Latest news with #LambFuneralHome
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Mortician' Becomes HBO's Most-Watched Documentary Series In Over 5 Years
EXCLUSIVE: The Mortician is piquing audience interest for HBO. The three-part documentary series, which chronicles the inhumane practices at a funeral home in Southern California, debuted on June 1. Since then, the show has tallied more than 2.6M cross-platform viewers in the U.S., per the network. More from Deadline 'Love Island USA' Season 7 Sets New Bar For Series, Soaring Past 1B Minutes Viewed In Week After Debut, Per Luminate HBO's Steve Carell Comedy Series Adds Annie Mumolo 'Somebody Somewhere's Tim Bagley On Finding The Humor In The "Depth And Darkness" Of Life & Showing The "Openness Of Your Heart" In Song It's now the most-watched HBO documentary series in over five years. That means it's beat out some high profile documentaries like Pee-wee as Himself, Chimp Crazy, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God and more. This is certainly a strong performance for the series, likely aided by the vote of confidence from HBO to place it in the network's marquee 9 p.m. Sunday night slot, following on the heels of The Last of Us, The White Lotus and The Gilded Age. That generally has signaled to viewers that a series should be on their radar and thus can be a force for driving engagement. The Mortician follows 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. With emotional interviews with families of the victims of the Lamb Funeral Home and revelations from former employees, The Mortician unravels a dark, troubling story that involved mass cremations and stealing from the dead in a multitude of macabre ways. The scandal shook Southern California and as members of the family stood trial, the funeral industry took heed, bringing about tighter regulations and allowing for greater transparency into the business of death. A testimony from Sconce, who tells his side of the story with animated energy and candor, anchors the series. The HBO unscripted series is directed and executive produced by Joshua Rofé and executive produced by Steven J. Berger for Number 19 and Strong Baby's Jonah Hill and Matt Dines. Best of Deadline 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More
The Guardian
a day 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
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
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.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
The Mortician: What Happened to David Sconce & Lamb Funeral Home?
Curious about the shocking true story behind The Mortician? With mass cremations, illegal organ harvesting, and a trusted family business at the center of it all, HBO's latest docuseries unpacks one of California's most disturbing criminal scandals. As new interviews, court records, and eyewitness accounts surface, the dark truth behind David Sconce and the Lamb Funeral Home comes into full view. Here's what to know about David Sconce's current whereabouts and what happened to Lamb Funeral Home. Authorities released David Sconce on parole in 2023 after he served part of a 25-year-to-life sentence imposed in 2013. The court issued that sentence after he violated a lifetime probation order stemming from his 1989 conviction. In that case, prosecutors charged him with mutilating corpses, conducting mass cremations, and hiring men to assault rival morticians. He had served a couple of years in prison before violating probation, which led to a harsher sentence. In HBO's The Mortician, Sconce, now 68, appears on camera and states, 'I don't put any value in anybody after they're gone and dead.' His actions and perspective form the core of the three-part documentary (via People.) A Pasadena police detective quoted in the Los Angeles Times reported that Sconce denied knowing one of his alleged victims, saying, 'I never met Tim Waters, I never spoke to Tim Waters… He was not an account of mine.' Former employee Danny Galambos testified that Sconce had hired him and two others to attack Waters and other competitors, for which Galambos received five years' probation. Lamb Funeral Home, previously operated by the Sconce family in Pasadena, California, no longer exists. The business lost its license and ceased operations following the scandal. According to The Mortician and archived Los Angeles Times coverage, regulatory agencies shut down the funeral home after investigations uncovered illegal cremations and desecration of bodies. A fire destroyed the Pasadena Crematory in 1986 after an employee reportedly left the ovens running while getting high. Authorities later found bodies being cremated in bulk at Oscar Ceramics, a pottery facility using kilns designed for ceramics instead of human remains. The discovery triggered the final collapse of the Lamb family's funeral business. The post The Mortician: What Happened to David Sconce & Lamb Funeral Home? appeared first on - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
The Guardian
5 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.'
