The Mortician’s premise revolves around the real-life horrors involving David Sconce at a funeral home in Pasadena, California. Founded by Charles F. Lamb in 1929, the Lamb Funeral Home was passed down to the next generation of the Lamb family. By the 1980s, Charles’ granddaughter, Laurieanne Lamb-Sconce, and her husband, Jerry Sconce, were running the family business. The couple left their son, David Sconce, in charge of the crematory. The business flourished until January 1987, when an unsettling complaint brought the funeral home onto the radar of the authorities.
Their undoing began with an uncanny call to the Hesperia Fire Department, reporting black smoke from a building that carried the smell of burning human flesh. When the Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth pointed out that the destination described was a ceramics shop, the complainant said: “Don’t tell me they’re not burning bodies. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.” That statement compelled Wentworth to check out the ceramics shop, and nothing prepared him for what he found.
What Happened At The Ceramics Shop?
When Wentworth visited Oscar Ceramics, he found that the ceramics company is in the business of cremating corpses. David has been using ceramic ovens to burn corpses after he was denied permits to construct a bigger crematorium. His family’s crematorium in Altadena had been destroyed in a fire. The family proposed to build another one near Shafter but was denied permits by Kern County Supervisors after residents in the area protested.
With that, David Sconce resorted to burning corpses in ceramic ovens. When authorities raided the ceramic shop, they found two ovens with the remains of partially burned humans. “They weren’t totally cremated when we shut the kilns down and opened them up,” Wentworth told the Los Angeles Times. “There have never been ceramic materials in that facility since it was built. We did find machinery used in cremations,” he added. The raid triggered a lengthy investigation that exposed multiple unethical practices at the funeral home.
Crimes Uncovered At The Lamb Funeral Home
Beyond operating an illegal crematorium to maximize profit, the Sconces were charged with multiple crimes ranging from fraud to mixing up remains for cremation, selling body parts, and extracting gold teeth from corpses. During their trial, the court heard that David, who was in charge of cremation, commingled the remains of up to 15 people for cremation. This was against the rule that requires only one body to be cremated at a time.
Under his watch, the business went from cremating fewer than 200 bodies in a year to over 8000. His former employees disclosed that he bragged about the number of bodies he could burn at once, and was proud to be called “Little Hitler.” The Sconces were also accused of cutting off body parts and selling them for research without the consent of the families that deposited the bodies.
Similarly, they pried gold teeth from corpses, going as far as breaking the jaws of dead bodies with a crowbar to pluck the gold. David’s parents were also accused of falsifying death certificates, among other fraudulent activities. Notably, the couple allegedly stole up to $100,000 in interest from the accounts of clients making advance deposits for funeral expenses. For these and other crimes, the Sconces were arraigned on 67 counts of felonies and misdemeanors.
David Sconce Regained His Freedom In 2023
Eight years after the scandalous practices at the Lamb Funeral Home came to light, David’s parents were each sentenced to three years and eight months in prison. Their son pleaded guilty to 21 charges five years earlier, and was facing a maximum 11-year sentence. However, he received a 5-year sentence after being held for two years without bail at the Los Angeles County Jail. That was in 1989.
David Sconce was also faced murder-related charges, including conspiring to murder a potential rival and his grandparents so that his mother could inherit the funeral home. For the former, he pleaded guilty in 1997 and bagged a lifetime probation. He violated his probation several times, culminating in a 25-year-to-life sentence in 2013. This was after he was found in possession of a stolen firearm. He was released on parole in 2023. Until the HBO documentary series premiered on June 1, 2025, Sconced had kept a low profile. Check out the whereabouts of Ted Bundy’s wife, Carole Ann Boone.
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