HBO’s Gruesome True-Crime Doc Tried to Have Its Bombshell Moment. There’s Just One Problem.
Joshua Rofé’s docuseries The Mortician, which finished its run on HBO last night, doesn’t tell us anything about its central character over the course of its three hourlong episodes that we don’t know from the very beginning. It’s clear practically from the instant that David Sconce, the scion of a Southern California funeral home dynasty who ran a yearslong scheme involving illegal bulk cremation and the mutilation of corpses, is as unrepentant as he is shady, a man who offers to tell the filmmakers everything because he’s fundamentally lacking in remorse. But what’s increasingly astonishing, throughout the episodes, is just how much Sconce is who he appears to be: the platonic ideal of a conscienceless grifter who will always find a way to justify his actions.
The series initially presents Sconce as a bad seed, a golden-haired high school football star who was forced into the family business after a knee injury ended his athletic career. On his mother’s side, Sconce is a descendant of the Lambs, a storied “old Pasadena” family who had run the Lamb Funeral Home since the 1920s. Generations of locals trusted them implicitly, which gave Sconce ample opportunity to betray that trust. Placed in charge of the family’s crematorium in the 1980s, he came up with a plan to slash prices and boost volume, going from under 200 to over 25,000 cremations annually in less than five years.
Sconce did this not by building a large new facility, industrializing a largely family-run industry at a previously unheard-of scale. He did it the old-fashioned way, if by old-fashioned you mean the 18th century. Sconce and his employees, who were mostly ex–football players with drug habits or criminal records or both, would compete to see which of them could cram more bodies into a single oven at the same time, breaking or severing whatever extremities it took to fill it to bursting. When the crematorium burned down after one helper got too high to keep an eye on it, Sconce simply relocated to a new facility in nearby Hesperia, using ceramics kilns in the place of ovens. The smoke, which got so bad that one of Sconce’s accomplices ran a phone line out to his car so he wouldn’t have to stay inside the building, eventually drew the ire of local residents, and when the authorities came to investigate, one of them recognized the smell—as a soldier, he’d helped liberate Auschwitz.
But as The Mortician’s later episodes make clear, Sconce’s rotten apple didn’t fall far from the family tree. His habit of harvesting organs and gold teeth—which he called “popping chops”—from corpses was already Lamb family practice, and his mother, Laurieanne, according to an auditor from the California Funeral Board, regularly skimmed profits from preneed accounts, which allow families to set aside money for funeral expenses in advance. One subject says Laurieanne kept a container of miscellaneous ashes on hand, along with a table of how much ash a cremated body typically yields, so that she could, for example, spoon the missing amount into a baby’s urn to make up for the issue that the family had already sold to a third party. (Sconce himself points out that selling body parts is illegal, but charging for the labor it takes to procure them is not.) It’s not clear whether the Lambs were always crooks or whether things went sour between one generation or the next, but it’s safe to say that by the time David came along, the clan’s skulduggery was already established practice. The Lambs’ fellow morticians wax nostalgic about how ethical the funeral industry was before the Sconce scandal unleashed a wave of new regulations, but none of them reflects on why their colleagues were too keen to question why the cost of cremation suddenly dropped by three-quarters. If they didn’t know, it can only be because they didn’t want to.
The series interviews several people whose loved ones were left in the care of the Lambs and handed what they now know was a pile of ash that had little if any connection to the person they mourned. (One individual also found out during the Lambs’ trial that her family members’ hearts had been removed first from their bodies.) But, ultimately, The Mortician keeps getting drawn back to Sconce, whose cold-blooded certainty is treated as if it’s more interesting than the victims’ grief. Those who handle the dead for a living naturally have to learn to regard bodies with a certain clinical distance, but Sconce’s total lack of empathy is more like sociopathy than professional remove. “That’s not your loved one anymore,” he tells the camera, as if he’s still arguing with bereaved family members decades after the fact. “It’s just potash and lime.” One day, his ex-wife says, he came home with a Styrofoam cup full of teeth and, without so much as a word, plopped down on the garage floor to break out the gold fillings.
Small wonder, then, that he may have come to regard the living with the same disdain. Despite years of effort, neither the authorities nor the filmmakers were able to tie him definitively to the 1985 murder of Timothy Waters, a rival mortician who was preparing an exposé on Sconce’s methods for an industry trade publication—or even, for that matter, to prove that Waters was murdered at all. His death was initially ruled a heart attack, and although Sconce was charged with first-degree murder and preliminary tests found traces of oleander—a natural poison that can stop the heart—Waters’ body had decayed so much by the time the case came to trial that no evidence could be found, and the charge was dropped. (The specialist who performed the tests compares Waters’ liver with “chocolate pudding.”) Sconce’s associates say he bragged about committing the crime, but with a habitual liar, it’s hard to know what the truth might actually be.
But, like too many contemporary true-crime documentaries, The Mortician isn’t satisfied with merely questioning truth; it has to provide it. So Rofé ends with a Jinx-style stinger: Sconce apparently, or at least plausibly, confessing to three murders. Exactly which three is difficult to say—Waters’, perhaps; an employee of Sconce’s who was found hanged after threatening to quit; and, most suggestively, an unnamed man who tried to rob Sconce and his wife at gunpoint. Sconce has just begun to tell the story, prompted only by Rofé asking if there’s anything else he’d like to say, when the cameraperson announces that they have to reload, and Sconce regains enough control to say he’ll tell the story only off-camera. But he does say it’s one of three “things I can’t talk about”—three being the number of murders an anonymous former employee suggests, elsewhere in the film, that Sconce may have carried out.
Rofé told the Guardian that Sconce is “clearly implying serious crimes have been committed.” But, considering there’s no suggestion whom that mystery victim may have been, it’s a wan note to end the series on, more of a damp squib than a bombshell. (The most materially suspect aspect is when Sconce, who previously claimed he “wasn’t a gun guy,” goes into detail about the handgun he usually kept in his driver’s-side door.) The last-minute equipment malfunction inevitably recalls the end of Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, whose pivotal interview was captured only on audio cassette due to a broken camera. But, as Morris has pointed out many times since, there’s a big difference between leveraging a movie to prove a condemned man’s innocence and using one to point toward his guilt. Nearly four decades later, the influence of Morris’ landmark movie is like a massive planet, pulling lesser satellites into its orbit. But few of them have the goods to be its equal, and most just end up as rubble.
Slate
