A Family Business (24 page)

The initial list, Lewis determined, carried twenty-three names and represented the first shipment of tissue from the CIE&TB to Carolina Biological.

“What kind of tissue are we talking about?” Lewis asked.

Bristol shrugged. “Either primary organs, brains, hearts and lungs and so forth.”

“Was at least one such organ—either a brain, heart or lung—removed from every person named on the list?”

Bristol nodded. “At least one.”

Flourishing a sheaf of papers, Lewis identified the documents as shipping lists which identified organs sent at various times to Carolina Biological. The documents were dated between October 27, 1986, and November 21, 1986. One shipment consisted of eight boxes containing 48 brains; another was made up of four boxes with another 24 brains; one shipment included 40 pairs of lungs; another 81 hearts, and one box, shipped on October 27, contained only one organ, a spinal column.

“How did you happen to pick Carolina Biological?” Lewis asked.

“I’m a scientist,” said Bristol. “I have worked in biology and everything forever, and I know that they are the largest supplier of specimens for anatomical study.”

The organs that were sent to the company, Lewis asked, what were they to be used for?

They were destined to be used in research, Bristol replied, as opposed to transplant.

“When you started fulfilling the Carolina Biological order, was there any discussion between you and David Sconce with respect to doing research tissue, that is, procuring research tissue instead of procuring transplant tissue?”

“Yeah,” said Bristol. “I thought the better way of going was transplant. That’s what I am trained for.”

“Is that what you thought you would be doing when you were hired by Coastal?”

“Yes,” Bristol replied. “But I remember David telling me that we don’t have transplantable tissue. We are going to have to work with what we have. And that’s why we went into the research and teaching tissue.”

Lewis had one other document he wanted to proffer. It was a purchase order from Carolina Biological made out to the CIE&TB and it called for the delivery of 500 brains, 750 hearts, and 100 lungs.

“Did you ever see this purchase order?” Lewis queried.

“No,” said Bristol.

“Was there any discussion about the money to be made from research tissue?” Lewis asked.

“Yeah,” said Bristol, “we believed we could do quite well with it.”

“And did David say anything to that effect? What did he say?”

“Well, he said something like he had all the bodies that we ever needed.”

From Bristol, Lewis switched to men who had worked for David at the crematorium, men who could testify to the allegedly common practice of removing gold-filled teeth. For sheer unpleasantness, that testimony was as strong as anything that had come before.

Leon Packard, Jim Dame, Dave Edwards, Andre Augustine, and Lisa Karlan all said they saw David pry open the mouths of cadavers and remove teeth. Once, said Augustine, he saw David remove ten to fifteen teeth from four bodies that were waiting to be cremated.

Packard testified that several times he saw David take containers of teeth and put them in the file cabinet behind Laurieanne’s desk.

Packard also said he once asked David why he took the teeth, and David replied that it would be silly to let the gold burn up in the retorts. “It helps pay your salary.”

On one occasion, Packard said, he went with David to Glendora, where David’s friend, Mike Engwald, ran a business called “Gold, Gold, Gold.” David had a container of teeth with him, and when they got to the shop, he and Engwald disappeared into a back room. When David returned a few minutes later, he had a stack of bills in his hand. He peeled off five $100 bills and gave them to Packard, saying that represented the raise that he had promised him.

Lorraine Moore, who once worked for Engwald, testified that David came into the shop at least three or four times a week—and sometimes as often as several times a day—carrying containers of gold-filled teeth.

Engwald usually paid David in cash, she said, frequently leaving the money in a sealed envelope with David’s name on it. On one occasion, at Engwald’s direction, she wrote David a check for $1200.

According to Hallinan’s testimony, David was not the only one at the crematorium profiting from the removal of gold teeth. Bob Garcia also would extract them, he said.

Hallinan said Garcia put some of the teeth into a bottle which he turned over to David, but some also went into his pocket. Later, Hallinan testified, when he and Garcia were alone in the building, Garcia would take the teeth out of his pocket, put them on a hard surface, and pound them with a hammer until he had pulverized the dentine. Then he plucked out the gold and put it back in his pocket, throwing the bits of tooth in the trash. Later he would take the gold to a shop and sell it.

Garcia, Hallinan added almost as an afterthought, also had a passion for clothes, which he would remove from cadavers and either wear himself or sell.

Switching abruptly from teeth and clothes to another incident, Hallinan had an even more gruesome tale to tell.

He said he was working one day when another worker took a fancy to a gold ring on the finger of one of the cadavers.

“He attempted to get it off by pulling, but the finger had grown too much or expanded,” he testified. “So at that point he figured there was another method. That’s when I went into the next room.”

“You didn’t assist him?” Lewis asked.

“No.”

“Did Garcia assist him?”

“As far as holding the finger,” Hallinan acknowledged.

“Do you know what happened to that ring?”

“No, I don’t.”

Even as the parade of witnesses continued, there were other factors at work that demanded Lewis’s time and attention. There was one situation, for instance, that struck particularly close to home. As far as Lewis was concerned, it irrevocably changed not only the entire complexion of the proceedings, but his life.

23

On October 1, almost two months after the preliminary hearing began, Lewis asked for a private meeting with Person in the judge’s chambers. Behind the closed door, Lewis explained that there were developments taking place that had a direct bearing on the case and he wanted Person’s guidance on how to continue.

About three weeks previously, Lewis said, he received a telephone call from an inmate at the county jail tipping him off that David was trying to hire someone to commit a series of murders. The alleged potential victims included the prosecutor himself and David’s grandparents. Lewis would later learn as well that there was another potential victim: Elie Estephan.

As for wanting
him
killed, a much-shaken Lewis reported, David was said to have two motives. One was the bail issue; the other was his mother. Apparently David continued to feel that he had been tricked by the prosecutor into coming into court thinking the requested bail would be $5000, only to discover that Lewis in fact was asking for $500,000 bail. If it had not been for Lewis, David reasoned, he still would be free. As far as David was concerned, Lewis was leading a personal vendetta against him.

What seemed to bother David as much if not more than the bail issue, however, was how upset his mother was by Lewis’s aggressive prosecution. As David had told Dave Edwards when he asked the ex-football star to assault Ron Hast, “He made my mother cry.” Lewis was doing more than make Laurieanne cry; he was humiliating her and trying to send her to prison.

Lewis had come to Person, he told the judge, because the defense had also heard about the leaks and wanted the prosecutor to turn over a list of the prisoners that investigators were talking to. Lewis, however, wanted Person to keep the defense at bay until investigators had a chance to complete their job.

Person did not find the request unreasonable. He would take care of the defense, he promised, until the investigation was over.

In mid-November, eight weeks after Lewis got the first telephone call and six weeks after his meeting with Person, the issue came into the open. Ironically, it was not because of the D.A.’s investigation, but because the defense decided to take the offense by attempting to discredit the prosecution’s inmate witnesses’ testimony before it could be offered. The action was good news for Lewis. Since it was the defense that had raised the question, Lewis was able to call his witnesses without having to turn over his investigative notes to the Diamond, Rucker, and Nishi. It was a small but significant victory for the DDA.

In the end, Lewis ended up calling still another string of witnesses to describe how David was trying to contract for the various killings.

One of the first to testify was Rogelio Rojas, an inmate barber who regularly trimmed David’s hair.

While he was snipping David’s locks one day, Rojas said, David casually asked him if he knew anyone who would be willing “to take out a few people for money.”

Who did he have in mind? Rojas asked.

Two people specifically, David replied. One was a man who had testified against him, Dave Edwards. The second was the prosecutor, Walt Lewis.

According to Rojas, David never went into detail about any actual plans to have Lewis killed, but instead he “just said that he wanted to try and find some people that were willing to do it for any amount of money.”

And where did he expect to get this money? Lewis asked.

By selling some property he owned, Rojas said David replied; that, and with the proceeds of his grandparents’ estate. If they could be killed as well, their money would go to his parents and they, in turn, would give him what he needed.

Rojas said he told David he would see what he could do, but he said he never pursued the issue any further.

Inmate David Gerhardt testified that David asked him if he could refer someone who would “put a hit” on Lewis and on his grandparents, who he claimed were “quite wealthy.” If the elderly couple could be “knocked off,” Gerhardt quoted David as saying, possibly by poisoning their mineral water, his parents would inherit all their money.

In return for his services, David promised Gerhardt that when he was released, he could move into the mortuary and stay there as long as he liked. He would even give him a job working in the funeral home.

Steve Warren, who had been a cellmate of David’s at one point, said David mentioned to him one day that he wanted to have Lewis killed.

“And did he say why he wanted to kill me?” Lewis asked.

“For the strain and trauma that you were putting his folks through,” said Warren, who added that David was particularly upset because of the way the prosecution was affecting his mother.

“What did he say?” Lewis prompted.

“He said that she had had a nervous breakdown and she was going through menopause.”

“And how was that connected with wanting me killed?”

“What he said was, it’s not so much what you are doing to him, it’s what you are putting his parents through.”

“And he didn’t say what the district attorney’s office is putting the parents through, or the police. He said me personally?”

“Yes,” Warren replied, adding that David was very explicit about what he wanted to have done to Lewis. “He said he would like to put you in a sack and hang you from a hook [and] beat you until you were black and blue and then put you—throw you—into an incinerator.” As an alternative method, Warren said, David suggested that he would like “to tie you up to a cactus and skin you and let the ants crawl over you.”

Finally, Lewis asked, did David say anything about how such plans might be carried out?

“He said,” Warren answered, “that if I was released and you were to disappear, that I would be taken care of.”

“How did you respond to that?”

“I told him I didn’t want any part of it.”

When investigators went to the jail to begin talking to inmates, they also found inscribed upon the wall of David’s cell, in two-inch high letters, the sentence: “Lewis will die.” An expert called by the prosecution testified it was David’s handwriting.

David did not deny the scribbling. It was intimated that the sentence had originally read “Lewis will die of AIDS,” but someone anxious to see David get in trouble had erased the last two words. Investigators noted, however, that “Lewis will die” was inscribed within a tightly penciled oval and there would have been no room for the rest of the message.

Inmate George Philpott testified that David mentioned to him at least three times, once when they were playing cards, that he would like to have Lewis murdered. He also mentioned, Philpott said, that David wanted to arrange the murder of a fellow inmate—Gerhardt—who by then had fallen out with David.

Philpott said he told David he had better be careful about what he said because if he were to be overheard by one of the guards, additional charges could be filed against him.

And inmate Jack Dubois testified that David had talked to him at least five times about having Lewis murdered. He brought it up often enough, Dubois said, to make him believe that David was serious about it.

Quoting David, Dubois said that he wanted Lewis dead and Edwards “seriously hurt.”