Speaker 1: Diversion audio. This episode contains mature content and quite graphic
Speaker 1: descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Speaker 1: Please take care in listening. Dave Edwards was an ex
Speaker 1: football player and a driver for the Pasadena Crematorium. He
Speaker 1: drove the truck that picked up cadavers and unloaded them
Speaker 1: at the business for cremation. Dave was on the road
Speaker 1: a lot, so he didn't spend much time at the
Speaker 1: crematorium nor the Lamb Funeral Home. Not long after his
Speaker 1: start date, Dave witnessed a money making scheme that he
Speaker 1: would rank second in the most revolting side hustles he
Speaker 1: experienced working there. Sconce the manager of the crematorium, often
Speaker 1: talked about quote making the pliers sing, popping chops, and
Speaker 1: going to the mine. David's side hustle was yanking gold
Speaker 1: teeth from the jaws of the deceased and selling the
Speaker 1: gold at his buddy's pawn shop. The standard operating procedure
Speaker 1: at Pasadena Crematorium was to examine all incoming bodies. David
Speaker 1: usually did it himself, but if he wasn't there, his
Speaker 1: employees did it. If they saw gold teeth, they marked
Speaker 1: the body bag with a smiley face, along with the
Speaker 1: chemical element abbreviation AU. David Pride rigor mortis. Jaws open
Speaker 1: with a screwdriver. Usually, if that didn't work, he'd grab
Speaker 1: a crowbar. Dave said he could hear a man's jaws
Speaker 1: crack from across the room. With a set of pliers,
Speaker 1: David extracted the teeth. He dropped them into whatever receptacle
Speaker 1: was nearby. Usually it was a used styrofoam cup, sometimes
Speaker 1: a tin can. One day, David left the cold room
Speaker 1: whistling and walked into the office where his mother worked.
Speaker 1: Lori Anne looked up from her paperwork, smiled, and asked,
Speaker 1: how much AU did you get today, honey? David cheosed
Speaker 1: like a proud child and shook a half cup of
Speaker 1: gold teeth in her face. Welcome to the greatest true
Speaker 1: crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode
Speaker 1: we're calling the Criminal Cremators. It's the story of a
Speaker 1: family business, the Lamb Family Funeral Home, which wanted to
Speaker 1: be a booming business so badly that they allegedly circumvented
Speaker 1: a lot of laws and even more ethics for their profits.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you all about it after this quick break,
Speaker 1: let's talk about only children. I should preface this by
Speaker 1: saying I grew up an only child, so I'm allowed
Speaker 1: to say all of this. Yes, Typically we fall into
Speaker 1: two categories. We're known as being either really weird and withdrawn,
Speaker 1: or we only children are unconscionably childishly selfish and in
Speaker 1: desperate need of your full attention all the time. I
Speaker 1: likely fall into that first category. I was one hundred
Speaker 1: percent the kid who liked when recess was rained out
Speaker 1: so I could read my book on the classroom floor.
Speaker 1: In my defense, I had a thousand cousins to help
Speaker 1: break me of this habit and parents who would not
Speaker 1: tolerate bad behavior, so I was socialized to near normalcy.
Speaker 1: I'm no selfless saint, but I do generally know how
Speaker 1: to interact with people and the world. I know it
Speaker 1: doesn't always revolve around me, and I'm pretty good at sharing.
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong. I would have absolutely never let
Speaker 1: anyone else ever play with my toys if they hadn't
Speaker 1: made me, if I hadn't been forced to share the stage,
Speaker 1: I would wonder what the hell everyone was looking at
Speaker 1: when Hello, I'm over here, all of us? Would I
Speaker 1: think resort to this kind of self aggrandizement without course correction.
Speaker 1: So my relatively well adjusted nature is not really a
Speaker 1: credit to me so much as my parents. In this story,
Speaker 1: the angry only child is the main perpetrator. His name
Speaker 1: is David Scance. But because our show focuses on women
Speaker 1: in true crime, though, there are a couple other key
Speaker 1: characters at play. One is a key witness. She was
Speaker 1: a former employee who was fired after asking too many
Speaker 1: questions about the legitimacy and ethics of the company's practices.
Speaker 1: And the other is, of course, David's mother. Lori Anne Lamb,
Speaker 1: was the second generation in the family business. She also
Speaker 1: had three siblings in line to take over, but her
Speaker 1: two brothers were not interested. Her sister died tragically in
Speaker 1: a plane crash before she could say one way or
Speaker 1: the other, and this is relevant later, I promise, so
Speaker 1: her parents groomed Lorianne to take over. When they retired,
Speaker 1: she worked in the funeral home with her husband, Jerry Sconce.
Speaker 1: Lori Anne was the church organist, Jerry was the Bible
Speaker 1: school football coach. Our sources say that they were the
Speaker 1: types to cite scripture during typical conversations, but especially when
Speaker 1: consoling the bereaved. The business itself was well known, as
Speaker 1: funeral homes tend to be locals, use the same businesses
Speaker 1: over and over. Almost all their business is customer retention
Speaker 1: from families, and most new referrals come from word of mouth,
Speaker 1: because it's kind of ghosh to advertise death. That's not
Speaker 1: to say there were no other funeral homes in the
Speaker 1: Pasadena area, of course there were. It's just like, well,
Speaker 1: when your car breaks down on the side of the street,
Speaker 1: what do you do? You call your insurance, They send
Speaker 1: a tow truck. The tow truck takes your car to
Speaker 1: the nearest in network service shop. You, the driver, are distraught.
Speaker 1: What are you going to do? Sit in the waiting
Speaker 1: room of one autobody shop while you get a few
Speaker 1: more quotes, spend another day retoe in your car, and
Speaker 1: then hope the cheaper option services you just as well. No,
Speaker 1: you have other concerns. Where can I rent a replacement vehicle?
Speaker 1: Can I get it in time to pick my kids
Speaker 1: up from school? How do I get time off work
Speaker 1: to handle this? How do I get groceries? It's similar
Speaker 1: when a loved one dies, but more now you have
Speaker 1: bigger issues to deal with, plus the basics. Not to
Speaker 1: mention the obvious, you're probably devastated with grief in addition
Speaker 1: to all that stress. Where you send the business is
Speaker 1: a small concern in the bigger picture of your life.
Speaker 1: You just want to honor your dead, and for that
Speaker 1: you go to a place you trust. Hopefully you're dearly
Speaker 1: departed gave you a reference and removed the guesswork. All
Speaker 1: that to say, the Scoance family's funeral home was well established,
Speaker 1: especially because they were three generations running and most of
Speaker 1: their clientele was elderly. They were doing well, but they
Speaker 1: weren't an empire by any stretch. And then Lori, Anne
Speaker 1: and Jerry's only child, David Scoance, had an idea. David
Speaker 1: had been a high school football player. He was apple pie, handsome,
Speaker 1: the homecoming king type who was generally lucky and things
Speaker 1: generally went his way. After high school, he went to
Speaker 1: embalming school. But David wasn't great at that and he
Speaker 1: didn't really like it. Things weren't falling into place for
Speaker 1: him now, so he forced them. In my experience at athletes,
Speaker 1: they tend to do this. They want their way, so
Speaker 1: they ask for it. If they get turned down, they
Speaker 1: ask again, and rather than regrouping and trying a different tack,
Speaker 1: they just turn up the volume. They try the same
Speaker 1: thing over and over. In sports, that is a lot
Speaker 1: of how you train. Not fast enough, run it again,
Speaker 1: not strong enough, do it again, try it over and
Speaker 1: over until you do it. And one of the things
Speaker 1: about only children is that we don't hear no a lot,
Speaker 1: or at least we take no as a try harder.
Speaker 1: So handsome David Scott's has an idea to take his
Speaker 1: family's funeral business to the next level. Up until nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, about four point one percent of bodies were cremated,
Speaker 1: But in California things were changing. By the mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: about thirty four percent of the bodies were cremated, and
Speaker 1: that's a huge upsling. David presented his idea in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two as the percentages were rising. He wanted to
Speaker 1: start a cremation service. You might be thinking that actually
Speaker 1: sounds smart, and it was, but the details made no sense.
Speaker 1: David's idea was to undercut the rates of their competitors,
Speaker 1: charging just fifty five dollars per cremated corpse. That included
Speaker 1: picking up bodies and returning the remains. The ovens in
Speaker 1: which bodies are cremated are called retorts. The Lamb Funeral
Speaker 1: Home only had two retorts, depending on the ovens efficiency,
Speaker 1: one body took two hours to cremate at best, that
Speaker 1: was twenty four bodies per day. If they had zero
Speaker 1: down time, which is impossible, that was thirteen hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty dollars. And if they ran their business round the clock,
Speaker 1: they'd have to hire more help than that would pay for.
Speaker 1: So smart idea poor execution. But his parents didn't say no.
Speaker 1: They just pointed out those facts, thinking maybe he would
Speaker 1: draw his own conclusion of no. And David came back with, yeah,
Speaker 1: but who's saying we can only do one body at
Speaker 1: a time. What if he filled the oven to the
Speaker 1: max as many bodies as it would fit, Even if
Speaker 1: he burned just five or six bodies at a time,
Speaker 1: with both ovens running, that was six hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: dollars per burn. That's good money. Again, they didn't say no.
Speaker 1: Lorenne pointed out the very obvious problem if they were
Speaker 1: all cremated at once, there would be no way to
Speaker 1: separate their remains, then they couldn't be sure their customers
Speaker 1: received the remains of their loved ones. David said, quote,
Speaker 1: how can you tell if the remains are mixed anyway?
Speaker 1: What difference does it make they're dead? I probably don't
Speaker 1: have to say this aloud, but this is when David
Speaker 1: should have been grounded, or at least sent to time out,
Speaker 1: or at the very very least told no. What he
Speaker 1: suggested was not only unethical, which should be obvious to
Speaker 1: anyone at all, but also illegal, and yet they indulged.
Speaker 1: Many of the Lamb's competing funeral homes had embalming services
Speaker 1: on site, but very few had cremation retorts. They essentially
Speaker 1: had to outsource the business of cremations to other specialty providers.
Speaker 1: It still usually cost one thousand dollars, but if Lamb's
Speaker 1: was only charging fifty five per body, that was a
Speaker 1: huge margin for the other funeral homes. It's grimm to
Speaker 1: think about, but it was business, and the families of
Speaker 1: the deceased were notified of this change in location by law,
Speaker 1: so those funeral homes were not doing anything wrong or illegal.
Speaker 1: Just grizzly. David had to hire a bunch of unscrupulous
Speaker 1: guys to carry out his dirty work. They were completely
Speaker 1: separate from Lurianne's office crew because most of the work
Speaker 1: would be done at the crematorium a few miles away
Speaker 1: in Altadena. And when you hire unscrupulous people, things tend
Speaker 1: to get sloppy. Let me tell you just how sloppy
Speaker 1: they got. Right after this break when we left off,
Speaker 1: David had just hired a new crew. They picked up
Speaker 1: bodies in trucks and hearses, which was normal, and then
Speaker 1: they'd store them in the cold room until they had
Speaker 1: enough to fill the retort. Yep, they'd fill the retort.
Speaker 1: Not only was it not the single cremation that the
Speaker 1: families had been promised, but the workers made a game
Speaker 1: of how many bodies they could wedge into the oven. Naturally,
Speaker 1: the bodies sometimes got stuck, so the guys would shove
Speaker 1: them further in with the two by four, or on
Speaker 1: the other side, they'd stick a hook into the bodies
Speaker 1: and pull them into place. Sometimes the hook went under
Speaker 1: the shoulder, sometimes threw the neck out a cheek. Retorts
Speaker 1: were three and a half feet tall, four feet wide,
Speaker 1: and eight feet long. One source compares it to the
Speaker 1: interior of an American sedan. If you're wondering how many
Speaker 1: bodies was enough to fill the retort, their record was fifteen.
Speaker 1: Of course, there were mistakes, like the time they accidentally
Speaker 1: cremated a body that was supposed to be embalmed, but
Speaker 1: it was a closed casket, so they just subbed in
Speaker 1: a random body, and no one knew the wiser. Before
Speaker 1: David's idea in nineteen eighty one, the Lamb Funeral Home
Speaker 1: had cremated one hundred and ninety four bodies. By nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six, the cremation business was processing eight thousand bodies
Speaker 1: a year, many more than any other such business in California.
Speaker 1: If that's not grotesque enough, David was also mining the
Speaker 1: bodies for sellable products before they were cremated. It started
Speaker 1: with the gold fillings. The Scots Home did require signing
Speaker 1: a permission form, but they kept their phrasing intentionally vague,
Speaker 1: using varied phrases like tissue removal. Every crematorium had to
Speaker 1: remove pacemakers and other artificial devices so they didn't explode
Speaker 1: in the retorts, but the forms didn't include selling those
Speaker 1: removed items. The ethical thing to do was dispose of
Speaker 1: anything that didn't disintegrate in the burn, but to David,
Speaker 1: it was a business opportunity. Before any bodies went to
Speaker 1: be incinerated, he checked their mouths for gold fillings, and
Speaker 1: if he found them, he would yank them out, put
Speaker 1: them in a styrofoam cup or whatever receptacle was around,
Speaker 1: and sold them to a friend at the Burbank Gold Exchange. Later,
Speaker 1: David would try to claim that gold fillings aren't valuable
Speaker 1: because they contained so many other medals, but that's exactly wrong.
Speaker 1: Their higher quality. Most gold jewelry in the US is
Speaker 1: fourteen caret gold. Dentists usually use eighteen caret gold. One
Speaker 1: filling was probably worth thirty five dollars at the time.
Speaker 1: With the kind of volume David was handling, it could
Speaker 1: add up pretty quickly. In nineteen eighty five and eighty six,
Speaker 1: David bragged that he was making five or six thousand
Speaker 1: dollars per month with gold fillings. Investigators were never able
Speaker 1: to determine the exact volume, but it did probably amount
Speaker 1: to tens of thousands of dollars, and from there it
Speaker 1: gets worse. After David started making money off the gold
Speaker 1: fill he looked at the rest at the body David
Speaker 1: sweet talked two tissue bank specialists into coming to work
Speaker 1: for the crematorium. One of them was a Japanese exchange
Speaker 1: student who went by George. He said the tissues were
Speaker 1: not fresh enough for a transplant, but they could be
Speaker 1: used by medical students, so David started harvesting and donating organs.
Speaker 1: Lisa Carlin was David's other tissue bank higher and her
Speaker 1: time there was very short lived. Lisa pushed back against
Speaker 1: David's ideas pretty often. She asked questions. She didn't think
Speaker 1: the wording in the permission forms should be so vague,
Speaker 1: and unlike David's parents, she didn't cave. Their disagreements often
Speaker 1: escalated into arguments, which ended in them screaming at each other,
Speaker 1: and they'd have these fights in front of all the
Speaker 1: other workers. They were not discreet at all. Lisa couldn't
Speaker 1: imagine that families thought any of David's operations were all right,
Speaker 1: and she told him so. After one of their fights,
Speaker 1: David told another employee that girl has gone too far.
Speaker 1: One of these days she's going to wind up dead.
Speaker 1: Their arguments didn't end when she quit. She still had
Speaker 1: to call and fight with him about money. That's when
Speaker 1: George overheard him say over the phone, quote for five
Speaker 1: hundred dollars, I can have you shot. For a thousand,
Speaker 1: I can have you killed, and then I'll burn up
Speaker 1: the parts so no one will know what happened to you.
Speaker 1: George also heard David say multiple times how much he
Speaker 1: hated his grandparents, his own grandparents, the ones who started
Speaker 1: the business that he was now running wild with, and
Speaker 1: he asked George for an untraceable poison to quote use
Speaker 1: on his grandparents. George circumnavigated the topic, telling his explosive
Speaker 1: employer to to an assistant LA coroner, you might be thinking, wait,
Speaker 1: it's illegal to sell organs. It's always been illegal, and
Speaker 1: you'd be right. The receiving universities were not buying the
Speaker 1: organs from tissue banks. They paid a transportation fee for
Speaker 1: each eye cornea lung, heart, kidney, even other parts like
Speaker 1: the three tiny bones of the ear or a knee joint.
Speaker 1: A serious harvester could accumulate twenty five thousand dollars per
Speaker 1: body somehow, and this part remains mysterious to me. David
Speaker 1: set up his own tissue bank to start sourcing the universities. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: other funeral homes in the area were suspicious of the
Speaker 1: volume David was cremating. They knew the laws, and they
Speaker 1: knew that David's crematorium only had two retorts. The only
Speaker 1: way they could be burning at that rate was by
Speaker 1: burning multiple bodies. At the same time, two other funeral
Speaker 1: home directors said as much. One, Ron Hast, published an
Speaker 1: open threat of exposure in an industry newsletter. He also
Speaker 1: had telephone Lareenne and told her straight up that he
Speaker 1: was going to expose them to you or me. That
Speaker 1: sounds like a pretty stand up move telling someone to
Speaker 1: their face, but David thought the phone call was worse
Speaker 1: than the threat itself because it upset his mama. So
Speaker 1: David paid two of his employees, giant former football players,
Speaker 1: eight hundred dollars to go beat up Ron Hast and
Speaker 1: his buddy to get Ron to keep his mouth shut.
Speaker 1: The other whistleblower was Tim Waters. Tim didn't even own
Speaker 1: a funeral home. He owned a limbousine rental place, and
Speaker 1: he had a middleman service that connected funeral homes to crematoriums.
Speaker 1: That meant he couldn't come close to David's fifty five
Speaker 1: dollars per body fee. His only way to push back
Speaker 1: against the prices was to convince his prospects that David
Speaker 1: was cremating illegally. He might not have had physical proofs,
Speaker 1: but he was shrewd enough to deduce that multiple cremations
Speaker 1: were the only way David's costs were that low. David's
Speaker 1: football employees were paid to beat up Tim too, and
Speaker 1: they later went on the record saying that David also
Speaker 1: offered to pay them to kill Tim. Tim died on
Speaker 1: Easter Weekend nineteen eighty five. He was very obese, according
Speaker 1: to the coroner's reports. Although the first autopsy showed his
Speaker 1: cause of death as undetermined, that autopsy showed conclusive evidence
Speaker 1: that it was heart failure. It wasn't until David was
Speaker 1: on the line for his first crimes, the crematorium crimes,
Speaker 1: that they would look further into the death of Tim Waters.
Speaker 1: It was a summer of nineteen eighty six when the
Speaker 1: town of Hesperia smelled weird, bad, awful smells coming from
Speaker 1: the ceramics factory on the hill. They were talking about
Speaker 1: Oscar Ceramics, a manufacturer of heat resistant tiles for space
Speaker 1: shuttles run by David Scots. Many people reported the terrible smell.
Speaker 1: One citizen who had fought in the Second World War said, quote,
Speaker 1: I was at the oven at Auschwitz, and I know
Speaker 1: that smell. But the police couldn't raid the factory without
Speaker 1: a warrant. Still, the police chief knew something was up,
Speaker 1: so he called the fire Marshal, who could enter any
Speaker 1: building at any time if there was a fire. There
Speaker 1: was most definitely a fire, and it was most definitely
Speaker 1: a code violation. The original retorts had been made for
Speaker 1: the purpose of incinerating bodies. These ovens had been made
Speaker 1: for firing ceramics, and there was a big difference. A
Speaker 1: crematorium necessitated a large smoke stacked chimney to control emissions.
Speaker 1: The ceramics place only had an exhaust, and one fateful
Speaker 1: day a citizen called in flames leaping from that exhaust.
Speaker 1: So the fire Marshal pulled up with the police chief,
Speaker 1: and despite the lone employee's efforts to prevent them, they
Speaker 1: went inside. On the floor there was a big pool
Speaker 1: of quote, dark smelly liquid the analysis later determined was
Speaker 1: a mixture of diesel fuel and amino acids, which a
Speaker 1: body emits when it is incinerated, and beyond that, flames
Speaker 1: were flying out from behind the metal doors of the kilns.
Speaker 1: The officials ordered the fires to be extinguished aside from
Speaker 1: the chimney in the doors, the flames were dangerously close
Speaker 1: to the puddle of fuel on the floor. While they
Speaker 1: waited for the oven doors to cool, they found barrels
Speaker 1: of ashes and bones in an ice chest. They saw
Speaker 1: the remains of human prostheses, and when they were able
Speaker 1: to open the doors of the kilns, out fell the
Speaker 1: remains of a human foot. David Sconce and his parents
Speaker 1: were arrested in nineteen eighty Sive, I'll tell you all
Speaker 1: about the trial and the sixty eight criminal counts they
Speaker 1: were charged with after the break. The most important thing
Speaker 1: to establish in this criminal case was the fraud of
Speaker 1: the forms themselves. The preliminary hearing would decide whether the
Speaker 1: case merited a courtroom trial. Judge Elvirah Mitchell ruled that
Speaker 1: it should, and she set David's bail incredibly high because
Speaker 1: she agreed with the prosecution that David was a flight risk. Naturally,
Speaker 1: the whole family denied culpability, but Laurie Anne's denial is
Speaker 1: kind of astounding. The case hinged on the paperwork so much,
Speaker 1: and Lori Anne was the one issuing forms and taking signatures.
Speaker 1: She said that every single person underwent a consultation in
Speaker 1: which they agreed to all the terms that were vaguely
Speaker 1: detailed in the heavily revised forms. Several testimonies of the
Speaker 1: bereaved were revealed otherwise and revealed that their signatures were forged.
Speaker 1: Some of their names were even misspelled. Lorianne denied it all,
Speaker 1: including their revisions to the forms themselves that better disguise
Speaker 1: the very vague terms used for harvesting organs. She even
Speaker 1: said the tissue bank existed because of her sister's untimely
Speaker 1: death in the airplane crash. That is some bad juju.
Speaker 1: The next judge victor person had to rule on the
Speaker 1: probability that they had committed the crimes they'd been charged for.
Speaker 1: He had no doubts. From there, the case transferred to
Speaker 1: Superior Court. The third judge, Terry Smirling, was extremely sympathetic
Speaker 1: to defendants, and he was notorious for it. He threw
Speaker 1: out ten of the charges against the ssconces. He said,
Speaker 1: the motives of the defendants are despicable, but that's not
Speaker 1: the issue. The issue is whether a crime has been committed.
Speaker 1: He determined that by signing the contract, relatives were bound
Speaker 1: to its terms, so he threw out all the most
Speaker 1: grotesque charges. It was in direct contrast to what judge
Speaker 1: person had ruled that there was no contract. In September
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, David Scots pled guilty to twenty one
Speaker 1: charges of mishandling remains and was sentenced to five years
Speaker 1: in prison. Terry sentenced David to run sixteen felony charges concurrently,
Speaker 1: and he served only five years because he'd already been
Speaker 1: imprisoned while awaiting trial. That finish line was just over
Speaker 1: a year away. There was, meanwhile, a huge deal investigating
Speaker 1: the death of Tim Waters. He was the one who
Speaker 1: had owned the company that transported the bodies, one of
Speaker 1: the two whom David had paid his employees to beat.
Speaker 1: According to protocol, the coroners had saved samples of Tim's
Speaker 1: tissues for five years. At this point they were only
Speaker 1: three years in. One coroner said there was no toxicology
Speaker 1: report in the original autopsy, so they ran one. Because
Speaker 1: bureaucracy is notoriously slow, the prosecuting lawyer went over the
Speaker 1: coroner's head straight to the source at the lab. The
Speaker 1: only thing they found in Tim's system was dijoxon. He
Speaker 1: called to apologize afterward, but the coroner wasn't mad. He
Speaker 1: was intrigued. Yes, dijoxon was typically found in medication that
Speaker 1: someone with Tim's health might have taken, but Tim didn't
Speaker 1: take any medication. The other thing that could have put
Speaker 1: dijoxon in Tim's bloodstream was oleander. The coroner was willing
Speaker 1: to testify, and he did. He did qualify that oleander
Speaker 1: typically kills in the first few hours if it's going
Speaker 1: to kill, but because of Tim's obesity, he thought the
Speaker 1: fat stores might have delayed the outcome. A conviction started
Speaker 1: to look possible, so the defense brought in another expert
Speaker 1: who said the conclusion was inconclusive. The prosecution was devastated.
Speaker 1: They had to drop the charge of Tim's murder or
Speaker 1: risk David's exoneration on all accounts. The case for Tim's
Speaker 1: murder was in court for months, even after Lisa's testimony
Speaker 1: that she was fired and threatened for asking questions, Even
Speaker 1: after multiple victims those related to the bodies illegally cremated,
Speaker 1: came forward testifying they had no idea that the form
Speaker 1: allowed for organ harvesting, even after the guys who beat
Speaker 1: up Ron and Tim testified that they were paid to
Speaker 1: do it. After multiple jailhouse informants said David had admitted
Speaker 1: to everything. Prosecution appealed right away, but it didn't move
Speaker 1: the needle for these crimes. David sconce served only two
Speaker 1: and a half years and would be on probation for life.
Speaker 1: If that's not hard enough to believe when don't you
Speaker 1: hear what his mother said? When Lori Anne and Jerry
Speaker 1: went to court for the scandal, Lori Anne said that
Speaker 1: the mass cremations, the mixing of ashes, and extraction of
Speaker 1: dental gold did happen at their family business, but David
Speaker 1: did it all. He acted alone. They had no idea
Speaker 1: any of it was happening, and he did it without
Speaker 1: their permission. She threw her son under the bus and
Speaker 1: the jury bought it. They acquitted both parents of all crimes,
Speaker 1: as well as the conspiracy to steal and sell body parts.
Speaker 1: The good to come up this case was changes to
Speaker 1: laws about cremation. Cemetery Board investigators usually spent more time
Speaker 1: looking at audits the financials of crematories. As a result
Speaker 1: of this case, the biggest change was that a legislature
Speaker 1: passed a bill authorizing on demand inspection of crematories. Plus
Speaker 1: it is now very explicitly stated legally that all cremations
Speaker 1: must be performed individually unless a multiple cremation is authorized
Speaker 1: in writing, and even if the family agrees to it,
Speaker 1: only a few crematories are able to perform multiple cremations.
Speaker 1: But wait, there's more. In twenty thirteen, that's twenty four
Speaker 1: years after the original ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court
Speaker 1: Judge Dorothy Shubin ruled that David violated his probation after
Speaker 1: he was convicted of having stolen a firearm. Apparently, David
Speaker 1: swiped a gun from his neighbor in Montana, and when
Speaker 1: he tried to pawn it, the shop owner discovered it
Speaker 1: was stolen. Back in two thousand and two, when David
Speaker 1: had gone to court for another unspecified probation violation, the
Speaker 1: judge of that case said, if you come back before
Speaker 1: me on a violation of probation, I will sentence you
Speaker 1: to life in prison. Although that judge has since retired,
Speaker 1: Judge Dorothy Shubin imposed that promise. Although it seems like
Speaker 1: David Scance is the star of this episode. Let's not
Speaker 1: forget the women on both sides of the law, without
Speaker 1: whom this story might have ended very differently. Judge Dorothy
Speaker 1: Shubin made good on that weird promise of life imprisonment
Speaker 1: if David ever violated his parole. Lisa Carlin once worked
Speaker 1: for David in his crematorium and wouldn't let her moral
Speaker 1: compass be swung. Her testimony was instrumental in the series
Speaker 1: of trials during the nineteen eighties. And then, of course
Speaker 1: there's David's mother, Laurie Anne, and while it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: fair to blame this whole saga of depravity on her
Speaker 1: as an enabler, it is fair to acknowledge that without
Speaker 1: her encouragement, these crimes may not have escalated to the
Speaker 1: scale that they did. Join me next week on The
Speaker 1: Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for our episode on
Speaker 1: the Gold Club, once Atlanta's most prominent and criminal strip club.
Speaker 1: A special thanks to Ken Inglade for his book Family Business,
Speaker 1: which helped me write this episode, and the many sources
Speaker 1: I used can be explored through our show's notes. The
Speaker 1: Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Speaker 1: Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay mcbreer and I hosted this episode.
Speaker 1: I also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by
Speaker 1: Emma Demuth and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme music by
Speaker 1: Tyler Cash. Executive producer Scott Waxman.