How HBO's 'The Mortician' explores the horrors of the 'business of death'

USA Today

14 hours ago

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."
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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."