April 22, 2025 • 36 mins
In this episode, we look at the story of a Family Business, the Lamb Family Funeral Home… which wanted to be a booming business so badly that they allegedly circumvented a lot of laws, and even more ethics, for their profits.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Associate Producer is Leo Culp
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio. This episode contains mature content and quite graphic
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Dave Edwards was an ex
(00:29):
football player and a driver for the Pasadena Crematorium. He
drove the truck that picked up cadavers and unloaded them
at the business for cremation. Dave was on the road
a lot, so he didn't spend much time at the
crematorium nor the Lamb Funeral Home. Not long after his
start date, Dave witnessed a money making scheme that he
(00:52):
would rank second in the most revolting side hustles he
experienced working there. Sconce the manager of the crematorium, often
talked about quote making the pliers sing, popping chops, and
going to the mine. David's side hustle was yanking gold
(01:16):
teeth from the jaws of the deceased and selling the
gold at his buddy's pawn shop. The standard operating procedure
at Pasadena Crematorium was to examine all incoming bodies. David
usually did it himself, but if he wasn't there, his
(01:37):
employees did it. If they saw gold teeth, they marked
the body bag with a smiley face, along with the
chemical element abbreviation AU. David Pride rigor mortis. Jaws open
with a screwdriver. Usually, if that didn't work, he'd grab
a crowbar. Dave said he could hear a man's jaws
(02:02):
crack from across the room. With a set of pliers,
David extracted the teeth. He dropped them into whatever receptacle
was nearby. Usually it was a used styrofoam cup, sometimes
a tin can. One day, David left the cold room
(02:24):
whistling and walked into the office where his mother worked.
Lori Anne looked up from her paperwork, smiled, and asked,
how much AU did you get today, honey? David cheosed
like a proud child and shook a half cup of
gold teeth in her face. Welcome to the greatest true
(03:03):
crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode
we're calling the Criminal Cremators. It's the story of a
family business, the Lamb Family Funeral Home, which wanted to
be a booming business so badly that they allegedly circumvented
(03:25):
a lot of laws and even more ethics for their profits.
I'll tell you all about it after this quick break,
(03:51):
let's talk about only children. I should preface this by
saying I grew up an only child, so I'm allowed
to say all of this. Yes, Typically we fall into
two categories. We're known as being either really weird and withdrawn,
or we only children are unconscionably childishly selfish and in
(04:14):
desperate need of your full attention all the time. I
likely fall into that first category. I was one hundred
percent the kid who liked when recess was rained out
so I could read my book on the classroom floor.
In my defense, I had a thousand cousins to help
break me of this habit and parents who would not
(04:36):
tolerate bad behavior, so I was socialized to near normalcy.
I'm no selfless saint, but I do generally know how
to interact with people and the world. I know it
doesn't always revolve around me, and I'm pretty good at sharing.
Don't get me wrong. I would have absolutely never let
(05:00):
anyone else ever play with my toys if they hadn't
made me, if I hadn't been forced to share the stage,
I would wonder what the hell everyone was looking at
when Hello, I'm over here, all of us? Would I
think resort to this kind of self aggrandizement without course correction.
So my relatively well adjusted nature is not really a
(05:22):
credit to me so much as my parents. In this story,
the angry only child is the main perpetrator. His name
is David Scance. But because our show focuses on women
in true crime, though, there are a couple other key
characters at play. One is a key witness. She was
(05:45):
a former employee who was fired after asking too many
questions about the legitimacy and ethics of the company's practices.
And the other is, of course, David's mother. Lori Anne Lamb,
was the second generation in the family business. She also
(06:08):
had three siblings in line to take over, but her
two brothers were not interested. Her sister died tragically in
a plane crash before she could say one way or
the other, and this is relevant later, I promise, so
her parents groomed Lorianne to take over. When they retired,
she worked in the funeral home with her husband, Jerry Sconce.
(06:31):
Lori Anne was the church organist, Jerry was the Bible
school football coach. Our sources say that they were the
types to cite scripture during typical conversations, but especially when
consoling the bereaved. The business itself was well known, as
funeral homes tend to be locals, use the same businesses
(06:53):
over and over. Almost all their business is customer retention
from families, and most new referrals come from word of mouth,
because it's kind of ghosh to advertise death. That's not
to say there were no other funeral homes in the
Pasadena area, of course there were. It's just like, well,
(07:14):
when your car breaks down on the side of the street,
what do you do? You call your insurance, They send
a tow truck. The tow truck takes your car to
the nearest in network service shop. You, the driver, are distraught.
What are you going to do? Sit in the waiting
room of one autobody shop while you get a few
more quotes, spend another day retoe in your car, and
(07:38):
then hope the cheaper option services you just as well. No,
you have other concerns. Where can I rent a replacement vehicle?
Can I get it in time to pick my kids
up from school? How do I get time off work
to handle this? How do I get groceries? It's similar
when a loved one dies, but more now you have
(08:01):
bigger issues to deal with, plus the basics. Not to
mention the obvious, you're probably devastated with grief in addition
to all that stress. Where you send the business is
a small concern in the bigger picture of your life.
You just want to honor your dead, and for that
you go to a place you trust. Hopefully you're dearly
(08:24):
departed gave you a reference and removed the guesswork. All
that to say, the Scoance family's funeral home was well established,
especially because they were three generations running and most of
their clientele was elderly. They were doing well, but they
weren't an empire by any stretch. And then Lori, Anne
(08:45):
and Jerry's only child, David Scoance, had an idea. David
had been a high school football player. He was apple pie, handsome,
the homecoming king type who was generally lucky and things
generally went his way. After high school, he went to
embalming school. But David wasn't great at that and he
didn't really like it. Things weren't falling into place for
(09:08):
him now, so he forced them. In my experience at athletes,
they tend to do this. They want their way, so
they ask for it. If they get turned down, they
ask again, and rather than regrouping and trying a different tack,
they just turn up the volume. They try the same
thing over and over. In sports, that is a lot
(09:29):
of how you train. Not fast enough, run it again,
not strong enough, do it again, try it over and
over until you do it. And one of the things
about only children is that we don't hear no a lot,
or at least we take no as a try harder.
So handsome David Scott's has an idea to take his
(09:49):
family's funeral business to the next level. Up until nineteen
sixty eight, about four point one percent of bodies were cremated,
But in California things were changing. By the mid nineteen eighties,
(10:12):
about thirty four percent of the bodies were cremated, and
that's a huge upsling. David presented his idea in nineteen
eighty two as the percentages were rising. He wanted to
start a cremation service. You might be thinking that actually
sounds smart, and it was, but the details made no sense.
(10:34):
David's idea was to undercut the rates of their competitors,
charging just fifty five dollars per cremated corpse. That included
picking up bodies and returning the remains. The ovens in
which bodies are cremated are called retorts. The Lamb Funeral
Home only had two retorts, depending on the ovens efficiency,
(10:57):
one body took two hours to cremate at best, that
was twenty four bodies per day. If they had zero
down time, which is impossible, that was thirteen hundred and
twenty dollars. And if they ran their business round the clock,
they'd have to hire more help than that would pay for.
(11:17):
So smart idea poor execution. But his parents didn't say no.
They just pointed out those facts, thinking maybe he would
draw his own conclusion of no. And David came back with, yeah,
but who's saying we can only do one body at
a time. What if he filled the oven to the
(11:37):
max as many bodies as it would fit, Even if
he burned just five or six bodies at a time,
with both ovens running, that was six hundred and sixty
dollars per burn. That's good money. Again, they didn't say no.
Lorenne pointed out the very obvious problem if they were
(11:57):
all cremated at once, there would be no way to
separate their remains, then they couldn't be sure their customers
received the remains of their loved ones. David said, quote,
how can you tell if the remains are mixed anyway?
What difference does it make they're dead? I probably don't
(12:30):
have to say this aloud, but this is when David
should have been grounded, or at least sent to time out,
or at the very very least told no. What he
suggested was not only unethical, which should be obvious to
anyone at all, but also illegal, and yet they indulged.
Many of the Lamb's competing funeral homes had embalming services
(12:53):
on site, but very few had cremation retorts. They essentially
had to outsource the business of cremations to other specialty providers.
It still usually cost one thousand dollars, but if Lamb's
was only charging fifty five per body, that was a
huge margin for the other funeral homes. It's grimm to
(13:16):
think about, but it was business, and the families of
the deceased were notified of this change in location by law,
so those funeral homes were not doing anything wrong or illegal.
Just grizzly. David had to hire a bunch of unscrupulous
guys to carry out his dirty work. They were completely
(13:36):
separate from Lurianne's office crew because most of the work
would be done at the crematorium a few miles away
in Altadena. And when you hire unscrupulous people, things tend
to get sloppy. Let me tell you just how sloppy
they got. Right after this break when we left off,
(14:10):
David had just hired a new crew. They picked up
bodies in trucks and hearses, which was normal, and then
they'd store them in the cold room until they had
enough to fill the retort. Yep, they'd fill the retort.
Not only was it not the single cremation that the
families had been promised, but the workers made a game
(14:33):
of how many bodies they could wedge into the oven. Naturally,
the bodies sometimes got stuck, so the guys would shove
them further in with the two by four, or on
the other side, they'd stick a hook into the bodies
and pull them into place. Sometimes the hook went under
the shoulder, sometimes threw the neck out a cheek. Retorts
(14:57):
were three and a half feet tall, four feet wide,
and eight feet long. One source compares it to the
interior of an American sedan. If you're wondering how many
bodies was enough to fill the retort, their record was fifteen.
Of course, there were mistakes, like the time they accidentally
(15:18):
cremated a body that was supposed to be embalmed, but
it was a closed casket, so they just subbed in
a random body, and no one knew the wiser. Before
David's idea in nineteen eighty one, the Lamb Funeral Home
had cremated one hundred and ninety four bodies. By nineteen
(15:39):
eighty six, the cremation business was processing eight thousand bodies
a year, many more than any other such business in California.
(16:00):
If that's not grotesque enough, David was also mining the
bodies for sellable products before they were cremated. It started
with the gold fillings. The Scots Home did require signing
a permission form, but they kept their phrasing intentionally vague,
using varied phrases like tissue removal. Every crematorium had to
(16:25):
remove pacemakers and other artificial devices so they didn't explode
in the retorts, but the forms didn't include selling those
removed items. The ethical thing to do was dispose of
anything that didn't disintegrate in the burn, but to David,
it was a business opportunity. Before any bodies went to
(16:49):
be incinerated, he checked their mouths for gold fillings, and
if he found them, he would yank them out, put
them in a styrofoam cup or whatever receptacle was around,
and sold them to a friend at the Burbank Gold Exchange. Later,
David would try to claim that gold fillings aren't valuable
because they contained so many other medals, but that's exactly wrong.
(17:13):
Their higher quality. Most gold jewelry in the US is
fourteen caret gold. Dentists usually use eighteen caret gold. One
filling was probably worth thirty five dollars at the time.
With the kind of volume David was handling, it could
add up pretty quickly. In nineteen eighty five and eighty six,
(17:35):
David bragged that he was making five or six thousand
dollars per month with gold fillings. Investigators were never able
to determine the exact volume, but it did probably amount
to tens of thousands of dollars, and from there it
gets worse. After David started making money off the gold
(17:59):
fill he looked at the rest at the body David
sweet talked two tissue bank specialists into coming to work
for the crematorium. One of them was a Japanese exchange
student who went by George. He said the tissues were
not fresh enough for a transplant, but they could be
used by medical students, so David started harvesting and donating organs.
(18:26):
Lisa Carlin was David's other tissue bank higher and her
time there was very short lived. Lisa pushed back against
David's ideas pretty often. She asked questions. She didn't think
the wording in the permission forms should be so vague,
and unlike David's parents, she didn't cave. Their disagreements often
(18:48):
escalated into arguments, which ended in them screaming at each other,
and they'd have these fights in front of all the
other workers. They were not discreet at all. Lisa couldn't
imagine that families thought any of David's operations were all right,
and she told him so. After one of their fights,
(19:09):
David told another employee that girl has gone too far.
One of these days she's going to wind up dead.
Their arguments didn't end when she quit. She still had
to call and fight with him about money. That's when
George overheard him say over the phone, quote for five
hundred dollars, I can have you shot. For a thousand,
(19:31):
I can have you killed, and then I'll burn up
the parts so no one will know what happened to you.
George also heard David say multiple times how much he
hated his grandparents, his own grandparents, the ones who started
the business that he was now running wild with, and
he asked George for an untraceable poison to quote use
(19:53):
on his grandparents. George circumnavigated the topic, telling his explosive
employer to to an assistant LA coroner, you might be thinking, wait,
it's illegal to sell organs. It's always been illegal, and
(20:17):
you'd be right. The receiving universities were not buying the
organs from tissue banks. They paid a transportation fee for
each eye cornea lung, heart, kidney, even other parts like
the three tiny bones of the ear or a knee joint.
(20:38):
A serious harvester could accumulate twenty five thousand dollars per
body somehow, and this part remains mysterious to me. David
set up his own tissue bank to start sourcing the universities. Meanwhile,
other funeral homes in the area were suspicious of the
(20:58):
volume David was cremating. They knew the laws, and they
knew that David's crematorium only had two retorts. The only
way they could be burning at that rate was by
burning multiple bodies. At the same time, two other funeral
home directors said as much. One, Ron Hast, published an
(21:21):
open threat of exposure in an industry newsletter. He also
had telephone Lareenne and told her straight up that he
was going to expose them to you or me. That
sounds like a pretty stand up move telling someone to
their face, but David thought the phone call was worse
(21:41):
than the threat itself because it upset his mama. So
David paid two of his employees, giant former football players,
eight hundred dollars to go beat up Ron Hast and
his buddy to get Ron to keep his mouth shut.
The other whistleblower was Tim Waters. Tim didn't even own
(22:05):
a funeral home. He owned a limbousine rental place, and
he had a middleman service that connected funeral homes to crematoriums.
That meant he couldn't come close to David's fifty five
dollars per body fee. His only way to push back
against the prices was to convince his prospects that David
(22:27):
was cremating illegally. He might not have had physical proofs,
but he was shrewd enough to deduce that multiple cremations
were the only way David's costs were that low. David's
football employees were paid to beat up Tim too, and
they later went on the record saying that David also
(22:48):
offered to pay them to kill Tim. Tim died on
Easter Weekend nineteen eighty five. He was very obese, according
to the coroner's reports. Although the first autopsy showed his
cause of death as undetermined, that autopsy showed conclusive evidence
that it was heart failure. It wasn't until David was
(23:11):
on the line for his first crimes, the crematorium crimes,
that they would look further into the death of Tim Waters.
It was a summer of nineteen eighty six when the
town of Hesperia smelled weird, bad, awful smells coming from
(23:37):
the ceramics factory on the hill. They were talking about
Oscar Ceramics, a manufacturer of heat resistant tiles for space
shuttles run by David Scots. Many people reported the terrible smell.
One citizen who had fought in the Second World War said, quote,
(23:58):
I was at the oven at Auschwitz, and I know
that smell. But the police couldn't raid the factory without
a warrant. Still, the police chief knew something was up,
so he called the fire Marshal, who could enter any
building at any time if there was a fire. There
was most definitely a fire, and it was most definitely
(24:22):
a code violation. The original retorts had been made for
the purpose of incinerating bodies. These ovens had been made
for firing ceramics, and there was a big difference. A
crematorium necessitated a large smoke stacked chimney to control emissions.
(24:43):
The ceramics place only had an exhaust, and one fateful
day a citizen called in flames leaping from that exhaust.
So the fire Marshal pulled up with the police chief,
and despite the lone employee's efforts to prevent them, they
went inside. On the floor there was a big pool
(25:05):
of quote, dark smelly liquid the analysis later determined was
a mixture of diesel fuel and amino acids, which a
body emits when it is incinerated, and beyond that, flames
were flying out from behind the metal doors of the kilns.
The officials ordered the fires to be extinguished aside from
(25:30):
the chimney in the doors, the flames were dangerously close
to the puddle of fuel on the floor. While they
waited for the oven doors to cool, they found barrels
of ashes and bones in an ice chest. They saw
the remains of human prostheses, and when they were able
to open the doors of the kilns, out fell the
(25:53):
remains of a human foot. David Sconce and his parents
were arrested in nineteen eighty Sive, I'll tell you all
about the trial and the sixty eight criminal counts they
were charged with after the break. The most important thing
(26:26):
to establish in this criminal case was the fraud of
the forms themselves. The preliminary hearing would decide whether the
case merited a courtroom trial. Judge Elvirah Mitchell ruled that
it should, and she set David's bail incredibly high because
(26:46):
she agreed with the prosecution that David was a flight risk. Naturally,
the whole family denied culpability, but Laurie Anne's denial is
kind of astounding. The case hinged on the paperwork so much,
and Lori Anne was the one issuing forms and taking signatures.
(27:09):
She said that every single person underwent a consultation in
which they agreed to all the terms that were vaguely
detailed in the heavily revised forms. Several testimonies of the
bereaved were revealed otherwise and revealed that their signatures were forged.
(27:30):
Some of their names were even misspelled. Lorianne denied it all,
including their revisions to the forms themselves that better disguise
the very vague terms used for harvesting organs. She even
said the tissue bank existed because of her sister's untimely
death in the airplane crash. That is some bad juju.
(28:05):
The next judge victor person had to rule on the
probability that they had committed the crimes they'd been charged for.
He had no doubts. From there, the case transferred to
Superior Court. The third judge, Terry Smirling, was extremely sympathetic
(28:25):
to defendants, and he was notorious for it. He threw
out ten of the charges against the ssconces. He said,
the motives of the defendants are despicable, but that's not
the issue. The issue is whether a crime has been committed.
He determined that by signing the contract, relatives were bound
(28:47):
to its terms, so he threw out all the most
grotesque charges. It was in direct contrast to what judge
person had ruled that there was no contract. In September
nineteen eighty nine, David Scots pled guilty to twenty one
charges of mishandling remains and was sentenced to five years
(29:10):
in prison. Terry sentenced David to run sixteen felony charges concurrently,
and he served only five years because he'd already been
imprisoned while awaiting trial. That finish line was just over
a year away. There was, meanwhile, a huge deal investigating
(29:30):
the death of Tim Waters. He was the one who
had owned the company that transported the bodies, one of
the two whom David had paid his employees to beat.
According to protocol, the coroners had saved samples of Tim's
tissues for five years. At this point they were only
(29:52):
three years in. One coroner said there was no toxicology
report in the original autopsy, so they ran one. Because
bureaucracy is notoriously slow, the prosecuting lawyer went over the
coroner's head straight to the source at the lab. The
only thing they found in Tim's system was dijoxon. He
(30:16):
called to apologize afterward, but the coroner wasn't mad. He
was intrigued. Yes, dijoxon was typically found in medication that
someone with Tim's health might have taken, but Tim didn't
take any medication. The other thing that could have put
dijoxon in Tim's bloodstream was oleander. The coroner was willing
(30:40):
to testify, and he did. He did qualify that oleander
typically kills in the first few hours if it's going
to kill, but because of Tim's obesity, he thought the
fat stores might have delayed the outcome. A conviction started
to look possible, so the defense brought in another expert
(31:02):
who said the conclusion was inconclusive. The prosecution was devastated.
They had to drop the charge of Tim's murder or
risk David's exoneration on all accounts. The case for Tim's
murder was in court for months, even after Lisa's testimony
that she was fired and threatened for asking questions, Even
(31:24):
after multiple victims those related to the bodies illegally cremated,
came forward testifying they had no idea that the form
allowed for organ harvesting, even after the guys who beat
up Ron and Tim testified that they were paid to
do it. After multiple jailhouse informants said David had admitted
(31:46):
to everything. Prosecution appealed right away, but it didn't move
the needle for these crimes. David sconce served only two
and a half years and would be on probation for life.
(32:08):
If that's not hard enough to believe when don't you
hear what his mother said? When Lori Anne and Jerry
went to court for the scandal, Lori Anne said that
the mass cremations, the mixing of ashes, and extraction of
dental gold did happen at their family business, but David
(32:29):
did it all. He acted alone. They had no idea
any of it was happening, and he did it without
their permission. She threw her son under the bus and
the jury bought it. They acquitted both parents of all crimes,
as well as the conspiracy to steal and sell body parts.
(32:59):
The good to come up this case was changes to
laws about cremation. Cemetery Board investigators usually spent more time
looking at audits the financials of crematories. As a result
of this case, the biggest change was that a legislature
passed a bill authorizing on demand inspection of crematories. Plus
(33:21):
it is now very explicitly stated legally that all cremations
must be performed individually unless a multiple cremation is authorized
in writing, and even if the family agrees to it,
only a few crematories are able to perform multiple cremations.
(33:41):
But wait, there's more. In twenty thirteen, that's twenty four
years after the original ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court
Judge Dorothy Shubin ruled that David violated his probation after
he was convicted of having stolen a firearm. Apparently, David
(34:03):
swiped a gun from his neighbor in Montana, and when
he tried to pawn it, the shop owner discovered it
was stolen. Back in two thousand and two, when David
had gone to court for another unspecified probation violation, the
judge of that case said, if you come back before
me on a violation of probation, I will sentence you
(34:25):
to life in prison. Although that judge has since retired,
Judge Dorothy Shubin imposed that promise. Although it seems like
David Scance is the star of this episode. Let's not
forget the women on both sides of the law, without
whom this story might have ended very differently. Judge Dorothy
Shubin made good on that weird promise of life imprisonment
(34:48):
if David ever violated his parole. Lisa Carlin once worked
for David in his crematorium and wouldn't let her moral
compass be swung. Her testimony was instrumental in the series
of trials during the nineteen eighties. And then, of course
there's David's mother, Laurie Anne, and while it wouldn't be
(35:11):
fair to blame this whole saga of depravity on her
as an enabler, it is fair to acknowledge that without
her encouragement, these crimes may not have escalated to the
scale that they did. Join me next week on The
(35:45):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for our episode on
the Gold Club, once Atlanta's most prominent and criminal strip club.
A special thanks to Ken Inglade for his book Family Business,
which helped me write this episode, and the many sources
I used can be explored through our show's notes. The
(36:16):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay mcbreer and I hosted this episode.
I also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by
Emma Demuth and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme music by
Tyler Cash. Executive producer Scott Waxman.
Diversion audio. This episode contains mature content and quite graphic
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Dave Edwards was an ex
(00:29):
football player and a driver for the Pasadena Crematorium. He
drove the truck that picked up cadavers and unloaded them
at the business for cremation. Dave was on the road
a lot, so he didn't spend much time at the
crematorium nor the Lamb Funeral Home. Not long after his
start date, Dave witnessed a money making scheme that he
(00:52):
would rank second in the most revolting side hustles he
experienced working there. Sconce the manager of the crematorium, often
talked about quote making the pliers sing, popping chops, and
going to the mine. David's side hustle was yanking gold
(01:16):
teeth from the jaws of the deceased and selling the
gold at his buddy's pawn shop. The standard operating procedure
at Pasadena Crematorium was to examine all incoming bodies. David
usually did it himself, but if he wasn't there, his
(01:37):
employees did it. If they saw gold teeth, they marked
the body bag with a smiley face, along with the
chemical element abbreviation AU. David Pride rigor mortis. Jaws open
with a screwdriver. Usually, if that didn't work, he'd grab
a crowbar. Dave said he could hear a man's jaws
(02:02):
crack from across the room. With a set of pliers,
David extracted the teeth. He dropped them into whatever receptacle
was nearby. Usually it was a used styrofoam cup, sometimes
a tin can. One day, David left the cold room
(02:24):
whistling and walked into the office where his mother worked.
Lori Anne looked up from her paperwork, smiled, and asked,
how much AU did you get today, honey? David cheosed
like a proud child and shook a half cup of
gold teeth in her face. Welcome to the greatest true
(03:03):
crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode
we're calling the Criminal Cremators. It's the story of a
family business, the Lamb Family Funeral Home, which wanted to
be a booming business so badly that they allegedly circumvented
(03:25):
a lot of laws and even more ethics for their profits.
I'll tell you all about it after this quick break,
(03:51):
let's talk about only children. I should preface this by
saying I grew up an only child, so I'm allowed
to say all of this. Yes, Typically we fall into
two categories. We're known as being either really weird and withdrawn,
or we only children are unconscionably childishly selfish and in
(04:14):
desperate need of your full attention all the time. I
likely fall into that first category. I was one hundred
percent the kid who liked when recess was rained out
so I could read my book on the classroom floor.
In my defense, I had a thousand cousins to help
break me of this habit and parents who would not
(04:36):
tolerate bad behavior, so I was socialized to near normalcy.
I'm no selfless saint, but I do generally know how
to interact with people and the world. I know it
doesn't always revolve around me, and I'm pretty good at sharing.
Don't get me wrong. I would have absolutely never let
(05:00):
anyone else ever play with my toys if they hadn't
made me, if I hadn't been forced to share the stage,
I would wonder what the hell everyone was looking at
when Hello, I'm over here, all of us? Would I
think resort to this kind of self aggrandizement without course correction.
So my relatively well adjusted nature is not really a
(05:22):
credit to me so much as my parents. In this story,
the angry only child is the main perpetrator. His name
is David Scance. But because our show focuses on women
in true crime, though, there are a couple other key
characters at play. One is a key witness. She was
(05:45):
a former employee who was fired after asking too many
questions about the legitimacy and ethics of the company's practices.
And the other is, of course, David's mother. Lori Anne Lamb,
was the second generation in the family business. She also
(06:08):
had three siblings in line to take over, but her
two brothers were not interested. Her sister died tragically in
a plane crash before she could say one way or
the other, and this is relevant later, I promise, so
her parents groomed Lorianne to take over. When they retired,
she worked in the funeral home with her husband, Jerry Sconce.
(06:31):
Lori Anne was the church organist, Jerry was the Bible
school football coach. Our sources say that they were the
types to cite scripture during typical conversations, but especially when
consoling the bereaved. The business itself was well known, as
funeral homes tend to be locals, use the same businesses
(06:53):
over and over. Almost all their business is customer retention
from families, and most new referrals come from word of mouth,
because it's kind of ghosh to advertise death. That's not
to say there were no other funeral homes in the
Pasadena area, of course there were. It's just like, well,
(07:14):
when your car breaks down on the side of the street,
what do you do? You call your insurance, They send
a tow truck. The tow truck takes your car to
the nearest in network service shop. You, the driver, are distraught.
What are you going to do? Sit in the waiting
room of one autobody shop while you get a few
more quotes, spend another day retoe in your car, and
(07:38):
then hope the cheaper option services you just as well. No,
you have other concerns. Where can I rent a replacement vehicle?
Can I get it in time to pick my kids
up from school? How do I get time off work
to handle this? How do I get groceries? It's similar
when a loved one dies, but more now you have
(08:01):
bigger issues to deal with, plus the basics. Not to
mention the obvious, you're probably devastated with grief in addition
to all that stress. Where you send the business is
a small concern in the bigger picture of your life.
You just want to honor your dead, and for that
you go to a place you trust. Hopefully you're dearly
(08:24):
departed gave you a reference and removed the guesswork. All
that to say, the Scoance family's funeral home was well established,
especially because they were three generations running and most of
their clientele was elderly. They were doing well, but they
weren't an empire by any stretch. And then Lori, Anne
(08:45):
and Jerry's only child, David Scoance, had an idea. David
had been a high school football player. He was apple pie, handsome,
the homecoming king type who was generally lucky and things
generally went his way. After high school, he went to
embalming school. But David wasn't great at that and he
didn't really like it. Things weren't falling into place for
(09:08):
him now, so he forced them. In my experience at athletes,
they tend to do this. They want their way, so
they ask for it. If they get turned down, they
ask again, and rather than regrouping and trying a different tack,
they just turn up the volume. They try the same
thing over and over. In sports, that is a lot
(09:29):
of how you train. Not fast enough, run it again,
not strong enough, do it again, try it over and
over until you do it. And one of the things
about only children is that we don't hear no a lot,
or at least we take no as a try harder.
So handsome David Scott's has an idea to take his
(09:49):
family's funeral business to the next level. Up until nineteen
sixty eight, about four point one percent of bodies were cremated,
But in California things were changing. By the mid nineteen eighties,
(10:12):
about thirty four percent of the bodies were cremated, and
that's a huge upsling. David presented his idea in nineteen
eighty two as the percentages were rising. He wanted to
start a cremation service. You might be thinking that actually
sounds smart, and it was, but the details made no sense.
(10:34):
David's idea was to undercut the rates of their competitors,
charging just fifty five dollars per cremated corpse. That included
picking up bodies and returning the remains. The ovens in
which bodies are cremated are called retorts. The Lamb Funeral
Home only had two retorts, depending on the ovens efficiency,
(10:57):
one body took two hours to cremate at best, that
was twenty four bodies per day. If they had zero
down time, which is impossible, that was thirteen hundred and
twenty dollars. And if they ran their business round the clock,
they'd have to hire more help than that would pay for.
(11:17):
So smart idea poor execution. But his parents didn't say no.
They just pointed out those facts, thinking maybe he would
draw his own conclusion of no. And David came back with, yeah,
but who's saying we can only do one body at
a time. What if he filled the oven to the
(11:37):
max as many bodies as it would fit, Even if
he burned just five or six bodies at a time,
with both ovens running, that was six hundred and sixty
dollars per burn. That's good money. Again, they didn't say no.
Lorenne pointed out the very obvious problem if they were
(11:57):
all cremated at once, there would be no way to
separate their remains, then they couldn't be sure their customers
received the remains of their loved ones. David said, quote,
how can you tell if the remains are mixed anyway?
What difference does it make they're dead? I probably don't
(12:30):
have to say this aloud, but this is when David
should have been grounded, or at least sent to time out,
or at the very very least told no. What he
suggested was not only unethical, which should be obvious to
anyone at all, but also illegal, and yet they indulged.
Many of the Lamb's competing funeral homes had embalming services
(12:53):
on site, but very few had cremation retorts. They essentially
had to outsource the business of cremations to other specialty providers.
It still usually cost one thousand dollars, but if Lamb's
was only charging fifty five per body, that was a
huge margin for the other funeral homes. It's grimm to
(13:16):
think about, but it was business, and the families of
the deceased were notified of this change in location by law,
so those funeral homes were not doing anything wrong or illegal.
Just grizzly. David had to hire a bunch of unscrupulous
guys to carry out his dirty work. They were completely
(13:36):
separate from Lurianne's office crew because most of the work
would be done at the crematorium a few miles away
in Altadena. And when you hire unscrupulous people, things tend
to get sloppy. Let me tell you just how sloppy
they got. Right after this break when we left off,
(14:10):
David had just hired a new crew. They picked up
bodies in trucks and hearses, which was normal, and then
they'd store them in the cold room until they had
enough to fill the retort. Yep, they'd fill the retort.
Not only was it not the single cremation that the
families had been promised, but the workers made a game
(14:33):
of how many bodies they could wedge into the oven. Naturally,
the bodies sometimes got stuck, so the guys would shove
them further in with the two by four, or on
the other side, they'd stick a hook into the bodies
and pull them into place. Sometimes the hook went under
the shoulder, sometimes threw the neck out a cheek. Retorts
(14:57):
were three and a half feet tall, four feet wide,
and eight feet long. One source compares it to the
interior of an American sedan. If you're wondering how many
bodies was enough to fill the retort, their record was fifteen.
Of course, there were mistakes, like the time they accidentally
(15:18):
cremated a body that was supposed to be embalmed, but
it was a closed casket, so they just subbed in
a random body, and no one knew the wiser. Before
David's idea in nineteen eighty one, the Lamb Funeral Home
had cremated one hundred and ninety four bodies. By nineteen
(15:39):
eighty six, the cremation business was processing eight thousand bodies
a year, many more than any other such business in California.
(16:00):
If that's not grotesque enough, David was also mining the
bodies for sellable products before they were cremated. It started
with the gold fillings. The Scots Home did require signing
a permission form, but they kept their phrasing intentionally vague,
using varied phrases like tissue removal. Every crematorium had to
(16:25):
remove pacemakers and other artificial devices so they didn't explode
in the retorts, but the forms didn't include selling those
removed items. The ethical thing to do was dispose of
anything that didn't disintegrate in the burn, but to David,
it was a business opportunity. Before any bodies went to
(16:49):
be incinerated, he checked their mouths for gold fillings, and
if he found them, he would yank them out, put
them in a styrofoam cup or whatever receptacle was around,
and sold them to a friend at the Burbank Gold Exchange. Later,
David would try to claim that gold fillings aren't valuable
because they contained so many other medals, but that's exactly wrong.
(17:13):
Their higher quality. Most gold jewelry in the US is
fourteen caret gold. Dentists usually use eighteen caret gold. One
filling was probably worth thirty five dollars at the time.
With the kind of volume David was handling, it could
add up pretty quickly. In nineteen eighty five and eighty six,
(17:35):
David bragged that he was making five or six thousand
dollars per month with gold fillings. Investigators were never able
to determine the exact volume, but it did probably amount
to tens of thousands of dollars, and from there it
gets worse. After David started making money off the gold
(17:59):
fill he looked at the rest at the body David
sweet talked two tissue bank specialists into coming to work
for the crematorium. One of them was a Japanese exchange
student who went by George. He said the tissues were
not fresh enough for a transplant, but they could be
used by medical students, so David started harvesting and donating organs.
(18:26):
Lisa Carlin was David's other tissue bank higher and her
time there was very short lived. Lisa pushed back against
David's ideas pretty often. She asked questions. She didn't think
the wording in the permission forms should be so vague,
and unlike David's parents, she didn't cave. Their disagreements often
(18:48):
escalated into arguments, which ended in them screaming at each other,
and they'd have these fights in front of all the
other workers. They were not discreet at all. Lisa couldn't
imagine that families thought any of David's operations were all right,
and she told him so. After one of their fights,
(19:09):
David told another employee that girl has gone too far.
One of these days she's going to wind up dead.
Their arguments didn't end when she quit. She still had
to call and fight with him about money. That's when
George overheard him say over the phone, quote for five
hundred dollars, I can have you shot. For a thousand,
(19:31):
I can have you killed, and then I'll burn up
the parts so no one will know what happened to you.
George also heard David say multiple times how much he
hated his grandparents, his own grandparents, the ones who started
the business that he was now running wild with, and
he asked George for an untraceable poison to quote use
(19:53):
on his grandparents. George circumnavigated the topic, telling his explosive
employer to to an assistant LA coroner, you might be thinking, wait,
it's illegal to sell organs. It's always been illegal, and
(20:17):
you'd be right. The receiving universities were not buying the
organs from tissue banks. They paid a transportation fee for
each eye cornea lung, heart, kidney, even other parts like
the three tiny bones of the ear or a knee joint.
(20:38):
A serious harvester could accumulate twenty five thousand dollars per
body somehow, and this part remains mysterious to me. David
set up his own tissue bank to start sourcing the universities. Meanwhile,
other funeral homes in the area were suspicious of the
(20:58):
volume David was cremating. They knew the laws, and they
knew that David's crematorium only had two retorts. The only
way they could be burning at that rate was by
burning multiple bodies. At the same time, two other funeral
home directors said as much. One, Ron Hast, published an
(21:21):
open threat of exposure in an industry newsletter. He also
had telephone Lareenne and told her straight up that he
was going to expose them to you or me. That
sounds like a pretty stand up move telling someone to
their face, but David thought the phone call was worse
(21:41):
than the threat itself because it upset his mama. So
David paid two of his employees, giant former football players,
eight hundred dollars to go beat up Ron Hast and
his buddy to get Ron to keep his mouth shut.
The other whistleblower was Tim Waters. Tim didn't even own
(22:05):
a funeral home. He owned a limbousine rental place, and
he had a middleman service that connected funeral homes to crematoriums.
That meant he couldn't come close to David's fifty five
dollars per body fee. His only way to push back
against the prices was to convince his prospects that David
(22:27):
was cremating illegally. He might not have had physical proofs,
but he was shrewd enough to deduce that multiple cremations
were the only way David's costs were that low. David's
football employees were paid to beat up Tim too, and
they later went on the record saying that David also
(22:48):
offered to pay them to kill Tim. Tim died on
Easter Weekend nineteen eighty five. He was very obese, according
to the coroner's reports. Although the first autopsy showed his
cause of death as undetermined, that autopsy showed conclusive evidence
that it was heart failure. It wasn't until David was
(23:11):
on the line for his first crimes, the crematorium crimes,
that they would look further into the death of Tim Waters.
It was a summer of nineteen eighty six when the
town of Hesperia smelled weird, bad, awful smells coming from
(23:37):
the ceramics factory on the hill. They were talking about
Oscar Ceramics, a manufacturer of heat resistant tiles for space
shuttles run by David Scots. Many people reported the terrible smell.
One citizen who had fought in the Second World War said, quote,
(23:58):
I was at the oven at Auschwitz, and I know
that smell. But the police couldn't raid the factory without
a warrant. Still, the police chief knew something was up,
so he called the fire Marshal, who could enter any
building at any time if there was a fire. There
was most definitely a fire, and it was most definitely
(24:22):
a code violation. The original retorts had been made for
the purpose of incinerating bodies. These ovens had been made
for firing ceramics, and there was a big difference. A
crematorium necessitated a large smoke stacked chimney to control emissions.
(24:43):
The ceramics place only had an exhaust, and one fateful
day a citizen called in flames leaping from that exhaust.
So the fire Marshal pulled up with the police chief,
and despite the lone employee's efforts to prevent them, they
went inside. On the floor there was a big pool
(25:05):
of quote, dark smelly liquid the analysis later determined was
a mixture of diesel fuel and amino acids, which a
body emits when it is incinerated, and beyond that, flames
were flying out from behind the metal doors of the kilns.
The officials ordered the fires to be extinguished aside from
(25:30):
the chimney in the doors, the flames were dangerously close
to the puddle of fuel on the floor. While they
waited for the oven doors to cool, they found barrels
of ashes and bones in an ice chest. They saw
the remains of human prostheses, and when they were able
to open the doors of the kilns, out fell the
(25:53):
remains of a human foot. David Sconce and his parents
were arrested in nineteen eighty Sive, I'll tell you all
about the trial and the sixty eight criminal counts they
were charged with after the break. The most important thing
(26:26):
to establish in this criminal case was the fraud of
the forms themselves. The preliminary hearing would decide whether the
case merited a courtroom trial. Judge Elvirah Mitchell ruled that
it should, and she set David's bail incredibly high because
(26:46):
she agreed with the prosecution that David was a flight risk. Naturally,
the whole family denied culpability, but Laurie Anne's denial is
kind of astounding. The case hinged on the paperwork so much,
and Lori Anne was the one issuing forms and taking signatures.
(27:09):
She said that every single person underwent a consultation in
which they agreed to all the terms that were vaguely
detailed in the heavily revised forms. Several testimonies of the
bereaved were revealed otherwise and revealed that their signatures were forged.
(27:30):
Some of their names were even misspelled. Lorianne denied it all,
including their revisions to the forms themselves that better disguise
the very vague terms used for harvesting organs. She even
said the tissue bank existed because of her sister's untimely
death in the airplane crash. That is some bad juju.
(28:05):
The next judge victor person had to rule on the
probability that they had committed the crimes they'd been charged for.
He had no doubts. From there, the case transferred to
Superior Court. The third judge, Terry Smirling, was extremely sympathetic
(28:25):
to defendants, and he was notorious for it. He threw
out ten of the charges against the ssconces. He said,
the motives of the defendants are despicable, but that's not
the issue. The issue is whether a crime has been committed.
He determined that by signing the contract, relatives were bound
(28:47):
to its terms, so he threw out all the most
grotesque charges. It was in direct contrast to what judge
person had ruled that there was no contract. In September
nineteen eighty nine, David Scots pled guilty to twenty one
charges of mishandling remains and was sentenced to five years
(29:10):
in prison. Terry sentenced David to run sixteen felony charges concurrently,
and he served only five years because he'd already been
imprisoned while awaiting trial. That finish line was just over
a year away. There was, meanwhile, a huge deal investigating
(29:30):
the death of Tim Waters. He was the one who
had owned the company that transported the bodies, one of
the two whom David had paid his employees to beat.
According to protocol, the coroners had saved samples of Tim's
tissues for five years. At this point they were only
(29:52):
three years in. One coroner said there was no toxicology
report in the original autopsy, so they ran one. Because
bureaucracy is notoriously slow, the prosecuting lawyer went over the
coroner's head straight to the source at the lab. The
only thing they found in Tim's system was dijoxon. He
(30:16):
called to apologize afterward, but the coroner wasn't mad. He
was intrigued. Yes, dijoxon was typically found in medication that
someone with Tim's health might have taken, but Tim didn't
take any medication. The other thing that could have put
dijoxon in Tim's bloodstream was oleander. The coroner was willing
(30:40):
to testify, and he did. He did qualify that oleander
typically kills in the first few hours if it's going
to kill, but because of Tim's obesity, he thought the
fat stores might have delayed the outcome. A conviction started
to look possible, so the defense brought in another expert
(31:02):
who said the conclusion was inconclusive. The prosecution was devastated.
They had to drop the charge of Tim's murder or
risk David's exoneration on all accounts. The case for Tim's
murder was in court for months, even after Lisa's testimony
that she was fired and threatened for asking questions, Even
(31:24):
after multiple victims those related to the bodies illegally cremated,
came forward testifying they had no idea that the form
allowed for organ harvesting, even after the guys who beat
up Ron and Tim testified that they were paid to
do it. After multiple jailhouse informants said David had admitted
(31:46):
to everything. Prosecution appealed right away, but it didn't move
the needle for these crimes. David sconce served only two
and a half years and would be on probation for life.
(32:08):
If that's not hard enough to believe when don't you
hear what his mother said? When Lori Anne and Jerry
went to court for the scandal, Lori Anne said that
the mass cremations, the mixing of ashes, and extraction of
dental gold did happen at their family business, but David
(32:29):
did it all. He acted alone. They had no idea
any of it was happening, and he did it without
their permission. She threw her son under the bus and
the jury bought it. They acquitted both parents of all crimes,
as well as the conspiracy to steal and sell body parts.
(32:59):
The good to come up this case was changes to
laws about cremation. Cemetery Board investigators usually spent more time
looking at audits the financials of crematories. As a result
of this case, the biggest change was that a legislature
passed a bill authorizing on demand inspection of crematories. Plus
(33:21):
it is now very explicitly stated legally that all cremations
must be performed individually unless a multiple cremation is authorized
in writing, and even if the family agrees to it,
only a few crematories are able to perform multiple cremations.
(33:41):
But wait, there's more. In twenty thirteen, that's twenty four
years after the original ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court
Judge Dorothy Shubin ruled that David violated his probation after
he was convicted of having stolen a firearm. Apparently, David
(34:03):
swiped a gun from his neighbor in Montana, and when
he tried to pawn it, the shop owner discovered it
was stolen. Back in two thousand and two, when David
had gone to court for another unspecified probation violation, the
judge of that case said, if you come back before
me on a violation of probation, I will sentence you
(34:25):
to life in prison. Although that judge has since retired,
Judge Dorothy Shubin imposed that promise. Although it seems like
David Scance is the star of this episode. Let's not
forget the women on both sides of the law, without
whom this story might have ended very differently. Judge Dorothy
Shubin made good on that weird promise of life imprisonment
(34:48):
if David ever violated his parole. Lisa Carlin once worked
for David in his crematorium and wouldn't let her moral
compass be swung. Her testimony was instrumental in the series
of trials during the nineteen eighties. And then, of course
there's David's mother, Laurie Anne, and while it wouldn't be
(35:11):
fair to blame this whole saga of depravity on her
as an enabler, it is fair to acknowledge that without
her encouragement, these crimes may not have escalated to the
scale that they did. Join me next week on The
(35:45):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for our episode on
the Gold Club, once Atlanta's most prominent and criminal strip club.
A special thanks to Ken Inglade for his book Family Business,
which helped me write this episode, and the many sources
I used can be explored through our show's notes. The
(36:16):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay mcbreer and I hosted this episode.
I also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by
Emma Demuth and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme music by
Tyler Cash. Executive producer Scott Waxman.
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