A Family Business (5 page)

But even if Lawrence had recognized the danger, it was already too late by the time he and Laurieanne consummated the sale agreement. The problems that began to surface with the incident at Oscar’s Ceramics early in 1987 actually had their origin some five years earlier. With benefit of hindsight, it can easily be seen that the troubles which befell the Sconces started in 1982. And they started with David.

4

The year 1982 held special significance for David. It was the year that he felt his life was over; that his situation was about as bad as it could get. He was twenty-six years old, an age when many of his peers were beginning to make their career mark; but David had no job, no marketable skills, no experience to speak of, and no prospects. He felt as though he were traveling backward.

Perhaps worse, his personal life had gone to hell as well. His wife, to whom he had been married for a year—an attractive, vivacious woman he had met at a football game and wed after a whirlwind romance—had left him. That had taught him what a devastating event divorce could be. It had not taken him long to recognize that being on the rebound was no fun; that freedom had its downside.

When everything came crashing down, David went into an uncharacteristic funk. Usually a buoyant optimist, like his father, he went into a deep depression. Life, he decided, was unfair. How did I get into this mess? he asked himself again and again. And how am I going to get out? But an answer continued to elude him. He was confused, unfocused, and unhappy.

To someone who didn’t know him well, David appeared to be both a charmed and a charming person. A physically handsome man with a trim, athletic physique, blue eyes that sloped slightly downward, and an infectious, ready grin, he could have graced a poster hyping the California Good Life.

A true Golden Boy, he was born in the Los Angeles suburbs, grew up there, and had planned to always stay there. He went to high school in Glendora, not far from Pasadena, the same school where his father coached football. Not surprisingly, since he was the son of a coach, David grew up with athletics as the center of his life. Sports represented the core of his universe, and he was lucky enough to have some talent as well. At Glendora High he ran track and he played defensive back on the football team. An extrovert who would try to strike up a conversation with a telephone pole, David made friends easily and was well-liked by his teammates. As in most schools around the country, from junior high through college, the jocks have their own clique, and David quickly became one of the more prominent members in the local group. In his senior year he was elected president of the Letterman’s Club.

After graduation in 1974, David enrolled at Azusa Pacific College, a small Christian school not far from his home. There were two reasons for choosing that particular college. One was his mother, whose devoutness had not diminished. All his life David had been particularly attached to his mother, and he realized that his selection of a college like Azusa Pacific would be especially comforting to her. His other and more practical reason was that his father had taken over as head football coach at the school, having made the transition in 1972, when David was a sophomore at Glendora High. David was motivated, therefore, by a desire to please both his parents: his mother, by choosing a Christian school; his father, by showing he trusted him enough to place his future directly in his hands.

David’s not-so-secret ambition was to play professional football, preferably for a relatively new and struggling West Coast team, the Seattle Seahawks. He thought the best way to attain that goal was to develop his talents through his father’s tutelage, to let Jerry shape him and guide him until he was ready to make his mark in big-time athletics. Unfortunately, things did not work out entirely as planned. Under Jerry, Azusa Pacific fielded only a mediocre team; under his tenure, the Cougars’ won-loss record was a less than glorious 25–30. The fact that the teams lost more than they won undoubtedly influenced Jerry’s departure; when he left the college in 1977, he opened a sporting goods store. It also undoubtedly affected David’s plans for a career as a pro. Players from small teams like Azusa Pacific, particularly teams with losing records, are not as attractive to professional scouts, especially if the players are not significantly outstanding. David was not. One of the hard facts that he had to learn early in his college career was that his athletic talents were limited. He might make a career as a coach, as his father had, but he was not destined to play pro football.

When David had enrolled at Azusa Pacific, he announced an intention to major in business. But that declaration was for the clerks in the front office; his real interest was athletics, not accounting. When he realized that Azusa Pacific was not going to put him on a fast track to the Seahawks, he lost interest in college. Well before he had enough credits to graduate, he quit.

On the surface, David had always been a confident, cheerful, happy-go-lucky, eager, Eagle Scout kind of youth, a young man who took things in stride and never let adversity get him down. If Plan A fell apart, he always had a Plan B. In that context, dropping out of college was no big deal. He still had his quick mind, his conviviality, and a gift for sounding absolutely, totally sincere. Superficially, David was living up to the Golden Boy image. But there was a darker side to his personality as well.

It is a requisite part of many athlete-composed subcultures—the jock set—to engage in wild and sometimes destructive pranks. Such activities are virtually de rigueur in certain brotherhoods. It certainly was in parts of David’s crowd. Members of the group to which David belonged were not only together on the athletic fields, they hung out together, partied together, and raised hell together. And whenever they gathered, David was always there, especially when they joined to raise hell.

One of David’s favorite capers, according to one coworker, involved loading up a car with raw eggs and cruising the Los Angeles suburbs looking for likely targets. When he found a hapless victim, they pelted him with eggs, laughing uproariously as the yolk and mucouslike white seeped into his clothing. After all, egg-throwing was a time-honored youthful escapade and it was all in good fun, except, of course, for the victim. The problem was, not all of his activities were as temperate as egg-throwing. According to another co-worker, David made the half hour drive to L.A.’s skid row, where he would beat up drunks, and then joke about it afterward.

In November 1974, when he was eighteen years old and a freshman at Azusa Pacific, David was faced with a not uncommon situation: his girlfriend decided to break off their relationship.

This presented more serious problems to him than it might to other teenagers. David lived in a macho world, surrounded by jock, macho friends. They lived by a macho code, one that had little tolerance for rejection, especially female rejection. The brush-off was a threat to his group status as well as a blow to his considerable ego. So David did what he thought was the macho thing: he tried to get even.

While the girl and her parents were out one night, he burgled their home. Although he escaped undetected, his satisfaction was short-lived. Even though he had been successful, the act somehow failed to vindicate the indignity he had suffered; it didn’t erase the shame.

This was an early indicator of David’s exceptional ability to hold a grudge, a characteristic that would be more apparent in an even more serious vein several years later. But in David’s teenage mind, the insult he had suffered extended much beyond the hurt he had actually felt by the dissolution of the affair. His craving for revenge proved totally disproportionate to the injury endured. And the thirst to inflict further harm was not yet sated.

Thirteen months after the initial break-in, on Christmas Eve 1975, while his former girlfriend and her parents were attending midnight church services, David burgled their home a second time, walking off with some $2500 worth of stereo equipment. Still, that did not satisfy his determination to seek retribution. He had to make his act more personal, to let his victim know, even if in a very subtle way, that he was a person not to be trifled with. The way he chose to articulate this was very strange. It also was very telling. After hiding his loot, David went to the church where the girl and her family were worshiping and squeezed into the pew with his victims, joining them when they raised their voices in song proclaiming peace on earth and goodwill to men.

Soon afterward, motivated by the realization that his name had been given to authorities as a suspect, David went to the police and tearfully confessed. He had committed the burglaries, he sobbed, as part of a misguided attempt to make the girl suffer for jilting him. Turning on the charm, he simulated contrition. It was a dumb thing to do, he admitted, but he was young, and his testosterone was flowing, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The policeman nodded. In a way, the officer said, he could understand that. He could see how a teenager might be so upset by being brushed off by his girlfriend that he would do something stupid. David bobbed his head in agreement. But the breakup had occurred more than a year earlier, the officer pointed out. Why wait a year to get even?

Eventually, David pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from the incidents and lightened his responsibility still further by helping police recover the stolen merchandise. As a reward for his cooperation, his one-year sentence was suspended, allowing him to escape without pulling jail time. He did, however, serve two years on probation and was ordered to pay a fine of $500, plus $125 in restitution.

Actually, he was very lucky. Not long afterward the law was changed to make
every
residential burglary a felony, completely eliminating the misdemeanor provision. If David were accused today of the same violations, he almost certainly would face a stiff jail sentence.

In 1982, seven years after the break-ins, David was desperate for a job. After dropping out of college, he went to work for his father in his sporting goods store, but that venture failed fairly rapidly, either because of Jerry’s lack of talent in running a small business or, as David would later contend, because his father was cheated by another entrepreneur. Whether he was right or wrong, David vowed revenge against the man he thought was responsible for his father’s store closing. It was still another example of his inability to forget a slight, either real or imagined.

After the store closed, Jerry took a much more active role in the operation of the funeral home, while David made a stab at a few other jobs. He worked for a short while as a card dealer in a gambling casino, and he ushered at hockey games. He even applied for a job as a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. Surprisingly, considering what would occur later, he almost made it. He survived the preliminary weeding-out process for deputy trainees, but he ran into trouble on the physical. When he took the vision test, he discovered he was color-blind, and that automatically disqualified him.

When the possibility of a deputy’s job fell through, David became even more depressed. By then he had become infected with the yuppie disease: he wanted to make
big
money; he just didn’t know how.

Upset because his son seemed to be wandering without direction, Jerry had a suggestion: Why didn’t he go back to school? Become a licensed embalmer, he suggested, and join the funeral home as a skilled contributor. All his life David had been doing odd jobs around the mortuary, but his function was little more than that of a hired hand. As an embalmer, however, he could play a valuable role.

David was lukewarm about the idea. His dream of personal fortune extended beyond pumping preservatives into dead bodies. But since he didn’t have anything better to do, he went along. However, as he had already proved at Azusa Pacific, the disciplined life of a student did not fit his personality. It wasn’t long before he became restless and decided to quit. His decision was greeted with a decided lack of enthusiasm by his parents, who were hoping that he would become interested in the profession and accept his place in the generational succession. But David brushed off their fears. Don’t worry, he told them eagerly, I have a much better idea.

5

While struggling to keep up with his class in embalming school, David worked part-time for his parents at the funeral home, performing unskilled jobs such as picking up bodies at hospitals or nursing homes and transporting them either to the funeral home or to the crematorium. It was the first time in several years that he had taken any active, sustained part in the funeral home’s operation, and he was struck immediately by the changes that had taken place. For one thing, he noticed that more people were being cremated than had been the case in the past; so many, in fact, that the demand was putting a strain on the area’s existing cremation facilities. But that was only part of the industry’s metamorphosis. From top to bottom it was undergoing a quiet revolt, and David was working out a plan so he could employ this to his and his family’s financial advantage.

Until the early eighties a funeral home, for several reasons, had proved to be a good, solid investment for its owners. For one thing, the number of customers a funeral home could count on receiving in any given year was remarkably predictable since, over the long haul, the death rate did not fluctuate by very much. For another, owners of mortuaries, unlike those of other service-oriented businesses, did not have to spend a lot of money on advertising, since funeral homes tended to draw their clients by word of mouth or tradition, a twist on the definition of brand loyalty. For still another reason, studies had revealed that potential customers did not engage in much comparison shopping. When someone died, the grief-stricken loved ones tended to go to a particular funeral home and arrange the services without telephoning around to see if a competitor might offer better rates. Most people apparently regard shopping for a funeral as demeaning to the dead. Finally, and very importantly, a funeral home’s profit margin was relatively high. Funeral homes bought their supplies at reasonable costs, then sometimes charged fees that bordered on the extortive when the customers were billed for the service. In the industry, a thirty-percent profit was not unusual.