Overview: A darkly gripping series, THE MORTICIAN chronicles a trusted family-owned funeral home that hid behind a façade of decency and propriety to take advantage of loved ones at their most vulnerable moments. In the early 1980s, David Sconce, scion of the Lamb family, took over the family business and sought to exploit the deceased in numerous ways to expand their earnings. Driven by profit, the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, California, engaged in years of morally questionable and inhumane practices. Featuring an exclusive interview with Sconce, newly released from prison, the series examines the lucrative and ubiquitous multibillion-dollar mortuary industry and illuminates what can happen behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny. Debut Date: a three-parter beginning on Sunday, June 01, 2025.
Expectations: Yes, it seems a bit macabre and certainly skews immoral; however, based upon some sound bites from David Sconce, chosen for the trailer, which is supplied below, you have to listen to what he tells you and extrapolate from it. He is not the only person out there who espouses the philosophy that a carcass is a carcass and the person you knew and loved was gone long before the body reached the mortuary. Why hold on to something that is no longer that person? Sconce and those like him put no value in what comes in that door, expedite the practice required, and get paid. Illegal, yes. Immoral, by most standards, yes. Jail time warranted and license revoked, yes. How exactly I feel about THE MORTICIAN and Sconce remains to be seen, but he has the right to believe what he believes about the deceased, but cannot enforce that his beliefs hold true for everyone else.
Gut Reactions: Episode One – We open the documentary with the testimony you’d most expect in the matter – a victim of the crimes perpetrated. A woman, Darlynn Branton-Stoa, agrees to go on camera to talk about what is expected of a mortuary service as she clutches a small urn that may or may not contain her beloved father’s ashes. She calls David Sconce a monster. Then we find ourselves on the campus of a local mortuary school, Cypress College, to learn from that perspective what it means to be a graduate in Mortuary Services. We even get a history lesson on how funeral services became big business after the Civil War, because everybody dies. Such businesses included the Lamb family funeral home of Pasadena, CA. Sconce’s mother was a Lamb. Then we settle in on David Sconce himself.
After being incarcerated for 10 years, on various accounts, he was paroled in 2023. He is willing to be interviewed. DirectorJoshua Rofé has his documentary. So, from there, we will learn how Sconce became viewed as a monster and how he violated the basic tenets of being a responsible mortician, and how he sees himself as maybe a bit greedy, but not evil.
David Sconce had a quick money scheme. Undercut the price of every funeral home in Southern California and then cremate more than one body at a time. A statistic arrives on the screen that states that before Sconce, the Lamb service was doing 194 cremations a year. In the first year under Sconce, it went up to over 1600, and the year after that, over 3400, then 4300. He’d hire old football chums to run the routes and bring them in, and Sconce would place 15 or more bodies at a time in the oven. Then he took it a step further. Sconce and his employees would glean all the rings off the fingers and claim all the expensive suits to resell them. You just can’t believe what you are hearing. Adding richness to the story is Sconce’s ex-wife, Barbara Hunt. She relates how she was married to this guy. One great story I’ve got to share is the one she tells the camera of David coming home with a styrofoam cup with the letters “Au” written on it. A while later, she saw him sitting on the garage floor with a hammer and a pile of teeth. He was breaking out bits of gold from the cadaver’s teeth! With all the money, he is buying top-line vehicles for his men and a Corvette for himself, complete with the license plate IBRN4U ( I Burn for you) on it! By now, Sconce was being watched, including by a rival crematorium owner, Tim Waters. That man, known to have met with Sconce, was found dead, supposedly of a heart attack, at 24. So, on top of it all, will Sconce have a murder rap to bear, too?
Again, you just can’t believe what you are hearing about this despicable money racket and how cavalier Sconce is about it all. What more can be told?
Episode Two – This installment addresses two setbacks facing Scone. One is the suspicion of the assault on and possible murder of rival Tim Waters, coupled with the destruction by fire of the crematorium. Did they pack the ovens to full and accidentally burn down their own operation? How he rebounds and/or dodges those issues will fill the hour.
The crematorium was destroyed while his chumps were high. But that didn’t stop Sconce. A few boroughs over, he obtained a shuttered ceramics factory. He just had his chumps ship the bodies over there to burn in mass in its kilns. That is, until an air quality inspector for the county caught wind of the enterprise. They had the place shut down, and operations ceased. The second setback was the investigation into Waters’ death. It was very easily circling Sconce. But then an unexpected third setback erupted. During a thorough investigation into all things David Sconce, it was espoused that his mother, Laurieanne Lamb, was cooking the books at the renowned Lamb Funeral Home. She was going to be slapped with larceny and fraud. The allegations even went as far back as her father, Lawrence Lamb, who founded the business. And if that wasn’t enough, findings revealed that they were also organ harvesting. The Lambs weren’t seeing that consenting organ donations were taking place, but they were helping themselves to the organs and selling them at the highest prices to research facilities, universities, and such. The respected Lambs’ family was just as corrupt as David was!
Episode Three – We get down to trial, and not just for David, but separate charges for his parents. For 20,000 mistreated clients, they only get 3 years and 8 months each. As for David Sconce, he shockingly got his charges, 96 of them, reduced to 21 and a sentence of 5 years. But the Winters’ murder charge was a separate case. That case was before him yet. In this documentary, we hear from the district attorney at the time, the judge of the case, the jury forewoman, and the expert toxicologist, and they were disappointed that the case of poisoning Tim Waters was dismissed due to a lack of evidence. The body of Waters was exhumed to reveal no trace of a lethal toxin, let alone oleander, the alleged agent. Sconce could have gotten life, but dodged the crime.
Upon release, Sconce moved his family to Lake Mohave, AZ. But while there, he racked up other offenses and served even more jail time, and it was at that time that his wife became his ex. Also, his father died, and his mother became a recluse. THE MORTICIAN ends on a somewhat eerie note. A former inmate of his said on camera that David was so full of himself that he didn’t know when to shut up. So, just when the filmmaker asks him if there was any more of his story he wished to clarify, or that was skipped over, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut! There was more to tell, but only if the cameras were off. He had a few more confessions to utter that he was proud of. It was almost like a THE JINX moment, if you know what I mean? David alluded to an incident in which he may have killed someone else (gasp). The interviewer declined to know anything further, as then he’d have to report it. The End, or is there a follow-up?
Conclusion: The heinous and gruesome crimes that played out forced the industry and the law to look at reforming mortuary practices, compliance, and laws. It is a better system now because of it. for David Sconce? He is a complicated, colorful figure, so full of himself that it is quite an experience to take him in, just like Robert Durst. What an unbelievable, sick, sad story. But as Sconce would say, it is what it is; a new day will dawn tomorrow. Hopefully, we never witness another man quite like him. THE MORTICIAN is available on HBO Max.
