A Family Business (23 page)

“Either through the neck underneath the jawbone or under the shoulder.”

“Did you ever see the hook go in the mouth and through the cheek?”

“Yes.”

John Hallinan described a similar scene.

“Now when you would stack these bodies into the retort, would they be layered?” Lewis asked.

“Yes.”

“How many layers of bodies would you have before they were burned?”

“I would say at least between two and four layers,” he said, explaining that the usual process required using a piece of plywood as a temporary shelf. “We would place the bodies over that and then we would use that to push the bodies up. After that body was in place, then we would move the piece of plywood on top of that body and push the next body up. We’d continue until we worked our way up.”

“And you were able to stack five high?” Lewis asked.

“It depended on the size of the bodies.”

“What is the most amount of bodies you were able to get into a retort?”

“To my recollection, twenty.”

It was Hallinan who had been working the morning the Pasadena Crematorium caught fire.

“Do you recall approximately what time you started loading bodies into the two retorts on the evening of November 22, 1986?” asked Lewis.

“It was approximately eight
P
.
M
.,” Hallinan replied, adding that it took them about five hours to get all the cadavers inside.

“And do you remember how many bodies you were able to get into each retort, or altogether how many bodies you were able to get in both?”

“Thirty-eight,” Hallinan replied matter-of-factly.

The former funeral home worker said that he and coworker Bob Garcia lit the ovens soon after they finished packing them, then left the building to go to Garcia’s house to “get intoxicated on rock cocaine.”

While they were gone, he said, the retorts caught fire and were subsequently destroyed.

The fire occurred early in the morning of November 23, 1986. Eighteen months later, when he was helping Lewis prepare the case against David, Detective Dennis Diaz testified that he went to the crematorium to see how badly the fire damage had been. What he found, he said, was that the roof of the building had caved in and the inside of the building was filled with rubble. The retorts, which had not been cleaned since the fire, were filled with human remains to a depth of ten to twelve inches.

Diaz said he took some bone samples from the retorts and delivered them to a forensic anthropologist named Judy Suchey. When she was called to the stand, she testified that her examination of part of the remains brought to her by Diaz showed that at least three bodies had been included in the sample.

How did she know that? Lewis asked.

Because, she said, there were three distal left humeri in that particular sample bag, and each person has only one distal left humeri, which is the lower part of the upper arm bone.

Hallinan’s testimony caused Lewis to miss a step; it produced for the first but not the last time during the hearing an unplanned deviation in the prosecutor’s strategy.

Late on the night he testified, Hallinan telephoned Lewis saying he was upset by something that had occurred after he left the courtroom. Lewis listened to his tale, then told him he was going to call him back to the stand early the next day and let him tell his story to Person.

The following morning the DDA wasted no time getting to the heart of the issue. What happened to you last night? he asked Hallinan as soon as he was settled in the witness chair.

Shooting a nervous glance at David, Hallinan said he was sitting at home when his telephone rang. He answered, and a man asked to speak to John. When he identified himself, the voice said: “You are pissing off some of your friends. They say you are a big rat, and they say that I have been hired to take you out. They said if you want to start, you can zipper your mouth and not show up tomorrow. If you don’t, you’ll be a statistic.”

Did you recognize the voice? Lewis asked.

Another nervous glance at the defense table. “No,” Hallinan said.

22

After Hallinan, Lewis was back on schedule. As he had done with the issue of multiple cremations, Lewis elicited testimony on another phase of the Sconce operation: the removal and sale of body parts.

He began by offering into evidence a document that contained the names of twenty-three people. At least one organ had been removed from each of the people on the list, he said, organs that then were sold by the CIE&TB. Organs from at least seventeen of those on the list were taken without permission, Lewis added. Plus he knew of at least nine other bodies from which parts were removed without consent. In all, the prosecution was able to document thirty-two bodies from which organs had been removed, twenty-six of them “by the use of fraud, deceit, forgery and outright theft.”

In some cases, Lewis said, consent forms were signed only
after
the organs had already been removed. This activity was carried out under the authority of ATC forms which the DDA argued were inadequate, or without any forms at all.

“Considering the facts of this case,” Lewis argued, “the people contend that the defendants, having been in the funeral business for many years, were well-aware of the vulnerability of the families of the deceased. The evidence clearly shows that the defendants…displayed a callous disregard for the feelings of these families in their most difficult and delicate times. The evidence in this case shows that the defendants…took grossly unfair advantage of the numerous families of the deceased persons who had the misfortune of trusting the bodies of their loved ones to the care of these three defendants.”

To back up his contentions, he called a string of witnesses, both former employees and next of kin.

• Leon Packard testified that Jerry told him, in Laurieanne’s presence, that if any customer ever asked about the “to remove tissue” clause in the ATC form, he should tell them it referred to the need to remove pacemakers, and when pacemakers were removed, it was inevitable that a “certain amount of minute tissue” would have to be removed as well.
  
• Former employee Louis Quinones testified that Laurieanne gave him a stack of ATC forms in November or December, 1986, and told him they were revised documents which needed to be distributed to their customers. Laurieanne added, Quinones said, that it was not necessary for him to point out the revisions when he delivered the forms.
  
• Stanley Dickey of the Dickey Mortuary in Fontana testified that if he had known that Lamb Funeral Home operated a tissue bank, he would not have used them for cremations.
  
• Lewis also called the directors of thirteen funeral homes that sent bodies to Pasadena Crematorium/Coastal Cremation. Each of them testified that they were unaware that organs were being removed, since they had never been told by David, Laurieanne, or Jerry that they needed to counsel next of kin about organ donation. Neither were they told, they said, that the Sconces were interpreting a signature on an ATC form as authority to remove organs, including eyes and corneas.
  

• “In view of the evidence produced in this case is it reasonable to believe that all three defendants simply forgot to tell all these funeral directors that when they obtained the signatures of the next of kin on the Authority to Cremate forms that their signatures, in addition to authorizing cremation, also authorized unlimited organ removal?” Lewis asked rhetorically.
  

  “No,” he said, answering his own question, “this is not a case of forgetfulness. This is a case of premeditated fraud and deceit. The three defendants clearly did not want the funeral directors to know what was going on.”
  

Lewis also called witnesses who testified that Jerry, Laurieanne, and David took an active role in organizing and operating the CIE&TB.

Marion Steen, for instance, said she loaned Laurieanne $15,000 in September 1985 to help her get the tissue bank started.

And funeral director Gregory Zook said he had wanted to invest but by the time he was ready to write a check, Laurieanne told him they didn’t need any more investors.

Zook also testified that David once excitedly described how much money could be made from a tissue bank, claiming that he planned to make a half-million dollars just from the agreement with Carolina Biological Supply.

A man named Freeman Fairbanks testified that he blindly signed an ATC form proffered to him by Laurieanne when he was making arrangements for the cremation of his sister, Golda McCauley. He was not asked to read the form or told what it was.

“As I recall,” he testified, “Laurieanne made up a contract, the charges and so on and so forth, and I signed that. And she showed me another form that she says was an Authority to Cremate and asked me to sign it and I signed it.”

“Did you read the form before you signed it?” Lewis asked.

“I’m sorry to say I didn’t,” Fairbanks replied.

“Did you get a copy of the form after you signed?”

“I don’t have one, no.”

After signing the form, he said, he asked to see his sister’s body one more time, but Laurieanne said that was not possible. “She said I couldn’t see her because she’d already been prepared for cremation, ‘wrapped’ was the word I believed she used.” In actuality, bodies are stripped of all clothing and other “unnatural” devices, such as prostheses, jewelry and dental bridgework, before they are put in the retort. They are, however, “wrapped” in a cardboard sheet in an effort to preserve some modesty.

“Did she tell you that your sister’s eyes were taken out the day before?” Lewis asked.

“No way!” Fairbanks replied. “She certainly didn’t.”

The prosecutor queried Fairbanks about an organ donor’s card, if Laurieanne had ever asked him if his sister had one.

“I can’t say for sure,” he replied, “but someone asked me if she had a donor’s card, and to my knowledge she did not.”

“Did you ever consent to donate any organ or eyes of Golda McCauley?” Lewis asked.

“Definitely not,” Fairbanks replied.

Lewis walked to the prosecution and returned with a sheet of paper, which he handed to Fairbanks, explaining that it was a form used to log research tissue.

“On the back,” Lewis said, “it has Golda McCauley’s name at the top and it says date and hour of death, 5/27/86 at 1900, date and hour of procurement, May 27, 1986 at 2020 hours, and date and hour of preservation, 5/27/86, 2030 hours, and time between death and preservation, 1.5 hours. Have you ever seen that before?”

“No,” Fairbanks said softly.

Although David had told Detective Diaz that the CIE&TB had been financed by Randy Welty, George Bristol, who had been hired by David as the technical expert to set up and operate the facility, said he never doubted that the three Sconces were running the operation.

“How would you determine whether in the case of any particular body that there was consent from the next of kin to take organs or tissue?” Lewis asked Bristol when he was on the stand.

“Well, we would look at the bodies, David or I or Eddie [Marshall] would. And we would see if they were okay to remove organs as far as being fresh enough, [that is,] not exhibiting stages of decomposition. Then we would write down the names on a scrap of paper and bring it in to either Jerry or Laurieanne to see if we had clearance to remove it.”

“And did you get clearance from every body from which you removed organs or tissue? Did you first get clearance from Laurieanne or Jerry?”

“Yes,” said Bristol.

Lewis wanted to know if he or the other workers made any distinction between bodies that had been brought in from Lamb Funeral Home or from other sources.

“There was a difference in consents usually,” Bristol replied. “Because Lamb cases that we worked on, a lot of those were burials, to be embalmed cases, where the crematory cases, a lot of them, came from other funeral homes and they were on cremation authorization.”

“How would your conduct with respect to taking tissue vary depending on whether the case was a burial case or a cremation case?” Lewis asked.

“Well,” Bristol answered carefully, “there are certain things that we wouldn’t remove on burial cases because if the scalpel slipped or something it would affect the viewability of the body.”

Lewis asked if whether a body was destined for cremation or for burial made a difference in who Bristol went to for permission to remove organs.

“We would usually go to Laurieanne if it was a burial case because she was in charge of the ceremonies and she was the one to be in contact with the family,” he answered.

Switching from the general to the specific, Lewis began questioning Bristol about the agreement to procure a large number of organs for the Carolina Biological Supply Co.

Bristol replied that he kept a special list of organs destined for the company so Laurieanne would have a list of donors to provide for state inspectors. However, the list was made up long after the organs had actually been supplied.

“Why did you wait so long to make that list?” Lewis asked.

“We were very busy,” Bristol replied. “Much of the time we did not have time.”