Aggregate Death
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.
Ode to the Professional Mourner
Some are fair weather friends, who are there when you’re buying the beer. There to watch the game on your new plasma, but always “busy” when you’re moving that big piece of furniture or “stuck in traffic” when you need someone to pick you up from work when you happen to lock the keys in your car.
Fair weather friends, take notice of the Professional Mourner. Oh, Sultan of the Sulk. Helper of the Hurting, you’re there when the sky turns grey. You’re the wiping horse of the long day. You may not be around to celebrate a birthday or a wedding, but you’re the first one in line at a viewing, even beating the immediate family to the funeral home door. You’re the first one to shed a tear and the last one to leave the post-funeral luncheon.
You own stock in the Vatican’s Mass cards, and used all your vacation days to attend weekday funerals. The new BMW that the florist drives is single-handedly financed by the funeral flowers you purchase on a weekly basis. You may not even know the name of the deceased whose funeral you are attending, but you’re on a first name basis with all the morticians in the area. You collect memorial cards and prayer cards like they’re money and habitually ask the funeral director if that third story apartment in the funeral home is up for rent.
You, my friend, out dress the funeral directors with your gold cuff-links and silk color coordinated tie and handkerchief combo. Your greatest pleasure is when someone mistakes you for an undertaker. Sometimes, you don’t correct them. You just let them assume that you ARE an undertaker. You’ve attended more funerals than many funeral directors, so why not?
You own the shirt, “Free hugs” and are brave enough to wear it to Wal-Mart. Your tactile nature makes you a boarder-line molester in normal life, but a real life hero at a funeral, hugging everyone you see with a smile and an empathetic “I know”. The viewing line stops when you reach the family as you give each member in the receiving line a full measure of the comfort platitudes you memorized from grief.com.
Some buy one newspaper for the comic strips, but you buy at least three a day for the obituaries. You cut them out and laminate them, filing them like your tax records, and mailing the extras to your mother in Michigan. If there were a doctorate degree in obituaries you would have graduated summa cum laude. Master of the mourning. Comrade of comfort. You would rather be a pall bearer than get a promotion. Pal of the pall. Chum of the casket. You are the professional mourner. A true gloomy weather friend.
