A Family Business (17 page)

He had begun his career as a patrolman and worked in uniform for thirteen years before transferring to the detective division. For four years, from 1982 to 1986, he had answered assault and homicide calls, then he went back into uniform for a year before returning to the detective division. He had only been back in plainclothes for a few weeks when the Sconce case broke. As the newest man in the division, he did not yet have a permanent assignment when the case started developing, so he found himself tagging along as the official Pasadena P.D. observer to the investigators from the other counties.

As Diaz listened, following the debate as avidly as Lewis, his dark eyes darting from one speaker to the next, it became increasingly evident that the case was going to be dropped in his lap, his and Lewis’s. It took the others less than an hour to come to the same conclusion. Everything they had collected, they decided, was going to be handed over to the Pasadena authorities.

Despite the material that had already been gathered, the case at that stage was little more than an outline. Except for the charges resulting from the discovery of the gold-filled teeth, the only formal accusations against David were the ones that existed from the first three misdemeanors—performing multiple cremations, co-mingling of remains, and the harvesting of body parts without permission—and one felony, for polluting the air. Jerry was still charged with theft, and he and Laurieanne faced embezzlement counts. But that was pitifully thin material on which to base a case that obviously involved much more. Diaz sighed; he would have to begin at the beginning if he was going to build a file that would result in prison sentences for the Sconces.

The detective need not have worried. As he began working his sources, he found a surfeit of people willing to talk, especially about David. An important witness interviewed early on was former employee Jim Dame, who—apparently fearful that he was going to be dragged into the mud—contacted investigators and offered to tell what he knew in return for an informal assurance he would not be prosecuted. Over the course of several interviews, Dame divulged details about the funeral home operation and pointed Diaz to Steve Strunk.

Strunk told Diaz he thought David had paid to have several competitors beaten up, but he could not remember the names of the victims. A few days later, however, he telephoned the detective saying the names of the victims had come back to him. They were Ron Hast, Stephen Nimz, and Tim Waters. The men who administered the beatings, he said, were Dave Edwards and Danny Galambos.

Armed with pictures of Edwards and Galambos, Diaz went to see Hast and Nimz. The funeral home director and his friend gasped when the detective flashed the photographs. That’s them, they said immediately, those were two of the three men who beat them up. From there it was not difficult for Diaz to uncover the third man, Andre Augustine.

Diaz, however, was frustrated when he tried to track down Tim Waters. When he was told that Waters was dead, his interest soared. Then it dipped when he read Dr. Holloway’s autopsy report and saw where the pathologist had ruled that Tim’s death had been a natural one. Shrugging, Diaz moved on to the assault of the late cremation service owner. And that was when the prosecution got really lucky.

Since Diaz did not have the authority to fully investigate Tim’s beating, because it had occurred in Burbank and out of his jurisdiction, Walt Lewis got on the telephone.

When the DDA checked with Burbank P.D., he had unbelievable good fortune. Officers summoned to investigate the attack on Waters more than two years previously had found an empty milk carton on the sidewalk outside Tim’s office. On the chance that it might someday be useful, they filed it away in the evidence room. Keeping his fingers crossed, Lewis asked that the carton be dusted for fingerprints. When the results came back, Lewis and Diaz broke into huge grins: the prints were those of Danny Galambos.

From that point on, events began to snowball. By May, Diaz was confident he had enough evidence to build strong cases against all three Sconces. He was whistling when he trotted the bulging file across the street to Walt Lewis’s office:

16

David and his parents, it seemed, had made a lot of enemies over the years, many of whom had apparently just been waiting for a chance to tell what they knew about the Sconces. Lewis and Diaz were determined to give them that chance. But what was really amazing to the prosecutor was that every time one of them came forward with a tale to tell, that particular story was more grotesque than the one that preceded it. It seemed to Lewis as if he were diving into a bottomless pit of slime.

The situation was so complex, it would take Lewis several months to fully comprehend the scope of the Sconces’ activity. Even then it continued to evolve, with new accusations invariably surfacing, frequently on a daily basis. By late May 1987, as the date for the Sconces’ arraignment drew steadily nearer, the list of charges against Jerry, Laurieanne, and David resembled an Amtrak timetable; when he walked into the courtroom to present his case, Lewis had a roster of forty-one charges. In the following weeks, even as he argued for the right to bring them to trial, the list continued to grow as Diaz uncovered still more information. Before he was finished, Lewis amended the charge list three times and the total number of counts grew to sixty-eight.

For the DDA the circumstances were extremely nerve-wracking. Preparing for trial was one thing, but trying to get ready when the charge list continuously shifted was quite another. Despite his long experience, Lewis had never before handled such an unstable case. “I felt like I was on a bucking bronc and I couldn’t get off,” he said later.

To complicate the situation even more, Lewis was under a tight deadline. If he failed to get some of the charges on the record before mid-June, he stood to lose some of the misdemeanor counts because the period for filing would elapse.

As Lewis worked frantically to put together the list of charges resulting from the operation of the funeral home and the crematorium so it would be in a format that would withstand courtroom scrutiny, Diaz and D.A. Investigator Gerald Loeb, who had been assigned to help in the case, simultaneously were trying to zero in on the charges that had to do with activity away from the funeral home, such as David’s alleged involvement in the attacks against Hast, Nimz, and Waters. At that time, the possibility that Waters had been murdered was a tantalizing but elusive suggestion, one that was crippled by lack of proof that his death had actually been a homicide, since the autopsy report had clearly spelled out death by natural causes. Diaz felt that he and Loeb stood a much better chance of building a substantial case against David on the beatings than they did of tying him into a death that may or may not have been a murder. But even on the beatings, the detectives lacked one important component: David’s own version of events.

Balancing the desire to question him about the accusations were other factors that made them hesitant about approaching him directly. For one thing, they were reluctant to tip their hands. Though confident that the accusations were valid and eventually could be proved, they knew that David was not yet aware that they were investigating him for assault. There also was the question of his physical absence. If he had been in Pasadena, where the investigators could keep an eye on him, they might not have vacillated about arresting him so they could grill him about the attacks. Unfortunately for them, however, he was safely out of their grasp. Soon after he and his father were charged and released, David had taken his wife and children to Bullhead City, Arizona, just across the California state line. By June, not only was he some 200 miles away, but he was in another state, and that could present serious jurisdictional problems in attempts to get him to court in Los Angeles County.

Lewis and the investigators agreed that the less David knew about the case they were building against him, the better would be their chance of bringing him to trial. Also, they knew that in a matter of days David was going to have to return to Pasadena to plead to the funeral home charges, and until then they did not want to spook him with talk about the assaults. Still, the temptation to discover how he might react to the accusations was great. So they settled for the next best thing to questioning him themselves: they had someone else ask him while they listened in.

After Galambos, Augustine, and Edwards were confronted with the evidence against them in the beatings of Hast, Nimz, and Waters, they decided, in a rush to save their own skins, to offer their services to the prosecution, hoping the effort would be remembered when their cases came to court.

Galambos, in his haste to be helpful, had spilled to Lewis the essence of the conversation in which David allegedly admitted that he had murdered Tim Waters. Edwards subsequently substantiated Galambos’s claims to a large degree by saying that David had made similar remarks to him. But at the time investigators were trying to put their case together, it was all very vague. What the investigators needed most at that stage was something from David—virtually anything—that would show how he might react to accusations that he had engineered three assaults and, not incidentally, a possible murder.

Diaz and Loeb devised a plan. Since David had been relatively close to Edwards, the investigators decided to ask Edwards to telephone David and feel him out about these aspects of the case. Edwards was in a bind; he could hardly refuse. On June 5, three days before David was scheduled to appear in court in Pasadena to be arraigned, Edwards called him in Arizona using a telephone equipped with a tape recorder. At his shoulder was Loeb.

“Hello,” Edwards said nervously once David was on the line.

“Dave?” David responded, surprised because he had not heard from Edwards since he quit his job at Coastal Cremation late in 1986, before the incident at Oscar’s Ceramics. “How are you doing?”

“Not too bad,” Edwards replied.

“I was going to say,” David told his black friend, “that I hadn’t heard from you in a coon’s age, but that would be tactless.”

Edwards, apparently not amused, tried to explain why he had called.

David’s guard went up. When Edwards did not react as he expected to his attempt at humor, he suspected that his friend may have been talking on a tapped line. “How’s stuff over the phone these days?” he asked, giving Edwards the opportunity to signal him if he knew the call was bugged.

“I’m not real sure,” Edwards answered slowly.

That was enough for David. “Speak hypothetically,” he instructed.

Ignoring the order, Edwards got straight to the point. He and Galambos had been fingered for the attack on Hast and Nimz, he said, and Galambos was cooperating with the authorities. “Danny said yes to everything,” Edwards explained.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” David answered calmly. “He could be saying that to save his ass.”

“Of course he is,” Edwards answered somewhat indignantly.

“You know,” David replied, “it comes right down to it, it’s your word against Danny’s.”

But that wasn’t the worst of it, Edwards pointed out. “They asked him about Burbank,” he said, indicating to David that Galambos also was being questioned about the beating of Tim Waters.

“Oh, big deal,” David replied.

Edwards was not sure that David understood. “The big guy,” he added.

“Yeah,” David assured him. “That’s okay.”

Edwards still was not sure that David had grasped the implications of what he was trying to say. “That’s okay?” he asked incredulously. “The guy’s gone!”

“Yeah, he’s history,” David agreed calmly. “But see, now I heard that [a third person] was telling a bunch of people about three weeks ago at the Cemetery Board meeting that he knows it was me that had him beat up.”

“Yeah,” prompted Edwards.

“Okay? So big deal,” David said. “I mean, I don’t care who would say that. They’re going to have to prove it.”

“Yeah,” Edwards repeated, hoping to draw more out of his former employer.

“Even if Galambos said, ‘Yeah, he did it; he paid me,’ I’ll say, ‘Okay, well, you know, I didn’t. I don’t know why he’s saying that.’”

Edwards, convinced that David still was not getting the point, made it plainer. “What we’re afraid of,” he added, “what Danny’s afraid of, and what I’m afraid of, is that they might try to say that he had something to do with him kicking off.”

“No!” David replied more urgently, the light apparently dawning. “Uh-uh. Uh-uh. He didn’t! Waters was a paranoiac from a long time ago.”

Startled by David’s reaction, Edwards let the conversation drift to a discussion about David’s lawyer. But then he maneuvered it back to Tim Waters.

“I know Danny’s going to say something about the thing in Burbank,” he said. “What if they try to say that he had something to do with that, with him kicking off.”

“Well, you weren’t around with that,” David replied, seemingly clearing Edwards while confirming, however imprecisely, that he had information about Tim’s death.

Edwards sighed inwardly and shot an I-told-you-so glance at Loeb. “I know that,” he said hastily into the telephone, “but knowing Danny, he’s going to say you had something to do with that.”

David’s caution returned; he wanted to get off the subject entirely. “No!” he told Edwards. “Big deal if he says [that]. I didn’t, you know. They can’t prove I did, because I didn’t. So I don’t care.”

Edwards looked at Loeb and shrugged. The gesture said he believed that he wasn’t going to be able to get David to say any more. Loeb nodded in agreement.