This Guy is the Worst Funeral Director Ever
David Wayne Sconce
There’s been some bad ones.
Bernhardt “Bernie” Tiede II (the subject of the Hollywood movie staring Jack Black) confessed to murdering a wealthy 81 year old widow. After her murder, he forged a $20,000 check. If you watched the movie, you can feel some sympathy for Bernie.
But you probably won’t feel any sympathy for David Wayne Sconce, who is possibly the worst funeral director ever documented.
David was a funeral director in the Pasadena California area.
Whittier Daily News documents one of his more egregious practices:
Oscar’s Ceramics on Darwin Road in Hesperia, a plant that purportedly was making ceramic panels for space stations, was instead a secret cremoratorium. Investigators on Jan. 20, 1987 found two large kilns, each more than half filled with the burning bodies of human beings. Human bones and ashes partially filled eight 55-gallon garbage cans. The thick, dark liquid of human body fats and oils covered the floor, running out the back door to a makeshift pit. Pasadena Crematorium, located in Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena. The Altadena crematorium was gutted by fire Nove. 23, 1986, yet the cremations credited to the facility continued. David Sconce was operating an unlicensed crematorium in Hesperia.
In addition to operating an unlicensed crematory under the guise of a ceramics plant, he also:
sold body parts from dead bodies
stole gold dentures
performed mass cremations
hired thugs to “rough up” competing morticians
forging organ-donor consent forms
He plead guilt to 21 accounts and served (along with his conspiring parents) two and a half years in jail.
Sconce then hired a hitman to kill a businessman who was attempting to buy a rival crematory.
He plead guilty to Conspiracy to Murder and was sentenced to a lifetime of probation in 1997.
Via the San Gabriel Valley Tribune:
The Lamb Funeral Home (the funeral home owned by Sconce) case led to a massive lawsuit that also involved 100 mortuaries that contracted with the funeral home for cremations. The $15.5 million suit in 1991 involved 20,000 relatives of people cremated at the funeral home.
In 2012 Scounce was caught committing a felony when he was caught with a stolen gun that he was attempting to pawn. Prosecutors are seeking a 25 year prison sentence (I’m not sure if the sentence has yet been finalized).
So if you’re a mortician and you’re having a bad day … maybe you knocked over some flower baskets and broken some roses; or maybe you forgot to list the fiance of the deceased in the obituary … remember, even though you feel like a bad funeral director, you’re not the worst. That infamous title belongs to David Wayne Sconce.
