THE MORTICIAN

THE MORTICIAN is a three-part HBO documentary streaming on Max about a criminal controversy that occurred at a longtime, well-respected funeral business in Pasadena, Calif., during the 1980s. The miniseries includes interviews with victims, journalists, law enforcement, a judge, funeral home employees, business rivals, and even the ex-convict son of a married couple who were convicted for some of the crimes. As viewers watch, they won’t only uncover more and more, but they will also get more and more outraged.

This documentary starts off by interviewing Darlynn Branton-Stoa. She lays the groundwork of the documentary. She talks about death and how death is about saying goodbye to loved ones. That process of saying goodbye ends with burial or cremation. However, she says her father’s body was “violated and desecrated.” The movie goes on to say that, when it comes to the funeral/cremation business, there must be lots of trust involved. However, trust in one specific funeral business was totally eroded in five short years by the bad actors running the facility. Chief among them is David Sconce, the charming but hot-headed, pistol-packing grandson of the patriarch of a Pasadena funeral home named Lamb.

In an historical section, the movie says funerals used to be solely a family affair. However, during the Civil War, methods of embalming were perfected, and the business of the town undertaker was created. People wanted their loved ones treated with respect and dignity. So, the undertakers wore suits to compare themselves to professional physicians and lawyers. The age of the undertaker gave way to the age of the funeral home and the mortician. Customers still expected their loved ones to be handled with care. So, that’s one reason most funeral homes became family owned and operated.

One such funeral home was the Lamb Funeral Home of Pasadena, founded in 1929 by Charles Lamb. Lawrence Lamb, the son, took over the funeral home in 1950. Then, Lawrence’s daughter, Laurieanne, married a high school football coach named Jerry Sconce, and they had a son named David, who started a promising career in football until he stepped into a gopher hole and hurt his leg. So, his parents suggested David take some local community college classes to get a mortician’s license, and that’s what he did. David’s parents took over the funeral home in 1980, and David took over the company’s cremation business in 1981.

Under David’s leadership, the Lamb family funeral home used the Pasadena Crematorium at the Mountainview Mortuary and Cemetery. At the time, the normal price that funeral homes charged customers for a cremation averaged between $250 and $400. David decided to undercut the competition and charge only $55. He began making so much money that he started hiring multiple employees to work with him. However, this is where things take a turn.

David’s Pasadena crematory only had two ovens in it. If they were doing the proper technique of two hours for cremation and two hours for cooling the oven, he could only do about four bodies in an eight-hour shift. However, David started doing two to three bodies at a time, and up to 40 to 50 bodies a day, for the two ovens.

David had such a good deal going that his drivers collected bodies from Santa Barbara, 45 miles north of Los Angeles, to San Diego, 90 miles away from Los Angeles. He and his men found a way to fit up to 15 bodies in one oven over a four-hour period, including breaking bones. David and his employees even had a competition to see how many they could fit into a crematory. They acknowledge they had no idea whether the ashes they handed out to families actually contained their loved ones. David says his company legally dumped the ashes for most of the bodies in the ocean.

To David, the commingling of ashes doesn’t matter, not only in the mass distribution of ashes in the ocean but also in the personal funeral urns given to customers. “What’s it matter?” he asks the interviewer onscreen. “They’re dead. There is no person there, not anymore. Should’ve loved them while they were living.”

Thus, in 1981, the Lamb Funeral Home listed 194 cremations, but in 1982 under David it listed 1675. This was followed by 3487 in 1983, and 4350 in 1984. According to Episode Two, David’s staff registered 8173 cremations in 1985, and, by the end of 1986, they had racked up more than 25,280!

People started getting wise to David in the midst of this, however. A competitor, Tim Waters, who had his own cremation company, started asking questions about how David was able to cremate so many bodies so fast. He started doing some research on David and was about to publish an article in a mortuary magazine, but David heard about it. He sent one of his workers to keep Waters quiet. The worker hired a friend, and they beat Waters within an inch of his life. Later, Waters allegedly had a luncheon meeting with David and died of a heart attack the next day. The official autopsy listed heart attack as cause of death, but the medical examiners forgot to do a toxicology report. A year later, the authorities ordered a toxicology report and found remnants of oleander, a poisonous flower, in Tim’s tissue. By then, however, a hearing for both David and his parents was being held, so the report wasn’t part of the hearing or the following trials of David and his parents.

Episode Three depicts the results of that hearing, plus the results of two trials, one for David and one for his parents, and what happened to them after their trials. Episode Two also describes how David’s crematory services escalated and how the authorities caught David and his employees in January 1987. Episode Two also depicts how David and his parents got caught committing other crimes with the Lamb Funeral Home.

The quality of this miniseries is incredible. It’s well shot and edited. It pulls from quality vault elements to aid the narrative. It also does a great job telling viewers the macabre story and making the viewer feel disgusted. However, that is also the problem. People admit to doing horrendous stuff, which any sane person would not acknowledge doing. However, David, in his interview with the filmmakers, refuses to acknowledge that what he did was bad. Of course, he denies killing anybody.

MORTICIAN features some heartbreaking interviews with victims of the funeral home. One woman, for example, wanted her mother to be buried with her wedding ring. She was told it’s not the best idea to bury her mother with the ring. One man’s wife died from a tumor at a young age. After the story of David commingling ashes was reported, he sadly tells the filmmakers that he now has no idea if the ashes of his beloved wife are really in the urn that the Lamb Funeral Home gave him.

Meanwhile, David’s former wife talks about a time she saw him cracking open teeth and taking the gold from them. We also hear that his employees were told to strip the dead and sell their clothes. They would take the jewelry and sell that too. They would even do grave robbing. All of this allowed David Sconce to get money and power.

Eventually, David’s parents were sentenced to given three and one-half years in prison, and David was given five years. As the movie shows, people were outraged by these light prison sentences. They blame the judges in both cases, including the judge in the hearing who ordered that the Sconces be tried on various charges. The hearing judge was also outraged that the judge in David’s trial threw out many charges, including charges that he ordered an employee to beat up his rival, Tim Waters, to make him stop exposing what David was doing.

After David was convicted, the Deputy District Attorney tried to charge David with murdering Waters. Both sides agreed to exhume the poor man’s body for another test, but the toxicology experts found out the body was placed in an aboveground tomb, and the man’s liver had turned to liquid mush. So, at the murder hearing, David was acquitted.

The description in Episode Two of how David and his employees got caught is fascinating, as well as gruesome. Also fascinating is the movie’s description in Episode Three of David’s life after he did his five years in the 1990s. In the final moments of David’s interview, he shows little to no remorse about his actions in the 1980s. In fact, he lightly taunts the filmmakers and vaguely suggests that he may have hunted down a man who once mugged he and his wife one night. I can’t talk about that on camera, he tells them.

THE MORTICIAN has no narrator who chastises David and his parents for what they did. It lets the victims, law enforcement officials, experts and businesspeople in the funeral home business, and the judge in the first hearing do that. Also, the horrible revelations of what they did, which including selling dead people’s organs (David says they didn’t actually sell the organs but charged the organ medical recipients for the time it takes to retrieve the organs!), kind of speak for themselves. In that light, it’s interesting to note that the authorities found am infamous book in David’s car. The book lists multiple ways a person can murder another person and get away with it. One of the ways is oleander poisoning, the method that may have led to Tim Waters’ fatal heart attack. David’s brother-in-law says David loved to talk about the different methods in that book. David got a real kick out of it, he notes.

Because of the resurrection, the Bible doesn’t support cremation. It favors burial. Considering all the ways in which cremation can be abused by some funeral homes in the Lamb case, and other cases, burial also seems to be a rather prudent decision.

MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution for this miniseries because of a few “f” words, one strong profanity and gruesome subject matter, including photos of a man’s bloodied and bruised face.