Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (32 page)

Tim and I continued to run our respective businesses and in time we even became what can only be described as friendly competitors. He was renting a large blue ’76 limo to the studio filming weekly episodes of
Remington Steele
, starring Pierce Brosnan. At the end of the second year the studio tried to purchase the limo because the show had been doing well, so Tim said he would sell it the following year if they would continue renting it for one additional season.

The studio contacted me and said they wanted me to possibly find a match for Tim’s car. A business associate of mine named Jack Rodman had an identical gray ’76, so I offered to buy his limo and train him in funeral work, which would keep him very busy. Painting the limo to match Tim’s dark blue limo was easy, but dying the interior proved to be more difficult. As usual, the studio wanted the car yesterday, so my painter had to do a real rush job. Instead of spraying dye on the seats and headliner as he was instructed, he used blue paint instead. The seats hardened like cardboard, but it was a perfect match! Despite Tim’s losing this lucrative rental, we remained good friends and I followed the progress of his business.

The limo he had was of no use to him after he lost the rental so he sold it to me, which I ended up using once, in a very unusual way. Mischa was attending North Hollywood High School when some of the kids decided to pull a prank on a female student. She had a little stuffed pig that she carried with her at all times. As a joke, a student stole it and was showing it to his buddies, including Mischa, who brought it home and took a Polaroid picture of it bound up with twine. The student was in a panic to get it back, so she was given a ransom note instructing her to come up with $50,000 in Monopoly money for its return.

By this time word had gotten around, and much of the school was becoming aware of the scheduled hostage payoff. We put our heads together and planned to make the pickup at a specific time and place. On the day of the exchange, Mischa drove the limo with me in the backseat. I was in a black suit and a snap-brim hat, which made me look like a Mafioso. As we drove up to make the drop-off, many students gathered on the school’s front lawn just after lunch break to see what was going to happen. A student approached the limo with the Monopoly money, and
we turned over the pig. These silly but imaginative antics were reminiscent of the Hollywood productions with which we were involved.

In the mid-’80s, a couple of LA County funeral home owners decided to sell their businesses and retire. One was in Monterey Park and belonged to Art and Ruth Cram. After months on the market as an operating mortuary, they hadn’t gotten any offers, so they sold the property by itself while agreeing to sell us the name Carter-Cram for a percentage of the revenue they had generated annually. Another funeral director, Amos DuBois in San Gabriel, was also planning to retire and was aware of our plans to take over the Monterey Park mortuary, which was only about five miles away.

Since Carter-Cram and DuBois were close to each other, it seemed reasonable that if we purchased the two well-known names, we could combine them into one facility. A property was available just around the corner from the famous San Gabriel Mission, belonging to a casket company that decided to close the facility. After the purchase we did extensive remodeling and introduced a number of arches into the building to reflect the flavor of the nearby mission. We combined the two names together to form DuBois, Carter-Cram and hired a manager, because neither one of us wanted to commute there each day.

As it turned out, we never took into consideration the fact that both of these mortuaries had been on their town’s main streets, while our new mortuary was not. When the locals would drive down the main streets of the two towns, the old landmarks were not there anymore, so many people just figured that they had gone out of business. The new facility never performed very well, so after a couple of years we made the decision to sell it. The same day escrow closed, the Whittier Narrows earthquake occurred and the building sustained a great deal of damage. Maybe it was some kind of divine intervention since we had no earthquake insurance, or maybe it was just a case of the new property owner getting screwed by the fickle finger of fate.

Tim Waters had complained to me on a few occasions about a young man named David Sconce, who operated a cremation business in conjunction with the Lamb Funeral Home, which his parents owned. All funeral homes do a certain number of cremations, which they farm out to cemeteries with retorts. We had been sending ours out for years to Evergreen Cemetery, one of the oldest in Los Angeles.

The city had closed many crematories because of the poor local air quality. Early technology in filtering smoke from retorts was quite rudimentary. Newer models had high-efficiency scrubbers to clean the exhaust. When the Air Quality Management District (AQMD) shut down the crematory at Westwood Village Cemetery, we became concerned that Evergreen’s crematory might also be shut down.

Nobody was able to determine how David Sconce could undercut the fees charged by other crematories, especially considering the convenience he offered. Normally, a mortuary had to deliver a case to a crematory and later pick up the ashes, but David would make the pickup and return the ashes, all for an extremely low fee. It was a long time before we found out about his dirty secrets—and what shockers they were. He would ultimately be charged with the worst criminal activity ever seen in the funeral industry, but for the time being things continued as usual.

David had been making the rounds to all the mortuaries attempting to solicit their business, including that of Tim Waters. In spite of his young age, Tim wasn’t the type of person to get talked into anything that he was opposed to. Tim had been using the Grand View Cemetery in Glendale and he respected the people at this family-owned facility, so he wasn’t about to switch and start using David’s service.

Tim’s manager, Don, called me one day and said that Tim had been brutally beaten at his office by two very buff guys, and he was in Kaiser Permanente Hospital in the valley. I visited him there, and he was hardly
recognizable because his face was badly swollen and his nose was broken. He said he had no idea who might have done this to him or why. In just over a month, Don called again to inform me that Tim was back in the hospital, but this time he was very concerned that Tim might not make it.

He had gone to his parents’ home in Camarillo, where he had become violently ill and had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance. The hospital was about sixty miles north of LA, and when I arrived there the receptionist at the nurse’s station said that she couldn’t give me any information because it was hospital policy to discuss a patient’s status only with family members. Having been in the funeral business for years, I knew that this could mean only one thing.

After I returned to Los Angeles, Tim’s mother called, gave me the bad news, and said she wanted me to take care of his funeral. It was to be held at Saint Charles Catholic Church in North Hollywood, which everyone called “Bob Hope’s Church” because he lived less than a mile away from it and had donated a great deal of money for its construction. Two days after Tim’s death, I drove to the Ventura County Coroner’s Office to bring Tim back to LA. Over the years transporting cases had become routine, but this time it was very strange to look in the rearview mirror and see a cot carrying somebody I knew so well, wondering how this could be at his young age of 24.

Tim had been grossly overweight, but would never discuss that with anyone. This might have contributed to or caused his death, but there was also that horrible beating that he had gotten just weeks before. The pathologist who did the autopsy told me that Tim had an enlarged heart and liver due to his obesity. All coroner’s cases are immediately weighed so they would have that information on record, but my inquiry didn’t shed any light on that issue. The doctor said their scale went up to only 350 pounds, and the needle was resting on the peg at that mark. The pathologist seemed to be somewhat uncertain about a distinct cause of death, even though it was attributed to heart failure. Little did we know at the time that it may have been something much more disturbing.

At his family’s request, we put Tim in an African mahogany casket, the lid of which we could barely close because he was so large. He was interred in a lawn crypt at Grand View Cemetery. After the cryptside service, his father came over to me and we talked for a few minutes. Surprisingly, he told me that Tim had commented to him that the only person he couldn’t out-finagle in a business deal was Allan.

Following Tim’s death, the word got out that the crematory facility that David Sconce had been operating in the town of Altadena, just north of Pasadena, had recently had a big fire. David denied it and said it was only a small flare-up.

One of the hot-button industry issues at the time was a ruling from the State Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers that no crematory could cremate more than one person at a time, and that under no circumstances could there be any commingling of ashes. Ron decided to send a letter to the Lambs about this matter and enclosed a form for them to sign and return.

David showed up at our office and demanded an explanation for the letter. Ron explained that we were merely carrying out our responsibility to the families we were serving and protecting ourselves at the same time. David claimed that Ron’s letter had brought his grandmother to tears. We never did receive the form back from him, but in spite of David’s resentful reaction, it would turn out that Ron was admonishing him to never do precisely what he was in fact doing.

One evening at home, Ron heard a knock on his front door. When he answered it, he found two men standing there who identified themselves as undercover LA Police Department detectives. They told him that they were investigating allegations that his car had been involved in a hit-and-run accident. Ron took them into his garage to prove that his car had no damage, but once inside the garage they beat him severely and even splashed bleach from his pool supplies all over his face. As soon as they fled, he called me.

Our homes were both in the Hollywood Hills and it took me only three minutes to get there. Upon my arrival, I saw Ron was standing in the driveway, holding a blood-soaked towel to his face. When the police arrived they asked a lot of questions about the possible motive, but for the life of us, we could not think of anyone who would have a reason to carry out such a horrible attack.

Shortly thereafter, the news broke that David had been arrested for operating an illegal retort. The allegation involved the use of a former pottery kiln in Hesperia, California. Many of the residents had complained to the authorities about a foul smell in the air that had continued for months. An AQMD officer had gone there to investigate and found the facility behind a locked chainlink fence. He buzzed the
intercom and announced that he was there to do an inspection but was informed by an employee that he didn’t have the authority to let anyone in. The inspector told him that if he didn’t open the gate immediately he would have a sheriff’s deputy there in ten minutes with a pair of bolt cutters and arrest the employee for hindering an investigation.

The inspector must have been horrified when he saw bodies stacked like cordwood, with fluids from decomposing bodies leaking onto the floor. This discovery led to an investigation that lasted many months. David’s employees were vigorously interviewed by the police and threatened with prosecution for their complicity. Soon they were talking nonstop about all the illegal activities taking place. They admitted that one time they had crammed sixteen bodies into the Altadena Crematory furnace that was supposed to handle only one at a time. They fired it up and went to get something to eat. Once a body starts burning it’s like a candle, as the fat melts and makes additional fuel. That’s how the fire broke out, and it was no mere flare-up. It destroyed the structure, so it became necessary for David to move his facility to Hesperia. David was arrested on numerous criminal charges.

Enough time had elapsed between Tim’s beating and Ron’s attack that we never connected the two, so Ron couldn’t believe it when a police detective named Dennis Diaz contacted him and gave him an account of how David Sconce had ordered both beatings.

As the trial proceeded, all the lurid facts came to light. A whole plethora of felony counts included mutilating bodies, commingling ashes, returning the wrong ashes to families, removing and selling human organs to medical research facilities, and removing gold fillings. All told, there were about twenty-eight felony counts against him, including some horrendous activities so outlandish that no laws governed them. Unfortunately, they offered David a plea bargain, which would reduce the charges to a much smaller number if he pled guilty to some lesser counts. The case was such a huge scandal that two books were published about the whole affair—
Chop Shop
by Kathy Braidhill and
A Family Business
by Ken Englade.

After David’s conviction and imprisonment, even more shocking news came to light. Anyone who has seen documentaries or read articles on prison life is aware that incarcerated criminals often confess their crimes to fellow inmates. In some cases, these prisoners then pass the information on to the authorities for possible reductions of their own sentence.
This has happened so many times you would think that criminals would know better, but the lure to boast to others must be too great. While serving out his prison term, David admitted to a cellmate that he had murdered Tim Waters by putting oleander extract in his food. Tim ate out all the time and probably was poisoned in a restaurant when he left his table to use the restroom, providing David a chance to taint his meal.

The Ventura County Coroner’s Office still had a vial of Tim’s blood, because coroners often keep blood and tissue samples for years. In Tim’s case, this had probably been done because the cause of death was questionable. After extensive analysis, this blood tested positive for oleander in a sufficient quantity to be a fatal dose. However, a problem arose in determining who might have had access to the samples and whether they were compromised. I’m sure the attorneys would have argued these facts out in court, so the only way to proceed was to disinter Tim from Grand View Cemetery. They performed a second autopsy and took new tissue samples, but Tim had been dead for about five years and the new samples had been degraded and diluted with formaldehyde. As a result, David was never charged with Tim’s murder.