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The Guardian
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Mortician review – so queasy it will stay with you for ever
The smart thing about comparing something to The Jinx is that you're essentially daring viewers to stick with you until the very end. After all, as good as The Jinx was, it didn't reach legendary status until its final few moments, when notorious murder suspect Robert Durst paused an interview with his microphone still on, and muttered a confession while using the toilet. The Mortician, it has to be said, is pound for pound more staggering than The Jinx. Joshua Rofé's three-part documentary about California cremator David Sconce is a feat of construction, patiently doling out larger and larger transgressions until the whole thing becomes swamped in unimaginable horror. It's the kind of documentary where, when the credits roll, you realise that you haven't drawn breath for several minutes. As with most true crime documentaries, Sconce's case is a known one. Perhaps you watched it unfold at the time, or perhaps you like to spend your time trawling the darker corners of Wikipedia. This is the downfall of many products of this ilk; they're flashy retellings that add very little of value. The Mortician is not that. The Lamb Funeral Home scandal made enough of a splash to have inspired more than one novel, and yet The Mortician deserves to go down as the definitive version. On some level, it's the story of a very efficient businessman. As the figure in charge of Pasadena crematorium Lamb Funeral Home, David Sconce was determined to undercut his rivals. He would perform long round-trips around mortuaries in his rundown van, collecting bodies, burning them and returning them for the low, low price of $55. But cremations are slow. It takes from two to three hours to burn a body and let the remains cool enough to safely gather them. So Sconce started burning a few at a time. And then more and more, breaking bones to cram as many as he could into his incinerator. In barely any time at all the business went from performing 194 cremations a year to 8,173, handing bereaved relatives urns scooped from bins brimming with the mixed ashes of countless different people. Incredibly, it only gets worse from there. To reveal too much would be to spoil the cascade of monstrosities that follow, but it makes for extremely queasy viewing. The thefts, the desecration, the complete detachment between the human life that ended and the wholesale scavenging that followed. It is unbelievably dark. At the centre of it all is Sconce himself. Met by the documentary crew outside jail, where he had just finished serving a 10-year sentence, Sconce is a weirdly charismatic presence. Described by one talking head as 'Richie Cunningham' from Happy Days, he has a big, open, all-American face, and golly-gees his way through much of his interviews despite the atrocities laid at his feet. At best, he defends his actions with a cold logic – 'People have got to be more in control of their emotions,' he says at one point of the appalled bereaved; 'That's not your loved one any more' – but at worst there's a showboating bravado, as if he can't get enough of his own performance. And this is ultimately what gets him. The Mortician has received so many comparisons to The Jinx because of how it ends. During an unguarded moment when he believes the camera is no longer running, Sconce appears to admit to something awful. It's left vague, since there's nothing as concrete as Durst muttering that he 'killed them all', but it's still enough for Rofé to publicly encourage renewed investigation. However, while the climax will grab all the headlines, the journey is just as important. The Mortician isn't only about one grim individual who did horrendous things to thousands of corpses; it's about the dehumanising effects of unfettered capitalism and our own relationship to death. In the cold light of day, how should we treat the people we love once they are gone? Is the dignity we afford their bodies purely ceremonial? Do they simply become matter to be disposed of by whatever means necessary? It is a harrowing journey to get to the end of the programme – the faint of heart should be warned that the series includes talk of concentration camps, infants, organ harvesting and something nefariously referred to as 'popping chops' – but it's worth it. The Mortician is so much more than a gussied-up Wikipedia page. It's something that is unlikely to ever leave you. The Mortician is on Sky and Now in the UK. In the US, it airs on HBO and Max. In Australia, it airs on Max
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Subject of The Mortician hints at unsolved ‘serious' criminal misdeeds linked to mortuary scandal
The subject of HBO's critically acclaimed show The Mortician admits on screen that there are 'three [things] altogether' which 'can't come back' and that he can't talk about publicly – after the docuseries mentions deaths for which he was suspected of being responsible, among them one at the center of a failed attempt to prosecute him on charges that he murdered a rival mortuary owner. David Sconce's haunting statements on the show's third and final episode late on Sunday are 'clearly implying some very serious crimes have been committed', The Mortician's director, Joshua Rofé, told the Guardian. But it wasn't immediately clear what, if any, consequences there may be. 'If there is a [prosecutor] out there who deems it fit, who thinks there is enough to even go by, then great,' Rofé said. 'They should do it.' The sequence is bound to draw comparisons to the conclusion of the 2015 season of the HBO documentary The Jinx, in which the late Robert Durst is overheard confessing that he 'killed them all' – an evident reference to three people he was thought to have murdered in prior years. That admission from Durst, who died in January 2022, was costly. In September 2021, he was found guilty of murdering a friend who helped him cover up the killing of his first wife. Sconce – whose family's Lamb funeral home in Pasadena, California, became synonymous with illegal mass cremations and achieved national notoriety in the 1980s – delivers the comments in question shortly before an acquaintance of his is asked how many murders he thinks the series's subject may have had a hand in. The acquaintance, who is granted anonymity, replies: 'I figure three.' Rofé's film largely revisits funeral industry reforms spurred by a tortuous criminal case brought against Sconce and the Lamb mortuary involving charges of mass cremations at a ceramics kiln; stealing and selling corpses' gold jewelry and dental fillings; stealing and selling corpses' organs; delivering fake ashes to people mourning dead loved ones; and plotting violence against competitors. One of those competitors was the Burbank, California, mortician Timothy Waters, who prosecutors maintained had died in 1985 after ingesting oleander that Sconce furtively used to poison a meal that the two men shared. Investigators later used a special tool to analyze Waters' liver and kidney tissue for derivatives of oleander. None were found, and, in 1991, the charges that Sconce had murdered Waters were dismissed. 'No oleander – nothing, zero, zippo,' Sconce's attorney, Roger Diamond, says of Waters' death in archival footage shown in The Mortician. 'The man died of a heart attack.' Sconce, meanwhile, says in archival footage: 'I always knew I'd walk out. I'm innocent.' He had been facing the possibility of execution. Yet, in stunning commentary on The Mortician, Cornell University toxicology professor Jack Henion – who served as a court expert on the Waters murder case – says the absence of an oleander derivative in the studied tissue does not mean it 'was never present'. Such a substance 'is unstable and may have broken down to undetectable levels over the past five years', Henion says on The Mortician. Henion adds that in his unofficial opinion Sconce 'likely' was guilty of killing Waters but 'got away with it'. One piece of circumstantial evidence which Henion cites is Sconce's possession of a book that details how difficult it is to detect oleander poisoning, along with an accompanying illustration of someone dining with a knife and a fork. What Sconce ultimately did plead guilty to included mutilating bodies, conducting mass cremations at just $55 a body and various other crimes. That led to a series of incarcerations – the most recent of which he was paroled from in 2023 – as well as lifetime probation. Walters isn't the only death in Sconce's orbit that thrust him under suspicion, as The Mortician notes. The docuseries also recounts how an employee of Sconce named Ron Jordan was found hanged and dead after indicating that he wanted to quit his job while promising he would keep quiet about all the illicit things he had seen. Investigators deemed Jordan's death a suicide, though in the series Sconce acknowledges that some surmised he was responsible – to which he says: 'Why would I want to kill him? Seriously?' Additionally, as The Mortician winds down, Sconce shares an anecdote about a man who robbed him at gunpoint in front of his now ex-wife during a trip to the cemetery. 'All I can say is – do you think I found that guy [later]?' Sconce asks Rofé. 'It's one of the things I can't talk about. The other thing I'll tell you about, too, but you can't talk about that either.' Sconce continues: 'Really, there's three of them altogether … OK – promise not to tell on me.' Rofé then tells him he is not interested in having any information that he would not be allowed to air, prompting Sconce to retort: 'Ah, it's never going to come back. It's never going to come back – can't come back.' Following that exchange is an excerpt from an interview Rofé said he filmed about two months later. The excerpt depicts the anonymous Sconce acquaintance discussing his belief that The Mortician's subject was a part of three murders. Whatever the case, with respect to the conclusion Sconce gave him, Rofé remarked: 'I could not believe what he said.' The director added: 'In one moment, when his guard drops, he shows you exactly who he really is. And I think that if you are to walk away with a feeling about what you want to happen, you would like justice or a fair shake for anybody who was a victim of a person who, in that moment, revealed who they really are.'
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Incredibly disturbing': docuseries goes inside jaw-dropping LA mortuary scandal
'I don't want to be cremated,' director Joshua Rofé said in a recent interview. 'I know that for sure.' After Rofé made the shocking HBO docuseries The Mortician, you can understand why. The three-parter focuses on a mortuary scandal that one of his interviewees called 'the ultimate incendiary point for which we now have massive regulations … regarding cremation'. Many who watch the piece may feel the same about their final arrangements as Rofé does concerning his. The Mortician is an exploration of a sprawling, twisted 1980s criminal case that vaulted the Lamb funeral home in Pasadena, California, and its co-proprietor David Sconce to national infamy amid charges of carrying out mass cremations at a ceramics kiln; stealing and selling corpses' gold jewelry and dental fillings; stealing and selling corpses' organs; delivering fake ashes to people mourning dead loved ones; and plotting violence against adversaries in the mortuary business. The series – debuting on Sunday – in part casts Sconce as an exceptionally malicious actor in a profession with mostly honorable practitioners. And his downfall led to industry reforms at protecting consumers of mortuary services in the US, including laws that allowed for crematorium inspections and made it a felony to furtively take dental gold or silver from corpses. But, as both The Mortician and a scan of news headlines establish, mortuary scandals that echo the one centering on Sconce and the families with whom he did business persist. Rofé alluded to a guilty plea in April from a Colorado funeral home owner accused of keeping a dead woman's body in a hearse for more than a year as well as improperly storing others' cremated remains. His series nods to other relatively similar cases over the years in Georgia, Vermont, Tennessee and Texas. None of that is to say the mortuary industry is particularly vulnerable to attracting the proverbial bad apples, Rofé said. He remarked: 'People do fucked up things in every business in the name of money.' Yet, he added, 'as it relates to the business of death, it becomes a bit more grotesque' when that happens. And there's so much grotesqueness in The Mortician that Rofé couldn't find a place for one of the most disturbing anecdotes he said he has personally ever elicited in his career. It's one that's included directing Lorena – examining the infamous case of the woman who cut off her husband's penis with a kitchen knife in Virginia in 1993 – and Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, which partially delved into a fight over the renowned landscape artist's estate. The anecdote in question came from Louis Quinones, who used to drive a van that retrieved bodies for Sconce's mortuary to cremate. Quinones recalled how one day he was in a cold storage room where the mortuary kept bodies on shelves, and he instinctively kicked a blanket on the floor aside that he believed had been left there haphazardly. But he felt there was something under the blanket, which he removed and discovered was the corpse of a baby. Quinones told Rofé that he looked at the name written on the baby's ankle tag – and realized that he had delivered what was supposed to be the infant's ashes weeks earlier to the child's mother after she had paid for a cremation. 'That is another level of depravity,' said Rofé, who also made Sasquatch, which zeroed in on a mythical monster and a murder. But there was no space for that recollection from Quinones in a series that spends a total of about 180 minutes recounting how Sconce first cornered the cremation market in his community by charging just $55 a body, undercutting the competition. The funeral home he owned and ran alongside his parents then went from conducting fewer than 195 cremations in 1981 to more than 25,280 just five years later – inviting a law enforcement investigation that uncovered the brutal, illegal shortcuts he took to register that increase in volume of about 12,860%. It was impossible at that rate for the mortuary to determine whose ashes belonged to whom. So it handed ashes back to client families at random – which they had no idea about for years. Furthermore, investigators determined that, to maximize his profits, Sconce abided by his mortuary's taking – and selling – everything from rings and clothes to eyeballs, hearts and livers. Those efforts required the mutilation of bodies and had not received permission from people who had entrusted Sconce to care for their dead. The details of Sconce's legal fate – including in connection with criminal charges that he killed the owner of a rival mortuary – are out there for those who are so inclined to find out ahead of The Mortician's airing. But suffice to say he went on to a series of incarcerations from which he was paroled. That parole happened as Rofé researched Sconce's story in archived newspaper articles and weighed retelling it in a docuseries styled after the Los Angeles noir films the director said he devoured after moving to the city at the beginning of his career. He picked out Sunset Boulevard, DOA, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. The Mission Revival-style mortuary inextricably tied to Sconce would have been at home appearing in any of them. Rofé and his team, mostly based in LA and New York, had two days' notice that Sconce was being released from a prison in Sacramento, California. But they got there in time to greet him at the prison gates and subsequently capture what HBO billed as the first – and evidently only – interview Sconce had given since his parole, making it an easy decision for him to finish what became The Mortician. Some of the comments Sconce offered have already made the news. 'To me commingling of ash is not a big deal,' Sconce says in one rant on The Mortician, an excerpt of which was in a trailer clip that drew media coverage. 'I don't put any value in anybody after they're gone and dead – as they shouldn't when I'm gone and dead. That's not a person any more.' He continued: 'That's not your loved one any more. And it never has been. Love them when they're here. Period.' Rofé couldn't discuss much of his interview with Sconce without spoiling the series for prospective viewers. But what he could say is he was gripped with how Sconce shifted from demonstrating himself to be 'the king of deflection' – even with respect to things that court documents presented as proven facts – to 'being so upfront about other incredibly disturbing things that you couldn't believe somebody was not only coping to but trying to rationalize as something that there's nothing wrong with'. 'And I still can't believe some of the things he said on camera,' Rofé said. 'If you [are] shocked watching, do understand that I was shocked having it said to me in person.' The Mortician begins on HBO on 1 June with a UK date to be announced
