Latest news with #Sconce
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
The Mortician review: HBO true crime series ends with a scandalous confession designed to shock and awe
Depending on where you live in the world, the first episode of HBO's new true crime series, The Mortician, will either be scandalous or sloppy. In the 1980s, a man named David Sconce took over his family's respectable funeral home business, and took it in an altogether macabre direction, all in the name of aggressive expansion. But the sort of shenanigans that he got up to would hardly draw a second glance in India. A lot of what he was convicted of doing would be brushed off as 'jugaad' here. In the United States, however — especially the wealthy Pasadena neighbourhood where Sconce conducted his activities — a scandal erupted. It was discovered that Sconce was mass-cremating bodies and essentially scooping out ashes from large barrels, and presenting them to the families of the deceased. They had no idea that the urn being given to them contained the remains of several dead people mixed together, and not just their loved one. Sconce said that this was a common practice in funeral homes, and that most businesses would be lying if they pretend that it wasn't. You could imagine white people getting all hot and bothered about something like this, but in India, where the cost of human life is negligible, it would be more surprising if there was no skullduggery going on. Also read – Last Stop Larrimah movie review: The best true crime documentary of the year so far; stranger-than-fiction storytelling at its finest Although the first episode of The Mortician ends on this rather underwhelming note, things only get more shocking from there. It is revealed that Sconce's own parents — they were pillars of the community — had warned his would-be wife about him, and that, too, on the day of their marriage. It's enough to hook you in. The three-part series also features interviews with the ex-cons that Sconce hired to do the dirty work for him. But it's one thing to hear stories of how these men squeezed dead bodies into incinerators without a care for who's who. It's another thing to hear them admit that they were stealing all the jewellery and gold off these bodies for Sconce to sell off. In total, he is said to have cremated over 20,000 people. He presumably stole the jewellery off most of them. He is also said to have sold off their kidneys, livers, and brains to the highest bidder. Things get murkier when Sconce's business rivals begin dropping dead, shortly after having threatened to tell on him. Not only does the show bring back several of Sconce's old associates, it also features news reporters, members of the community who were conned by him, and other assorted characters who had run-ins with him over the years. Not a single one of them has a nice thing to say about Sconce. He's described as the kind of guy who'd always have a gun on his person, and was routinely finding ways to scam the system. At one point in the '80s, his business was booming to such a degree that he set up a new facility a few miles out of town. He got caught because a Holocaust survivor living in the area was triggered by the smell of burning flesh in the air. He told the authorities that it reminded him of the concentration camps; he was sure of it. Sconce's arrest proved one thing: he might've been a good businessman, but he was a lousy criminal. For one thing, he wouldn't stop threatening to kill people; for another, he was always risking what he had by attracting more and more attention to himself. In an unexpected coup, the filmmakers are able to get Sconce himself to sit down for an extended interview. While he admits to having conducted mass cremations and robbed the bodies off all their valuables, he absolutely denies having anything to do with his dead rivals. Read more – Fred and Rose West – A British Horror Story review: Netflix delivers a true crime tale of Nithari-level nastiness; a deeply upsetting peek at pure evil Unlike the many true crime series on Netflix, The Mortician is a far classier affair. The tone isn't lurid; it doesn't come across as exploitative. Most notably, it doesn't have the look and feel of something that was shot over an afternoon. The filmmakers have taken great care to give Sconce's many victims a chance to speak about the trauma he inflicted upon them by desecrating the bodies of their family members. Others reflect on how tragic the case proved to be for the largely peaceful Pasadena community. Nothing, however, can prepare you for the show's climax. It would be improper to reveal what happens. But a direct comparison could be made to the conclusion of another HBO true crime documentary; certainly, The Mortician isn't interested in leaving things open to interpretation. It has a firm idea about Sconce, and it does everything that a non-fiction series can do — editing, music, framing — in order to make this stance crystal clear. The Mortician isn't top-tier true crime, but it sure comes close. The Mortician Director – Joshua Rofé Rating – 4/5 Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a 'Rotten Tomatoes-approved' critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police. You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More
Yahoo
2 days 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
Yahoo
5 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.
USA Today
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
How HBO's 'The Mortician' explores the horrors of the 'business of death'
Watching HBO's "The Mortician" docuseries transported me to my own 2002 funeral story, and memories of the aggressively solemn funeral-home director upselling my distraught mother with increasingly extravagant urns for my father's ashes. To our growing horror, the pinky ring-wearing salesman pushed an absurd marble number with an attached frame featuring a man in a full kilt, Balmoral bonnet and competition bagpipes. My puffy-eyed brother broke the sales spiel with, "But my dad didn't play the bagpipes." The atrocities documented in director Joshua Rofé's three-part series (which concludes Sunday, June 15, 9 ET/PT) about a funeral business gone wildly wrong are far graver than an overpriced urn. The dark, illegal mortuary practices depicted in the series exploded in the 1980s, and brought the once-respected Lamb Funeral Home in affluent Pasadena, California, into scandal, sparking ghoulish legal drama and and coverage on ABC's "Nightline." However, Rofé was inspired to delve into the story because of the trusting customers and neighbors who were preyed upon by the family-owned funeral home at their most vulnerable moments, when dealing with the loss of a loved one. "There was this crazy scandal," Rofé tells USA TODAY. "But I was intrigued by the idea of this family drama being a murder-mystery noir that explores the business of death and everything around that, the grief and loss." Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. The series centers on David Sconce, the high school football star and fourth-generation Lamb operator. His great-grandfather, Lawrence Lamb, founded the funeral home in 1929, run by Sconce's mother, Laurieanne, and her husband, Jerry. David took over the cremation side of the business in the 1980s and implemented drastic, illegal changes to increase profits. David carried out mass cremations, removed corpses' gold jewelry and dental fillings and illegally harvested corpses' organs for sale, prosecutors charged. In 1989, he pleaded guilty to 21 felony counts, which included violence by his group of employees on rival morticians. Rofé was surprised that Sconce agreed to extensive interviews, which started immediately after he was paroled in 2023 on unrelated 2011 gun charges (Sconce is shown being picked up at the prison gates). "I've interviewed people who the average person would consider scary," says Rofé. "But he was often devoid of humanity. To find someone who just lacks empathy is really hard." While denying most of the egregious charges, Sconce still defends the group cremations, claiming that "comingling of ash" in impossible-to-clean mortuary kilns is unavoidable. 'There's ash in there from dozens of people. It's a fact; it's how things are," Sconce says emphatically in the series premiere. "To me, the commingling of ash is not a big deal. I don't put any value in somebody after they're gone and dead. As they shouldn't when I'm gone and dead. It's not a person anymore." How was Sconce caught in 'The Mortician' In the '80s, Sconce set up a mass illegal cremation center in the remote desert of Hesperia, California. The cremation site was so prolific that a nearby World War II veteran, who had participated in the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, recognized the unmistakable smell of burnt corpses and alerted the police. "He said, 'I smell the burning flesh. That is a smell I will never forget,'" says Rofé. "That is what brings the operation down." Was Sconce's family involved in the illegal activities? Sconce's parents, including his seemingly empathetic mother, were swept up in the charges. This was shocking, considering Laurieanne, the funeral organist, was such an outwardly comforting presence to the mourners at Lamb Funeral Home. She was convicted in 1995 on nine charges, including conspiracy to remove body parts and unlawful authorization of the removal of eyes, hearts, lungs and brains from corpses. Each parent and David served more than three years in prison because of the scandal. "Many eyewitnesses testified that Jerry and Laurieanne were deeply involved," says Rofé. "This is a family drama in the sense that they were all in the trenches together." Have there been changes to prevent the crimes seen in 'The Mortician'? "The Mortician" features funeral professionals who decry the abhorrent practices depicted and point out changes made following the crimes at the Lamb Funeral Home — which had its license revoked by a state board on March 30, 1989, providing the nail in the coffin of the family business. My dear dad's ashes (presumably it's mostly his ashes) have a happy, bagpipe-free home in a simple urn placed in the living room. "The majority of the people in the mortuary business are exactly the type of people you want to encounter in your moment of grief," says Rofé. "But in any business, you run into somebody who cares about nothing but the bottom line. In this series, we examine what happens when that's the business of death."
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Mortician's Chilling Story About Organ Harvesting, Cremation
Originally appeared on E! Online When a family-run business is around for decades, people tend to assume the owners have been competently providing a valuable service. The case of the Lamb Funeral Home on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena, Calif., proved that looks can be deceiving. While generations of families entrusted their loved ones' bodies to the mortuary established in 1929 by Charles F. Lamb, authorities discovered in 1986 that countless people who paid for cremation services were not getting what they expected in return. And then there was the persistent rumor—addressed in HBO's new docuseries The Mortician—that the founder's great-grandson David Sconce had a hand in dispatching a business rival who was getting too close to the truth. The Mortician has been unpacking the bizarre saga with the help of Sconce, who spent 10 years in prison for probation violation after a complicated legal journey. And—while he denies killing anybody—he remains unapologetic about what went on at the crematorium under his watch. More from E! Online Why Robin Roberts and Wife Amber Laign Believe Having Separate Apartments Is the Secret to Marriage Vanderpump Rules Alum Kristen Doute Gives Birth, Welcomes Baby With Fiancé Luke Broderick Beyoncé Celebrates Sir and Rumi Carter's 8th Birthday Onstage During Cowboy Carter Show "To me, commingling of ash is not a big deal," Sconce said in the series of his admitted regular practice of cremating as many bodies as possible at once, which basically ensured that families wouldn't be receiving only their loved one's ashes. "I don't put any value in anybody after they're gone and dead, as they shouldn't when I'm gone and dead. It's not a person anymore." He did worry at the time about getting caught, he said, because the practice—which Sconce alleged is common in the cremation industry—was a crime under the state's Health and Safety Code. Meanwhile, the National Funeral Directors Association said in response to The Mortician that, though "the actions chronicled in this documentary are both horrifying and real," they are not indicative of the business itself. "It's important to remember that the subject of this documentary is not representative of the funeral profession as a whole," the organization said in a May 30 statement. "Every day, tens of thousands of funeral directors work around the clock to help families take the first steps toward healing following the death of a loved one. With care, compassion and integrity, they help families create meaningful funeral and memorial services that reflect their loved one's personal values, interests and experiences." Sconce "stupidly justified" what he was up to, he explained in the series, thinking "nobody cares about these people anyway. Most of my cases were scatter-at-sea, no visitors, no viewing." As for the remains returned to loved ones, Sconce maintained that it still didn't really matter what was in that urn. "People just got to be more in control of their emotions," he said, "because that's not your loved one anymore and it never has been. Love 'em when they're here, period." But mixing up ashes was just the tip of the iceberg. Here is the jaw-dropping story of The Mortician: Who Is The Mortician's David Sconce?What Happened at the Lamb Funeral Home? What Was Happening to the Bodies at the Lambs' Pasadena Crematory? How did authorities find out what The Mortician's David Sconce was doing with bodies and ashes? What other criminal activity was going on at the Lamb Funeral Home?What Happened to Tim Waters?How did police connect David Sconce to the beating of Tim Waters?What Was David Sconce Eventually Charged With?Was David Sconce ever charged with Tim Waters' murder?What happened to Laurieanne Lamb and Jerry Sconce?What happened to The Mortician's David Sconce?What happened to the Lamb Funeral Home?Who were the victims of the Lamb Funeral Home?Where is David Sconce now? For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App
