The Mortician's Chilling Story About Organ Harvesting, Cremation
When a family-run business is around for decades, people tend to assume the owners have been competently providing a valuable service.
The case of the Lamb Funeral Home on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, Calif., proved that looks can be deceiving.
While generations of families entrusted their loved ones' bodies to the mortuary established in 1929 by Charles F. Lamb, authorities discovered in 1986 that countless people who paid for cremation services were not getting what they expected in return.
And then there was the persistent rumor—addressed in HBO’s new docuseries The Mortician—that the founder's great-grandson David Sconce had a hand in dispatching a business rival who was getting too close to the truth.
The Mortician unpacked the bizarre saga with the help of Sconce, who spent 10 years in prison for probation violation after a complicated legal journey. And—while he denied killing the aforementioned competitor—he remains unapologetic about what went on at the crematorium under his watch.
"To me, commingling of ash is not a big deal," Sconce said in the series of his admitted regular practice of cremating as many bodies as possible at once, which basically ensured that families wouldn't be receiving only their loved one's ashes. "I don’t put any value in anybody after they’re gone and dead, as they shouldn’t when I’m gone and dead. It’s not a person anymore."
He did worry at the time about getting caught, he said, because the practice—which Sconce alleged is common in the cremation industry—was a crime under the state’s Health and Safety Code.
Meanwhile, the National Funeral Directors Association said in response to The Mortician that, though "the actions chronicled in this documentary are both horrifying and real," they are not indicative of the business itself.
"It’s important to remember that the subject of this documentary is not representative of the funeral profession as a whole," the organization said in a May 30 statement. "Every day, tens of thousands of funeral directors work around the clock to help families take the first steps toward healing following the death of a loved one. With care, compassion and integrity, they help families create meaningful funeral and memorial services that reflect their loved one’s personal values, interests and experiences."
Sconce "stupidly justified" what he was up to, he explained in the series, thinking "nobody cares about these people anyway. Most of my cases were scatter-at-sea, no visitors, no viewing."
As for the remains returned to loved ones, Sconce maintained that it still didn't really matter what was in that urn. "People just got to be more in control of their emotions," he said, "because that's not your loved one anymore and it never has been. Love 'em when they're here, period."
But mixing up ashes was just the tip of the iceberg. And as the June 15 series finale suggested, he may have had even more skeletons in the close than previously known.
Here is the jaw-dropping story of The Mortician:
Charles F. Lamb founded the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1920s. His son Lawrence C. Lamb took over the business in the 1950s and then his daughter Laurieanne Lamb and her husband Jerry Sconce became the new owners in the 1980s.
While Laurieanne and Jerry ran the mortuary, their son David Sconce was in charge of cremation services, which were provided at a separate site they owned, the Pasadena Crematorium in nearby Altadena.
“He was funny, he was fun, he had a beautiful family,” Sconce’s ex-wife Barbara Hunt said of her former spouse in the HBO docuseries The Mortician, which chronicles the shocking downfall of the Lamb family business. "I was very infatuated, fell in love right away."
In hindsight, Hunt continued, she did find it odd that her husband-to-be’s grandfather Lawrence and grandmother Lucille Lamb both asked her—on their wedding day—if she was sure she wanted to marry Sconce, and her future father-in-law told her, "'You can back out.'"
"I thought it was very strange, but I didn’t let it stop me," she recalled. "I wanted to marry him."
Sconce started offering cremation services to other funeral homes, in addition to Lamb customers, in around 1982, as remembered in The Mortician by Mountain View Mortuary and Cemetery owner Jay Brown. The Pasadena Crematorium was located on the Mountain View property, Brown explained, and Sconce “seemed like a nice fella.”
Sconce took seats out of an old Dodge van and was driving all around Southern California, from Santa Barbara to San Diego, he said in the series, “picking up dead folks.”
Doing licensed business as Coastal Cremations Inc., he was charging $55 per “case,” or dead body, he said, which included the price of a cardboard container to return the ashes and the cost of diesel fuel to power the two-oven crematory. According to Brown, Sconce’s prices undercut everyone else in town.
Johnny Pollerana, who used to work at the crematory for Sconce, said in The Mortician that his boss “made everything seem quite normal” as they went from two or three bodies in each oven to 15 at a time.
The Lambs provided 194 cremations in 1981, before Sconce took over, according to figures relayed in the series, and 1,675 in 1982, under Sconce’s management. That number grew to 3,487 in 1983, 4,350 in 1984 and 8,173 in 1985.
“I could cremate one guy in two hours or put 10 guys and it takes two-and-a-half hours,” Sconce said in The Mortician. “What’s the difference? There is none. Hard-hearted as that sounds, there is none.”
Back in the 1980s, he drove a white Corvette with the license plate I BRN 4U.
In addition to “commingling” the ashes, as Sconce put it, authorities determined that it was also his regular practice to remove gold teeth and fillings from corpses’ mouths before they were cremated. Sconce was later charged with taking dental gold.
Pollerana said in the series that he refused to “pop chops” when Sconce asked, so his boss “did it himself.”
Sconce, meanwhile, said in The Mortician that his “employees did it at length,” while he “did it on request a couple of different times—family requests. Family wanted it back, who knows?”
He told police in 1987 that he did not sell gold.
The subsequent criminal investigation also uncovered that the Lamb Funeral Home was harvesting organs without consent.
In the series, Sconce detailed being inspired by witnessing a cornea removal on a body he was scheduled to pick up. Figuring he could provide an endless supply of usable parts, he formed the Coastal International Eye & Tissue Bank, Inc., listing himself as executive director.
“It doesn’t make sense to me to waste stuff when it can help other people,” Sconce said in the series, which noted that he could get $500 for brains, $750 for hearts and $100 for lungs from a biological supply company he contracted with.
The now former mortician blamed his family tree for his focus on money above ethics in his business.
Recalling that his grandfather Lawrence, who died in 1991, used to gather the family for pictures at Christmas and instruct them to “say, ‘money!’” Sconce said, “This was learned through generations, so if you want to say fruit of the poisonous tree, there you go.”
On Nov. 23, 1986, the Pasadena Crematory was destroyed in a fire that started when an employee fired up the ovens, stepped out to get high and fell asleep (an anecdote the unnamed ex-staffer relayed in the series, his face obscured).
“I found out these guys smoked their dope and they left!” Sconce said in The Mortician, recalling getting the call from Pollerana that the crematory had burned down. “There’s no words.”
Less than two months later, the San Bernardino County Air Pollution Control Agency was getting complaints about suspicious smoke, flames and the smell coming from Oscar Ceramics in Hesperia, Calif., about 70 miles away from Pasadena—including from a World War II veteran who recognized the source.
Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that, when he told a caller he likely wasn’t smelling human flesh, the man said, “Don’t tell me they’re not burning bodies. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.”
When San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies and other officials entered the ceramics facility on Jan. 20, 1987, then-Sgt. David Dicus said in the series, they found that bodies were being cremated en masse in pottery kilns.
They were burning "probably close to 200" bodies at a time, Pollerana said in the show, "when they came to shut us down."
But even though it was illegal to burn multiple bodies at a time—and the findings in Hesperia made for gruesome headlines—it was still only a misdemeanor infraction.
“Criminally, we didn’t know what we had,” Dicus recalled in The Mortician. San Bernardino Sheriff’s deputies conducted a search at the Lamb Funeral Home, he said, and Sconce’s mom Laurieanne was “the sweetest lady you ever want to talk to.” She was “more than willing to talk,” Dicus added, and seemed to have “no concept of what was going on.”
When they looked into the cold storage area they saw “hundreds of bodies wrapped up in cardboard,” Dicus said, as well as body parts. “It was ghastly,” he said, but recalled thinking, “These people are lawfully dead, what do we have here?”
Sconce told a TV reporter in 1987, “There were no improprieties with the operation either in Altadena or the subsequent operation in Hesperia, and we’ve been really, really misquoted, misunderstood and just crucified in the press for about a week.”
Ultimately a routine audit was the nail in the coffin for the Lamb Funeral Home.
In 1986, California Funeral Board auditor Skip Jones found in reviewing the business’ books that they hadn’t been properly handling money earmarked for clients’ pre-need trust accounts (the funds paid ahead of time for mortuary services when they’re needed).
“All these accounts she’d taken money for, 170, she hadn’t reported,” Jones said in The Mortician. Laurieanne promised to set up an account immediately and report it all to the CFB, Jones said, adding, “I had no reason not to believe her.”
Authorities found the following year that she had never followed through, according to Jones, and instead the funeral home had banked $90,000 in interest from their clients’ funds.
Sconce and his parents were arrested on charges of embezzling funds, organ harvesting and multi-cremation. Bail was set at $5,000 apiece for Laurieanne and Jerry, and they were soon released pending trial, but Sconce’s was set at $500,000.
“So,” he recalled in the series, “they swoop in and took me right to jail.”
On Feb. 12, 1985, Tim Waters—the owner of low-cost cremation provider The Alpha Society in Burbank, Calif.—was brutally beaten at his office.
Prior to that, he had been an outspoken critic of Sconce, according to multiple people in The Mortician.
He found Sconce’s prices suspiciously low, Mortuary Management magazine editor Greg Abbott said in the series. “Tim understood that the only thing that could make up for that is high volume,” Abbott said. “After that, Tim started telling people [in the industry] that he didn’t trust David.”
On April 8, 1985, Waters died of what an autopsy concluded was a heart attack. He was 24.
A neighbor reported seeing two guys sitting in a car outside his office, eating and dumping their trash outside the window, around the time Waters was attack. Burbank police stored the refuse in an evidence locker—where it sat until 1987, when Sconce came under investigation.
Fingerprints on a small carton of milk that was among the garbage collected from the scene matched Danny Galambos, one of Sconce’s employees.
Sconce denied having anything to do with Waters’ beating, telling a Pasadena police detective in 1987, per an interview recording reported on by the LA Times, “I never met Tim Waters, I never spoke to Tim Waters, I never saw Tim Waters until that photograph was shown to me. He was not an account of mine.”
At a June 1989 hearing regarding allegations against Sconce, Galambos testified, per the LA Times, that his boss hired him and two others to beat up Waters in retribution for purportedly spreading rumors about Sconce’s business. Galambos pleaded guilty in Pasadena Superior Court to three counts of assault for the attack on Waters and two other rival morticians; he was sentenced to five years’ probation.
Meanwhile, detectives had discovered that Waters’ autopsy hadn’t included a toxicology screening. In 1987, new tests found that he had traces of oleander, a poisonous plant that could be found growing in people’s yards all over Pasadena, in his system. His cause of death was updated to poisoning by Oleandrin and the manner was changed to homicide.
Sconce and his parents initially faced 67 felony and misdemeanor counts, including embezzlement of funeral trust accounts, unlawful removal of body parts from human remains, theft of dental gold, falsifying organ donation consent forms and multiple cremation of human remains.
A number of charges were dropped following a preliminary hearing, while prosecutors further slimmed the case down before they want to trial.
Over prosecutors’ objections to a plea deal, in September 1989 Sconce pleaded guilty in Pasadena Superior Court to 21 counts, including mutilating corpses, conducting mass cremations, and hiring people to beat up three rival morticians.
He was sentenced to five years in prison. He had been facing 11 years if his case went to trial.
“We’re not totally unhappy with the outcome,” Deputy District Attorney Nancy Aronson told the LA Times after the plea was entered. “Here’s a guy who has been pleading his innocence all this time and now he pleads guilty. It certainly saved the taxpayers and everyone a lot of time.”
Meanwhile, Sconce was also charged with conspiring to hire a hitman to kill a potential buyer of another funeral home. A judge dismissed that case, but told Sconce that if prosecutors successfully appealed, he would have the option of pleading guilty and getting a sentence of lifetime probation in return.
That’s what happened: In 1997, per the Associate Press, Sconce pleaded guilty to murder conspiracy and was put on probation for life.
In April 1990, Sconce pleaded not guilty to murder in connection with Waters’ 1985 death, which Ventura County Deputy District Attorney Harvey Giss said at the time appeared to be the country’s first poisoning-by-oleander case.
At a preliminary hearing that October, Galambos testified that, when Sconce hired him to beat up Waters, “We were supposed to make it look like a robbery…[Sconce] said if we accidentally killed him, he could always get rid of the body, he could burn it.”
Galambos also testified that Sconce told him he poisoned “‘that guy you did a few months ago,’” referring to the beating.
However, prosecutors acknowledged at the time that they still couldn’t prove Sconce and Waters met up on the day the latter fell ill and died.
The case was set for trial but prosecutors dropped the charge in April 1991 after additional testing on Waters’ exhumed body cast doubt on the previous finding that Waters died of oleander poisoning. “We feel that even though the first expert concluded that oleandrin was there,” Deputy Ventura County District Attorney Kevin DeNoce said at the time, “the discrepancy creates a reasonable doubt that warrants a dismissal of the charges.”
Decades later, Sconce maintained he barely knew the guy, but also wasn't surprised he had died of a heart attack, citing Waters' hefty physique.
“I think I saw him one time in my life,” Sconce said in The Mortician, “but other than that I had no interaction with him…All there is to it.”
When Laurieanne and Jerry went to trial, they pleaded innocence—and pointed the finger at their son.
Extracting gold teeth and other ghoulish actions “were done by their son, David,” their lawyer Edward A. Rucker said in court, per the LA Times. “It’s resulted in a great tragedy for them, for a third-generation business and for the families of the deceased.”
But the jury didn’t buy that they had no idea what was happening under their noses. In April 1995, per the LA Times, Jerry was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to remove parts and one count of misappropriation of $100,000 in trust account money, but not guilty of four counts of illegally removing and selling body parts from corpses before they were cremated.
Laurieanne was convicted of three of four counts of unlawfully authorizing the removal of eyes, hearts, lungs and brains from bodies prior to cremation, as well as three counts of forging customer signatures on organ donor and cremation authorization forms.
They were each sentenced to three years and eight months in prison.
“They did it literally to steal the hearts of the dead, and break the hearts of the living,” Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John Ouderkirk said in court. “They were conning the bereaved to make money.” The couple appealed but ultimately served their full terms.
Jerry died in 2019 at the age of 85. Laurieanne, now in her late 80s, is leading a private life and opted not to participate in The Mortician.
Sconce continued to be in and out of trouble with the law after serving about half of his five-year prison sentence.
He was sentenced in 2012 to five years’ probation in Montana on a federal charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. (He maintained his neighbor gave him a rifle that he held onto to protect his pets from wolves.) He then waived extradition to California, where he was wanted for multiple parole violations.
He pleaded guilty in 2013 to violating his lifelong probation on the attempted-murder-for-hire plea deal from 1989 and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
“He doesn’t deserve a life sentence, given the entire history of this case,” his attorney Roger Diamond argued at the time, per the San Diego Union-Tribune. “He’s never solicited anyone’s murder and nobody has been killed as a result of his actions.”
In handing down the hefty sentence, L.A. Superior Court Judge Dorothy Shubin countered that it had been made clear that Sconce “could not have a gun for any purpose,” per the Associated Press, and possessing one was “something Mr. Sconce willingly chose to do.” Prosecutor Thomas Krag called it an “egregious violation of his probation.”
Sconce said in court, “I did something I shouldn’t have done. I have to take responsibility for what I’ve done.”
The California Funeral Board revoked the Lamb Funeral Home’s license in February 1989.
At the same time, per the LA Times, the CFB announced a new license had been issued to Lamb Management Co., a new outfit being run by Lawrence’s sons Bruce Lamb and Kirk Lamb, who had not been involved with the business run by their sister Laurieanne and brother-in-law Jerry. They changed the name of the business to Pasadena Funeral Home.
These days, the original Lamb Funeral Home is now a venue for macabre entertainment, including a tour of the mortuary facilities and an escape room experience.
A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of the families of 5,000 deceased people who received cremation services from Sconce—including some whose arrangements were being handled by other funeral homes that contracted out with Sconce for cremation—was settled in February 1992 for $15.4 million.
Many of the victims had no idea anything was amiss with their loved ones’ ashes until they read about the findings in Hesperia and the criminal charges.
“I was shocked, I was devastated,” Darlynn Branton-Stoa, who brought her father’s body to the Lamb Funeral Home to be cremated after his death in September 1986, said in The Mortician. “David Sconce, he’s just a monster, he’s evil.”
Nancy Hathorn, who hired the Lamb Funeral Home to handle her father’s cremation, said in the series that she later found out his brain and eyes were removed first.
“When we find out they just scooped up whoever, whatever, and that’s what we left in the desert [where they spread his ashes],” she said, “that was just so sad.”
Recalling how shocked their family was, Hathorn added, “My dad was floating around in hospitals everywhere being picked at and studied. He didn’t agree to that. We didn’t agree to that.”
Now 68, Sconce was released from Mule Creek State Prison in 2023 and participated in The Mortician.
“I’m still in shock from being out of custody,” he said in the show. “I can’t believe somebody’s actually taken an interest in what I’ve known for so long.”
While he spoke candidly about packing bodies into ovens, commingling ashes, pulling gold from the mouths of corpses and selling organs, he maintained that he didn’t personally harm any living people.
However, in the final moments of the June 15 finale, Sconce implied during a story about getting held up at gunpoint at a cemetery one night that he might—as alleged by his unidentified ex-employee earlier in the show—have some blood on his hands.
"I thought I was gonna die. I really did," Sconce said. "I can tell you more of this, but I can’t tell you on camera. I can’t tell you...All I can I say is, do you think I found that guy?"
He continued after a pause, "It’s one of the things I can’t talk about. The other thing I’ll tell you about too, but can’t talk about that either. Really, there’s three of them altogether."
But when Sconce told director Joshua Rofé he had to promise "not to tell on me," Rofé said in the series he was "not interested in having that information" in that case.
To which Sconce replied, "OK...Ah, it’s never gonna come back. Never gonna come back. Can’t come back." He chuckled.
(Originally published June 14, 2025, at 5 a.m. PT)
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