The desert night in Southern California has a way of holding secrets. Heat settles into the sand like a memory that refuses to fade, and the air—usually still, usually silent—can suddenly carry a smell that doesn’t belong out here. On one particular night in the mid-1980s, a smell drifted across the outskirts of Los Angeles County, threading its way through darkness thick enough to feel. A smell sweet and heavy, the kind that clings to the back of the throat. That was the first sign. The second was the smoke—black, dense, billowing from the windows of a squat block building that looked abandoned even when its lights were on.

And then came the voice. A man on the phone, breathless, insistent, calling the local fire chief to say he knew exactly what that smell was. Knew it because he had smelled it before, decades earlier, half a world away.
“Don’t tell me they’re not burning bodies,” he warned. “I was at the ovens at Auschwitz.”

The chief didn’t want to believe him. Nobody in the United States expects to hear a sentence like that, not in California, not anywhere. But the caller’s certainty dug under his skin. So the chief drove out into the desert, still half convinced it would turn out to be nothing. A ceramics kiln, maybe. A weirdly intense bonfire. Some harmless explanation.

What he found instead would blow open one of the most disturbing funeral-industry scandals in American history.

When he opened one of the brick chambers inside that desert building, a human foot rolled out onto the floor. No dramatic music, no spotlight—just a dull thud, a chill running up the chief’s back, and a nightmare that had been quietly operating for years without anyone stopping it.

This was January 1987. And that warehouse was just one piece of a sprawling network built by a man who called himself the Cremation King of California. His name was David Sconce, and if you think that nickname sounds arrogant, it’s because he earned it through arrogance, through ambition, through a relentless obsession with turning death into the fastest, cheapest, most profitable operation the West Coast had ever seen.

But the true story—the one HBO unearthed in its documentary The Mortician—was darker than anyone expected. Because David Sconce wasn’t just running a business. He was running an empire. And he ruled it the same way cartels do: through intimidation, secrecy, and a willingness to cross every line the law thought it had drawn.

To understand how it all began, you have to picture Pasadena, California—not the glossy postcard version, but the real one, with its mix of old-money elegance and quiet suburban corners where generational businesses survive on reputation alone. That’s where the Lamb Funeral Home had stood since 1929, a family operation started by Charles Lamb, a man who took pride in dignity, ritual, and the quiet professionalism of helping grieving families.

For decades, the Lamb name meant trust. It meant care. It meant a service done the right way.

Then came Charles’s son. Then his granddaughter. And finally, David Sconce, the one family member who wasn’t supposed to inherit anything at all.

David wasn’t drawn to the funeral business. He grew up wanting stadium lights, not crematory furnaces. He was a high school athlete—big, strong, competitive, the kind of kid who pictures himself on magazine covers and college recruitment lists. He had speed. He had the build. He had everything except luck. Because one game, one injury, one knee that twisted the wrong way, collapsed all of those dreams in seconds.

After the surgery and after the rehab and after the reality set in that football had spit him out, David drifted for a while. He flirted with bodybuilding. He spent nights out drinking. He talked big but lived small. And the family business, desperate for help, eventually pulled him in out of convenience more than choice.

At first, David took over routine tasks. Paperwork. Scheduling. Transportation. But something about the mechanics of the funeral industry—the margins, the logistics, the room for cutting corners nobody had ever dared cut—lit up a part of his mind that sports had once occupied. He wasn’t sentimental about death. He wasn’t scared of it. And he didn’t see the funeral business as sacred. He saw it as underperforming.

Then he saw an opportunity.

Most funeral homes in Southern California didn’t own their own crematories. They outsourced. Quietly. Privately. Discreet little deals behind closed doors where bodies were sent across counties to third-party facilities. That meant middlemen. That meant markups. And David realized the entire industry was practically begging for someone who could be faster, cheaper, more convenient.

So he built Coastal Cremations Incorporated. A name bland enough to disappear into paperwork. A company agile enough to scoop up clients nobody else knew how to serve. And a price list aggressive enough to terrify every funeral director up and down the Pacific coast.

While others charged full service rates, David slashed his prices to half. Pickup and delivery? Free. Turnaround time? Unmatched. Capacity? “Unlimited,” he bragged. Not legally. But practically? Absolutely.

Word spread quickly. Within a year, cremation numbers soared from a modest couple hundred to twenty-five thousand—a figure so absurd it should have set off alarms in every licensing office in California. But nobody looked. Not yet. Because David kept the bodies moving like a one-man UPS for the dead, his vans sweeping through Los Angeles, Orange County, Santa Barbara, every hour of the day.

To funeral homes, he became indispensable. To competitors, he became a problem.
And when people became a problem to David Sconce, David made sure they stayed silent.

He didn’t need guns. He didn’t need threats spoken out loud. He had other methods—friends who owed him favors, muscle-bound men who could “deliver a message,” drivers who had seen enough to know not to argue. Rumors spread of intimidation, of confrontations behind funeral homes, of rivals suddenly backing off after late-night visits from men they didn’t recognize.

This wasn’t just a business anymore. It was a cremation cartel, and David sat at the top of it like a king.

But the part nobody understood at the time was how he pulled it off.
How could one facility—one furnace—handle that volume?
How could one operation burn twenty-five thousand bodies a year?
How could he be that fast?

The answer was simple. Horrifyingly simple.
He wasn’t cremating them one at a time.

Employees later described chamber loads that should have been impossible—dozens of bodies crowded into furnaces built for one, sometimes as many as nineteen at once. They said the bodies were arranged like stacked fire logs, limbs tucked in wherever there was room, cardboard boxes squeezed against metal trays. They said the goal wasn’t dignity. It was speed. Always speed. Always profit.

And when the ashes came out—mixed, indistinguishable—David had a system. Not for matching them back to families, but for distributing them by weight.
Three to five pounds for a woman.
Six to seven for a man.
Everything else swept into bins, untraceable.

The darker side of the business didn’t end there. Employees whispered about metal—valuable surgical pieces like titanium hips, artificial joints, rods and screws. These were removed quietly, sorted into buckets, sold off for scrap. Some talked about dental gold, about pliers glinting in the fluorescent light of the crematory rooms while David joked about “making the pliers sing.”

He could make thousands a month this way. Extra cash. Side profit. Another revenue stream carved from the dead.

And though the whispers about organs surfaced years later—brains, hearts, lungs—no one could ever agree how far that operation truly went. But the numbers that appeared in court records were enough to unsettle even people who thought they had seen everything.

David didn’t care about their shock. He didn’t care about dignity. He didn’t care about the families who trusted him. He cared only about scale. Growth. Expansion.
He liked to test his own strength, coworkers said, lifting bodies as though they were weight plates, shifting them in cardboard boxes with casual ease, laughing about which coworkers he could toss “one-handed.”

But for all the control he seemed to have, one thing threatened to bring his empire crashing down: heat.

Burning that many bodies that fast leaves behind more than ash. It leaves residue, buildup, a film that clings to the interior of furnaces and becomes combustible under the wrong conditions. Months of nonstop activity pushed the chambers past their limits. The fat residue ignited, flames raced through the crematory, and the whole facility went up.

For most people, that kind of disaster would end a business. For David, it was an inconvenience. He simply moved everything to the desert warehouse—the one the fire chief would one day walk into without knowing what horror was waiting behind the metal door of the cremation chamber.

That warehouse became his new headquarters. Remote. Isolated. No neighbors.
No oversight.
No one watching the smoke.

And for a time, everything continued as before—until the night the smell drifted again, until the phone call, until the foot rolled onto the floor and the authorities realized the scale of what they had stumbled into.

That discovery cracked open the entire operation.
Investigators traced vans, receipts, fake logbooks.
Former employees talked.
Competitors talked.
Even funeral directors who had once stayed quiet began distancing themselves.

By the end of the investigation, the truth became undeniable:
David Sconce had turned the California funeral industry into a personal empire built on speed, deception, and total disregard for the people whose families had entrusted him with their last rites.

But what no one expected—not then, not even now—is that the cremation scandal might not have been the full story.
Because hidden inside the years of rumors, rivalries, and intimidation were whispers of something even darker—three deaths that seemed too convenient, too timely, too close to the man who benefited from their silence.

And much later, when cameras rolled for an HBO documentary and David was an older man with nothing left to lose, he dropped a hint. A smile. A suggestion.
“Three of them,” he said. “All together.”

PART 2 will continue from here, picking up the trail of the first suspected death—mortician Tim Waters—and unraveling the quiet storm of violence, ambition, and unanswered questions surrounding David Sconce.

 

For weeks after the desert warehouse was exposed, California buzzed with a strange mixture of outrage and disbelief. News anchors spoke his name like it was a cautionary tale, funeral directors whispered about him like a dark legend, and families who had once trusted the Lamb name now found themselves asking sickening questions they never imagined needing to ask. But while investigators dug through ashes, receipts, and storage rooms full of paperwork, a more unsettling pattern began to surface—one that didn’t fit neatly into court filings or regulatory violations.

It began with conversations that had nothing to do with ovens or forged logs. Conversations about people. Specific people. People who had crossed David Sconce, challenged him, questioned him, or tried to break away from him. People who were no longer alive to tell their side of the story.

At first, the whispers seemed like desperate speculation—rumors that always swirl around a scandal this large. But the more investigators looked at the timeline, and the more former employees talked, the more impossible it became to ignore that several deaths in David’s orbit came with shadows attached. And one of those shadows belonged to a man named Tim Waters.

In the 1980s, if you worked in the funeral trade in Southern California, you knew Tim. Not because he wanted to be known, but because he wasn’t the kind of man who filtered his opinions or softened his edges. He was big—over three hundred pounds—with the kind of presence that walked into a room before he did. A mortician out of Burbank with a reputation for being blunt, stubbornly honest, and impossible to intimidate.

While others in the industry kept their heads down, Tim spoke up. Loudly. Too loudly for someone operating in a territory where David Sconce was rapidly building dominance through fear and under-the-table arrangements. Tim didn’t care. He took business wherever he could get it. He called out competitors who he believed were cutting corners. And when he heard rumors—whispers that Coastal Cremations was cremating multiple bodies at once, that the numbers didn’t add up, that something wasn’t right—Tim didn’t whisper back.

He talked.
To clients.
To colleagues.
To anyone who asked.

And that alone made him dangerous.

According to a funeral director who later spoke with investigators, Tim had openly told people that Sconce was “stuffing bodies into the ovens,” and that if regulators ever stepped in, the whole industry would be scorched alongside him. Rumors like that don’t just damage business. They attract attention—the kind David couldn’t afford.

In February 1985, months before the warehouse discovery, something happened to Tim that would later seem far too coincidental.
He was attacked.
Jumped in what police at first believed was a robbery gone wrong.

Tim survived, bruised and shaken but alive. The man who assaulted him was caught—not because he confessed to police, but because guilt has a way of leaking out when a job turns messier than intended. In later statements, that attacker claimed he had been sent by David Sconce. Sent to “rough him up.” Sent to send a message. Sent to quiet the man who wouldn’t stop talking.

Officially, it was one man’s word against another’s.
Unofficially, people who had seen David’s methods had no trouble believing it.

Tim didn’t stop talking. If anything, he talked more.
But a few months later, he suddenly wasn’t talking anymore.

He died.
Out of nowhere.
At home.
Doctors told the family it was his heart. Sudden. Tragic. Not unheard of for a man his size.

Most people accepted it at face value.
For a time.
Until the cremation scandal exploded.
Until the old attack resurfaced.
Until someone claimed they overheard David bragging—yes, bragging—that he had poisoned Tim.

That was when the whispers turned into questions.
And those questions found their way to the coroner.

Tim’s old tissue samples were re-examined, this time with an eye for toxins rather than natural causes. The results came back with something unexpected: traces consistent with oleander, a toxic plant that grows everywhere in California. A plant whose leaves, if crushed or brewed, can stop a heart with brutal efficiency—especially in someone already at medical risk.

With that revelation, Tim’s death was officially reclassified. Not natural.
Poisoning.

Suddenly, the quiet funeral rooms and embalming tables of Los Angeles felt more like the backdrop of a crime novel—one where enemies didn’t just lose business; they disappeared.

Detectives reopened the case, and the Sconce name floated through the hallways of the Burbank police department like a ghost. But scientific tests are slippery things. A second analysis couldn’t confirm the oleander with the same certainty. Contamination, degradation, time—all of it muddied the water.

In the end, prosecutors didn’t have enough.
No charges.
No trial.
No closure for Tim’s family.

But in the industry, few people believed his death was innocent coincidence. Not after the attack. Not after the reclassification. Not after the things whispered behind closed doors by men who had once worked for Sconce and knew what he was capable of.

Tim Waters was the first death that cast a shadow over the story.
But he wasn’t the last.

Not long after, another name surfaced—Ron Jordan.
If Tim was the loud challenger, Ron was the opposite: loyal, quiet, the kind of employee who sees everything but says nothing. He had worked for David long enough to understand the system from the inside. Long enough to know the shortcuts, the secrets, the things that didn’t belong on official paperwork.

According to the HBO documentary, Ron eventually reached his breaking point. Whether it was fear, guilt, or exhaustion, no one knows—but he told David he wanted out. He would quit, he said. But he wouldn’t talk.

That was the promise.
Silence in exchange for freedom.

A short time later, Ron was found dead—hanged.
Authorities ruled it a suicide.
Case closed.
Simple.
Clean.

But the documentary reopened the wound.
Because when filmmakers asked David about Ron, his reaction wasn’t defensive.
It wasn’t mournful.
It wasn’t even angry.

It was puzzled amusement.
“Why would I want to kill him?” he asked. “Seriously.”
The smile that followed made viewers shift in their seats.

Then came the third story—the one David himself volunteered on camera without being prompted.
A story about a man who once robbed him at gunpoint.
A man who humiliated him in front of his wife.
A man David claimed to have encountered again later under circumstances he refused to detail.

He leaned in, eyes gleaming with the kind of cryptic satisfaction that doesn’t belong to an innocent man, and asked the filmmaker:
“You think I found that guy later?”

When the filmmaker hesitated, David continued.
“It’s one of those things I can’t talk about. The other thing—I’ll tell you too, but you can’t talk about that either.”

The filmmaker declined, reminding him that anything said off-camera couldn’t be used.
David smiled wider.
“Ah, it’s never going to come back. Can’t come back.”

Then he delivered the line that turned stomachs and electrified the internet:
“Really, there’s three of them. All together.”

No names.
No locations.
No details.
Just a quiet confession that may or may not have been real, dropped like a stone into deep water, leaving ripples that continue to spread.

What makes the line haunting isn’t the possibility that David was bluffing.
It’s the possibility that he wasn’t.

Because by the time the documentary aired, David had already lived an entire second life—an exile from the funeral industry, a man who tried to disappear into ordinary work, who tried to bury his past beneath years of silence.

After the convictions in the late 1980s—mutilation of remains, misuse of crematory equipment, and charges tied to the intimidation of competitors—David served five years in prison with the possibility of parole. Then came lifetime probation. And then came his attempt at reinvention.

He moved to Arizona.
He kept his head down.
He worked as a bus driver, blending into a blue-collar routine so ordinary it felt almost absurd in contrast to the empire of cremations he had once commanded.

But quiet lives never fit men like him.

In the mid-90s, he was caught in a peculiar scam involving bus coupons—a petty, almost laughable offense compared to the scale of his former operation. But probation violations, like secrets, have a way of stacking. And years later, in Montana, he was found with a stolen rifle that belonged to a neighbor.

It wasn’t violence this time.
It wasn’t intimidation.
It was stupidity.
And stupidity, unlike murder, is easy to prosecute.

The lifetime probation he’d been assigned finally snapped shut around him, dragging him back into the justice system. In 2013, he was sentenced to 25 years to life.

Most people assumed that was the end of the Sconce story.
A neat bow.
A villain tucked away.
A scandal filed into California history.

But a decade later, in 2023, he was released early.
Older. Softer-looking. But still carrying that same unsettling calm in his eyes—the calm of a man who has lived with the weight of too many secrets for too long.

And that was when the documentary found him.
That was when he told his stories.
That was when he smiled about the three unnamed people who would “never come back.”

And that was when the world realized his empire of ashes may have been only part of the truth.

Part 3 will continue from here, taking us deeper into the aftermath of the scandal, the regulatory overhaul that reshaped California’s funeral industry, and the lingering question that refuses to fade:
Was David Sconce a criminal mastermind, or simply a man who enjoyed letting the world wonder how far he’d really gone?

In the weeks after The Mortician aired, conversations about the scandal resurfaced in a way no one predicted. People who had never heard the name “Sconce” were suddenly whispering it in grocery store aisles, on true-crime forums, in comment sections under late-night news clips. What struck viewers wasn’t just the scale of the cremation scheme or the cold efficiency with which David ran his empire—it was the lingering sense that he had walked out of prison with more truth in his head than the justice system had ever uncovered.

Regulators in California, many now retired, watched the documentary with a mixture of embarrassment and disbelief. Some had been around during the first investigation in the late 80s. They remembered the way the case spread through the funeral homes of Los Angeles like a contagion: one rumor infecting another, one employee confessing after months of silence, one grieving family discovering the urn they received held a stranger.

But they also remembered the frustration of trying to regulate an industry that operated partly in the shadows, partly in the margins, and entirely under the assumption that dignity didn’t need surveillance. Before the Sconce case, crematories in California were inspected the way mom-and-pop diners were: occasionally, politely, with the assumption that everyone involved knew how serious their work was. Death had always been treated as sacred. And sacred spaces weren’t supposed to require watchdogs.

Sconce shattered that illusion.

When investigators finally pieced together the full scope of his operation, it was like discovering that a gentle stream had been hiding a riptide beneath its surface the entire time. Twenty-five thousand cremations in a single year should have been impossible. Every regulator who looked at the numbers said the same thing: “We should have caught this sooner.” But hindsight is a loud, unforgiving teacher, and by then it was far too late.

The aftermath was a bureaucratic earthquake.

New legislation rolled through Sacramento with urgency usually reserved for environmental crises or financial scandals. Surprise inspections were added. Reporting requirements multiplied. Crematories were required to document individual remains with levels of detail that seemed excessive to some and absolutely necessary to others.

And perhaps the most symbolic change of all:
removing dental metals—gold, silver, anything of value—from remains became a felony.

It wasn’t that the law had been unclear before. It was that before the Sconce scandal, nobody imagined someone would exploit the dead on a scale industrial enough to need legal definitions. But once the truth surfaced, California had to redraw its boundaries.

Funeral directors across the state felt the shift. Some resented it—those who had done their work honorably now found themselves buried under paperwork. Others welcomed it, relieved that the industry was finally being forced to clean up the gray areas where men like David had thrived.

But no matter how many laws were passed, no matter how many rules were rewritten, none of it answered the question hanging at the center of the scandal:
What had David meant when he said there were “three of them”?

Filmmakers tried to parse his tone. Was it bravado? Bitterness? A tired man playing with his own mythology? Or was it something else—a quiet confession wrapped in a smirk, delivered safely at a time when he believed the clock had finally run out on accountability?

Viewers debated it endlessly. Some insisted he was bluffing, riding the wave of notoriety he had once run from. Others pointed out that men who crave power rarely confess to crimes they didn’t commit. But among people who worked in the funeral industry during the 80s, few doubted that there were darker chapters in the Sconce story than the courts ever uncovered.

Because even as the legal dust settled, even as David served his time, even as his name faded from newspaper headlines, a strange phenomenon persisted:
People were afraid to talk.

Former employees didn’t give interviews. Former competitors changed the subject. Families who had once dealt with Coastal Cremations preferred not to revisit the past. And old friends—if David ever truly had friends—kept their distance like survivors of a storm that had left scars no one else could see.

But the documentary changed something.
It opened the floodgates.
People who had stayed silent for decades suddenly found themselves remembering conversations they’d buried, nights that felt wrong in ways they couldn’t articulate then but could finally admit now.

One former driver recalled being told to “take the long route home,” a phrase that made sense at the time but gnawed at him in the years that followed. He delivered bodies late at night, sometimes to places that didn’t look like funeral homes, sometimes to locations he later learned had no formal crematory licenses. He remembered the fear, the way coworkers avoided eye contact when he asked questions, and the sinking realization that there were things he wasn’t supposed to know.

Another former worker claimed he once saw David pacing in the parking lot at midnight, talking to someone in a whisper that didn’t match his usual bluster. “It looked like he was begging,” the man said. “I’d never seen him beg. But whatever that conversation was, it scared him.”

None of these stories added up to evidence.
But they added up to atmosphere.
And atmosphere is sometimes more revealing than facts.

The Sconce empire didn’t collapse in one dramatic raid. It crumbled slowly, like a building whose foundation had been eaten away by termites. Quiet resignations. Sudden disappearances. Unexplained breakdowns of equipment. And then—the fire. The blaze that devoured the original crematory and forced David into the desert.

Some investigators later wondered whether that fire was an accident at all.
There was no proof.
But the timing raised eyebrows.
Because in criminal empires, fire has a way of erasing things that can’t be explained.

When the story reached HBO decades later, David was no longer young, no longer powerful, no longer able to command fear in the same way he once had. But age had not softened him. If anything, it made him stranger—like a man who had spent so long living with secrets that they had become more familiar to him than the truth.

On camera, he had an odd calm.
A confidence that came from knowing the worst had already been uncovered and the rest could only live in speculation.
He spoke about the past the way some men talk about old sports victories—lightly, almost fondly, as if it all belonged to another life entirely.

And when the interviewer leaned in, pushing gently toward the darker corners of his story, David did not flinch.
He smiled.
A small, tight smile that seemed to say:
I know something you don’t.
And you will never know it as well as I do.

Viewers found themselves replaying the moment when he mentioned the robber—the man who had held him at gunpoint years earlier. David didn’t have to bring it up. Nobody asked. Yet he chose to. He brought the story into the light, dangled it like bait, then pulled back before giving an answer.

“You think I found that guy later?” he asked, voice dipping into a tone that felt almost playful.
Then came the ellipses—his silence, his smirk, the tilt of his head—speaking more loudly than any confession.

For many viewers, that was the moment the documentary stopped being a story about a funeral scandal and became something else—a portrait of a man who enjoyed the power of ambiguity.

But to people inside the system—regulators, former cops, attorneys—another moment mattered more.
It was when David talked about his family.

About the Lamb Funeral Home legacy.
About the image his great-grandfather built in Pasadena.
About the trust that had been passed down like a fragile heirloom.

There was no remorse in his voice.
No regret.
Only irritation.
The kind of irritation a man feels when he believes the world has misunderstood him.

David never saw himself as a villain.
Not then.
Not now.
In his mind, he was an innovator—someone who saw inefficiencies in a system stuck in the past and fixed them with ruthless practicality.

Families wanted quick service? He gave it to them.
Funeral homes wanted low prices? He delivered.
Competitors complained? He removed obstacles.

He didn’t break rules, he told himself.
He stretched them.
Bent them.
Optimized them.

And in the world of business—at least the world he believed he lived in—efficiency mattered more than tradition.

The tragedy was that his efficiency treated human lives like logistics.
Like freight.
Like units.

But even now, even after prison, even after the documentary forced him back into the public eye, David never apologized.
He shrugged.
He joked.
He sent shivers down the spines of people who had thought they were immune to fear.

By the end of Part 3, the question that haunts the entire narrative begins to sharpen:
Can a man who built an empire out of ashes ever truly be understood?
Or is the mystery—the unanswered deaths, the hints of violence, the secrets half-revealed—the final layer of protection around a story he intends to take to his grave?

Part 4 sẽ tiếp tục liền mạch từ đây:
David’s strange release, the families left behind, the lingering wounds in the California funeral industry, and the unsettling possibility that the truth about “the three of them” may never surface—not because it was lost, but because it was never meant to be found.