idea of a crematorium going up in their midst, and activists in the group scheduled a series of well-attended demonstrations protesting its construction. As a result, zoning authorities refused to grant David a variance, in effect telling him to take his retorts someplace else.

That’s when David settled upon Hesperia. It also is when he decided, fearful of a repeat of what had happened in Kern County, to camouflage his actions by telling Hesperia authorities the tall tale about manufacturing tiles for the space shuttles. He was careful not to make any reference to a crematorium in the name of the proposed new facility, which he christened after his second wife’s father, Oscar Sallard.

Why David did not take into consideration the fact that the cremations would cause a terrible stench is unknown. It may have been because all his cremations before had been performed in a proper crematorium—in retorts built specifically to cremate bodies. At Altadena, the retorts had been equipped with specially designed chimneys which kept the odor from being released into the air. But his retorts at Hesperia were homemade devices constructed from a design for industrial kilns, and were not equipped with the special crematorium chimneys. Of course, if they had been built as cremation retorts and equipped with crematorium chimneys, officials would have immediately become suspicious when they examined the facility to approve his permits. Also, when David built the facility in Hesperia, he probably did not intend to use it as much as he did. His original plans may have been to use Oscar’s Ceramics only occasionally, keeping it as a safety valve to take care of the overflow from the Altadena facility until he could find a site for a Bay Area facility. But then he got sandbagged by two workers.

As John Hallinan would later testify, a little after midnight on November 23, 1986, John Hallinan and Bob Garcia, who were toiling on the bulldog shift at the Altadena crematorium, decided to get high on rock cocaine. About three
A
.
M
., feeling no pain, they decided to
really
load up the two retorts; to shatter once and for all the record for the number of bodies cremated at one time and set a new one that would never be broken. Sweating and shoving, laughing and cursing, they jammed thirty-eight bodies into the two ovens. In order to get the last one in, Hallinan had to snap its legs.

That broke the record, all right. It also broke David’s back. Proud of their accomplishment, the two lit the gas furnace and staggered off to Garcia’s house to smoke some more dope. But they had put so many bodies in the ovens that the cadavers blocked the chimney and the heat could not escape. As a result, the whole apparatus went up in flames. By the time the fire department arrived, both ovens had been destroyed. After that, David no longer had a choice about using the Hesperia facility. He would have to go full-blast there or close down operations altogether. He chose to go full-blast.

PART FOUR

The Road to Ventura

15

After the January 1987 raid on Oscar’s Ceramics, the action that proved to be the beginning of David’s downfall, it took investigators more than five hours to sort through the grisly material, to confirm what they initially suspected: an undetermined number of bodies had been incinerated in two industrial-sized pottery kilns doing duty as illegal crematorium retorts. Furthermore, they determined that the person apparently responsible for the operation was David Wayne Sconce of Pasadena.

That was the easy part; the hard part was deciding what they could do about the situation. Obviously, skulduggery was involved, but the law was not going to allow them to do much more than slap David on the wrist. While it was a felony in California to dismember a human corpse, performing multiple cremations was only a misdemeanor. So all the San Bernardino authorities could lean on David with was a collection of minor charges which, in the long run, meant virtually nothing. He could be back in business somewhere else in a week.

But if they felt cheated because his offenses were only misdemeanors, they could take some consolation in knowing that until 1984 what he had been doing was not illegal at all. The only reason they were even misdemeanors then, in 1987, was because the public had become out-raged over two blatant cases, neither of which involved David.

The first case to spur public indignation involved the Harbor Lawn-Mount Olive Mortuary and Memorial Park in Costa Mesa, near San Diego. That case was eventually settled after insurance companies agreed to set aside $14 million to compensate some 25,000 persons whose relatives or loved ones were cremated at the facility, most of them allegedly in multiple cremations.