“Being in funeral service, we cannot bring our work home,” a mortician says early on HBO’s new true crime docuseries The Mortician. “No one wants to talk over dinner about what we did over the day.”
Ironically, the opposite is true for the Lamb-Sconces, whose family funeral home became a house of horrors ghoulish enough to fuel three hour-long installments, premiering June 1.
In their household, discussions about mixing corpses’ ashes and secretly harvesting hearts were as commonplace as remarking on the weather. The Mortician director Joshua Rofé (Lost for Life; Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed) leans on true crime filmmaking clichés, but it’s the series’ comprehensive account of how a respected Los Angeles family were able to get away with gleefully profiting off grieving clients’ vulnerability thanks to their all-American exterior that helps set it apart from so many similar streaming shows.
Rather than laying out the family’s criminal web right off the bat, The Mortician kicks off by zooming in on its most infamous member: David Sconce, who ’80s headlines deemed a “crematorium Hitler” after he was arrested for cremating as many as 200 bodies at once to maximize profits.
The show isn’t shy about framing him as its key villain—the first time we see David being released from prison in 2023, the footage is set to a blaringly ominous score that feels directly ripped from scenes of the evil Harkonnen planet in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films.
On paper, he’s quite the counterpoint to the rest of his maternal family. David’s grandfather, Lawrence Lamb, became a staple of Old Pasadena when he founded the Lamb Funeral Home, a seeming bastion of “family and Christian values.”
Friendly, rich, and blonde, they embodied stereotypical white Americana—the guys were football stars, and David’s mother, Laurieann Lamb, once rode in Pasadena’s Rose Parade.
After a knee injury ended David’s youthful football glory days, he decided to go straight into the family business, taking over clients’ increasingly popular cremation requests. Since the Lambs had their very own crematorium at a nearby cemetery, he came up with the idea of offering to do competitors’ cremations for a drastically lower price. Business boomed throughout the ’80s, but even David’s industriousness didn’t account for the dramatic rise in cremations.
As grainy archival footage of Pasadena highways gives way to spooky stock clips of gas fumes, an onscreen cremation counter informs us that Lamb Funeral Home’s cremations soared from 194 in 1982 to a whopping 25,285 by 1986. How was this possible? By shoving as many corpses into the fire as possible.
To this day, David remains chillingly unbothered by his embrace of this illegal technique, even after his associates recount alleged tales of their boss playfully slapping bodies and encouraging them to cut off fingers to sell corpses’ jewelry.
“I don’t put any value in anybody after they’re gone and dead… That’s not a person anymore,” David blithely tells the interviewer. “People just gotta be more in control of their emotions, because that’s not your loved one and it never has been. Love ‘em while they’re here, period.”
Equally concerning? Claims that David had a hand in the deaths of his director competitor, Tim Waters, who supposedly died of a heart attack at 24 after investigating David’s business practices; and employee Ron Jordan, whose supposed suicide shortly after he asked to leave the funeral business raised eyebrows among law enforcement.
Even if the rest of the Lamb-Sconces were downright saintly, David’s actions are grisly enough to warrant a true crime special. What takes this case to another stomach-churning level is the revelation that not only did his parents and grandparents know what he was doing, it was a well-known secret of the trade.
“This was learned through generations,” David claims. “So if you wanna say fruit of the poisonous tree, there you go.”
In fact, his beatific mother Laurieann might be the most disturbing of the whole bunch—in one of the docuseries’ most unsettling scenes, an employee claims that she kept who-knows-whose ashes in her office drawer, with exact instructions about how much ash to put in each urn, ranging from adult men to infants. The fact that none of the Lamb-Sconces received more than five years of prison time makes their blasé responses to trial witnesses weeping on the stand about their parents’ brains being removed without their knowledge all the more galling.
One of the most sickeningly alluring sides of the wildly popular (if problematic) true crime genre is the ways in which it probes the question of how seemingly normal citizenry can resort to doing the unthinkable behind closed doors. For the Lamb-Sconce family, the answer seems to be unfettered late-stage capitalism.
In a fascinating but all-too-brief stretch of the premiere, a historian explains that, after the Civil War, American funeral practices grew from private rituals to a multi-billion-dollar industry, chiefly run by families who fashioned themselves after high-earning doctors and lawyers.
As several morticians point out towards the end, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that at least the Lamb Funeral Home’s horrific practices being exposed led to strict industry protocols.
Still, a few “bad apples” being slapped on the wrist doesn’t change the fact that, as one interviewee points out, burying a loved one is the largest expense the average American will face besides buying a house. If you’re raised to reduce a dead body down to its price tag, it’s only a step further to start seeing dollar signs behind their eyeballs and jewels, too.
As all-encompassing as The Mortician’s breadth of interviews is, I couldn’t help but wish for a bit more of an inquiry into the cultural attitudes towards American grief and funeral rites that allowed the Lamb-Sconces to take things so far in the first place—and what it might say about us.
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