A Family Business (19 page)

Diamond tried to argue. “It is all based on alleged threats and statements made a long time ago,” he protested. “We are not talking about threats to intimidate.” He was prepared to say something else, but Judge Mitchell interrupted him again.

“I am very concerned,” she repeated, shaking her head. “I really am. I am concerned about the allegations that are set forth in this document, and, as I said, based on my reading of the document, I would be inclined to make the bail higher than the bail that has been requested by the district attorney’s office.”

Lewis smiled to himself. Holy cow, he thought, she really would have agreed to a higher amount if I had just asked for it.

The judge, however, had her attention focused on Diamond. To make absolutely sure the defense attorney understood her position, the judge added, not unkindly: “It is a serious situation, counsel, and I would not be comfortable if anything occurred because I decided that I was going to reduce the bail, or I was going to decide to release him on his own recognizance.”

Diamond turned to David, shrugging his eyebrows. She’s made up her mind, the gesture said, there’s nothing further we can do right now. Far from considering it a lost cause, however, Diamond already was making plans to explore other avenues and to try different legal approaches. We may have struck out here, he acknowledged, but there are other judges and there will be other days. Leaning over, he whispered words of encouragement to David. But David was not concentrating on his lawyer; he continued to glare at Lewis.

For David, there would indeed be other judges—a lot of them, as it turned out—but not one of them would reduce his bail. In fact, a few months down the road even the chance for bail would be removed altogether. After that, he would not have an opportunity for freedom until he was judged on the accusations. At that point his only chance of seeing Bullhead City in the immediate future would be if he were acquitted.

Sitting in Judge Mitchell’s courtroom, half listening to Diamond, David knew only fury. The judge’s decision must have angered and frustrated him, but his real rage seemed to be directed at Walt Lewis. If it had not been for him, David felt, he would never have found himself in such a pickle to begin with. One day, he vowed, Lewis is going to pay for this. In the meantime the path was clear: he planned to fight. If anything, Judge Mitchell’s decision had increased his determination. Lewis may have won the first round, David told himself, but the battle was just beginning. Recalling a lesson he had learned on the football field, David was reminded of that truism in contact sports: If you can’t go over an obstacle, go around it. And he had an idea about how he just might be able to go around the prosecutor.

18

Lying on his bunk, staring at the ceiling of his cell, David’s thoughts churned with possibilities. Let his lawyer worry about appeals and suppression hearings and motions protesting illegal searches, he thought. In the meantime he had a scheme of his own. Diamond would not agree with his plan, he knew, so he was going to have to do it himself. But that was no problem. All his life, he had been able to talk his way out of any jam he had gotten himself into, and this time was not going to be any different. It was just going to take a little more planning, was all.

For more than two weeks he plotted. His plan was to go to the prosecution and try to work a deal. If his lawyer wouldn’t do it, he would move on his own.

When Lewis was handed David’s note requesting an interview, which came to him via one of the jailers, he was delighted. If Lewis had learned one thing in his years as a prosecutor, he felt, it was to
always
listen to a defendant’s story. By articulating a position, a defendant put himself on record, even if what he said was obviously false. Since Lewis himself, as the prosecutor, could not take part in the interview, he sent Detective Dennis Diaz.

For his part, Diaz was flabbergasted when he learned that David was requesting an interview. Certainly, he thought, David must know what I think of him. Although the two had never had a conversation, Diaz had interviewed too many people about the Sconces for him to be anything but absolutely convinced David was guilty of the charges pending against him. “He brags a lot,” Diaz commented to a fellow officer one day, “but he has done what he brags about.”

The detective had been investigating David for some four months, and while he had a good idea of what the man was like, it was all based on secondhand information. He was curious about what it would be like to talk to him man to man, the two of them sitting across a table from each other, so he could form his own opinion.

Diaz knew that David could be extremely charming, that when he wanted to, he could be polite, articulate, and as down-to-earth as the guy next door. He had evidence of that already, and not just through his conversations with people involved in the funeral home operation. Just a few days previously he had heard through the law enforcement grapevine that David had everybody in the system convinced about what a nice guy he was, that the deputies in the county jail were amazed that he was locked up, because his claim to innocence sounded so convincing. Diaz had problems with this. He could understand how a bleeding-heart liberal might fall for David’s spiel, but it was totally beyond him how David could have so thoroughly snowed a group of experienced fellow officers as well.

On the morning of Wednesday, July 15, 1987, Diaz and another investigator named Ricky Law met with David in a lawyer’s meeting room at the Castaic Wayside Honor Ranch—a grim, prisonlike facility which belied the term “honor ranch”—about twenty-five miles northwest of Pasadena, where David was then being held.

While he had not come to the meeting expecting to hear the truth from David, Diaz was nevertheless taken aback by the first words out of David’s mouth.

“It’s just unbelievable,” David began affably, treating Diaz more like an old friend and confidant than an antagonist, “I can’t believe the intellect in jail. It’s actually incomprehensible. I could never understand how it could be in jail. I honest to goodness say thank God for jail, because some of the people I’ve seen in here, they don’t belong anywhere else.”

Diaz stared at him. “I can imagine,” he mumbled, stifling an impulse to laugh at the irony of the comments.

“I can’t imagine some of these people being out in the world,” David continued, oblivious to the looks of disbelief he was getting from the investigators. “It’s just tough,” he whined. “I’m telling you, there are fights, loud talk, lights on twenty-four hours a day, showers every three days…”

Diaz and Law let him ramble, stopping him only occasionally with a request to elaborate on something he said or prompting him with a verbal nudge. If he were going to tell them anything of value, it would have to be at his own pace and in his own time. The best he could do, Diaz figured, was give David full rein. Sooner or later he would get to the point.

Diaz was right. David eventually did get around to what he really wanted to talk to the investigator about, but by the time he got there, he had blown such a smokescreen that Diaz would not have believed him if he said the sun rose in the east. The interview turned out to be a real trip for Diaz, and like many journeys, half of the excitement had been in getting there.

The first thing he wanted to tell them, David said, was that he was meeting them behind Diamond’s back. Diaz knew that and had planned for it. Just to make sure that David did not try later to claim that the meeting was forced upon him and therefore violated his rights, Diaz whipped out a statement that had been drawn up in advance by Lewis and asked David to sign it. It acknowledged that David had agreed to the interview without an attorney being present.

“Sure,” David agreed amiably, “I’ll talk to you without an attorney. He hasn’t talked to me in two weeks anyway. I know he will be mad about this, but I’m reasonably intelligent and I don’t believe I’m going to do anything to discredit anything. I just want to talk to you guys because I haven’t had a chance to talk to anybody.”

What he wanted to talk about, he said, was how everyone had lied about him. “What I’m interested in, before this goes any farther, basically, gentlemen, is I’m interested in cooperating with you.”

Diaz looked at him evenly. Sure you are, he thought, if you think it will help you walk.

Not surprisingly, David’s version of events differed considerably from what Diaz had been told by others. According to David:

• It was not he whom Lisa Karlan used to argue with almost constantly when she worked at CIE&TB, but George Bristol. “George hired her; George fired her,” he said.
  
• He had not been involved in any depth in the operation at CIE&TB. The money supporting that facility had come from a man named Randy Welty, who also owned a small chain of adult bookstores. According to David, Welty suggested establishing the business and was willing to finance it, but he insisted that everything be in David’s name. At the time, David said, he needed money to build Oscar’s Ceramics, so he went along with the idea, accepting $30,000 in traveler’s checks from Welty. “It more or less paid for all my bricks to build [the retorts at] Oscar’s.”
  

• But David insisted that he took no active part in the operation and was not paid by the company. “I never ran the bank. I never talked to doctors. I never placed any corneal tissue, or removed any tissue. I never drew a check from the tissue bank. I never received any compensation whatsoever from the tissue bank for any activities at all.” The day-today operation, he added, was handled by Bristol and another employee.
  

• Dave Edwards had been in a near panic when he telephoned him on June 5.
  

• Apparently unaware that Diaz had a tape of the conversation, David contended that Edwards had called him looking for a place to hide because he was afraid he was going to be arrested.
  

  “And I told Edwards, I says, ‘If you come out here, they’ll just extradite you.’ And I go, ‘Most of the stuff that I’m facing now has turned into misdemeanor stuff anyway, so there’s no real big deal about showing up.’ He just wanted to come to Arizona. I says, ‘I don’t have the room, I don’t know anybody out here, and you can’t do it.’”
  

• It was Edwards’s idea to beat up Hast and Nimz, not his, and they carried it through on their own, not because he had paid them to do it.
  

• He said Edwards was angered by Hast’s telephone call to Laurieanne in which he threatened to publish rumors of multiple cremations. Edwards, David said, was very fond of his mother and had been disturbed because Hast’s telephone call had upset her. Also, Edwards felt that if the crematorium were forced to close down because of anything Hast did, he would not be able to get his brother a promised job driving one of the vans.
  

  If it had been him, not Edwards, who was angry with Hast, David said, he simply would have met with the funeral home director and talked him out of it. “I wasn’t going to go down there and kick the guy’s butt.”
  

• He never removed gold-filled teeth from cadavers or told anyone else to. If he saw gold bridgework, he said, he would remove it and he or Jerry would dispose of it, but that was all.
  

• “So, basically, you never pulled anybody’s teeth?” Diaz asked.
  

  “No,” David said.
  

  “Then” Diaz asked, “why is it we found so many teeth?”
  

  “Where are the teeth that were found?” David wanted to know.
  

  “I’ve got them,” Diaz replied. “They were in a cup exactly where people said they were going to be. On a desk. It may have been your mom’s desk.”
  

  “There were a lot of people,” David answered smoothly, “who had access to the stuff there. And I made no bones about hiding what I did. Everybody saw me taking dentures or stuff like that out, and my dad and I would toss it. We’d keep it on the table in the sifting room, and when we would remember to get it, we’d take it and we’d go dump it. It was my legal right to do that by the cremation order.”
  

  Besides, David added, he had been told by an old family friend, Mike Engwald, who owned a gold exchange company, that dental gold was virtually worthless. “He told me it wasn’t worth anything because it wasn’t truly gold; that it was a mixture of a bunch of inert stuff and it wasn’t really worth the trouble of taking it out.”
  

  Engwald also had warned him that there were federal regulations governing the sale of gold, and if he tried to peddle the precious metal, he ran the risk of being found out by the IRS.
  

  “He told me I should take great steps in preventing anybody from taking any because if it ever came back, it would hurt me and my business.”
  

  “And obviously you never sold any gold to him then?” Diaz asked, tongue in cheek.
  

  “No!” David answered firmly.
  

• Multiple cremations were something always mentioned by anyone who wanted to make trouble for a crematorium owner.
  

• “I take it you’re going to say that you never cremated more than one body at a time,” Diaz asked skeptically.
  

  On this point David turned cautious.
  

  “Ahhh,” he began, collecting his thoughts. “I’m not going to say that,” he finally answered. “I’m not going to say I didn’t; I’m not going to say I did. I’m going to take the Fifth on that right now. It won’t do me any good to say one way or another because you know in the state of California it is legal to cremate more than one [body] at a time if you have consent, if you have a release.” He did not want to discuss the issue further, he said, until he had collected all his records and could determine when he had consent and when he did not.
  

  I’ll be damned, Diaz said to himself, that’s the closest this guy has come—maybe it will be the closest he ever
  will
  come—to admitting anything. And what does he pick? A misdemeanor.
  

• The accusations that he had sought the murder of his grandparents were almost too farfetched to talk about.
  

• Lawrence Lamb, David said, was a lovable man, a “funny old guy,” who at eighty-one still insisted on driving the hearse to funerals even though his driving skills left a lot to be desired. Every time he took the wheel, David said, the officers in the motorcycle escort quaked in fear. One time, David added, his grandfather took the funeral procession to the wrong cemetery, and that was a hoot. But as far as planning to kill him, the idea was ridiculous.
  

  However
  , he added ominously, Dave Edwards seemed to have a lot of problems with his grandfather.
  

  Edwards had been present one day when one of the escort officers warned David that he had better not let Lawrence drive anymore because he was not safe on the road. When Edwards heard that, he turned to David. “He said, ‘When’s that old buzzard going to kick off?’ and ‘Isn’t your mom going to inherit this whole place when he kicks off?’”
  

  David explained that the business was set up as a trust fund, and when Lawrence died the money would be divided among all the children, not just his mother. “Edwards goes, ‘Oh gosh, it’s a shame, you know.’ He goes, ‘Too bad, man, your mother works hard.’”
  

  A few days later, David said, Edwards brought him a copy of
  The Poor Man’s James Bond
  . “He goes, ‘Here, you ought to read this, man. This has got all kinds of good shit in it.’”
  

  David said he put the book aside and never looked at it. And he certainly never talked about adopting any ideas from it to use in getting rid of his grandfather.
  

  “Why would I benefit from getting rid of my grandfather?” he asked Diaz. “It wouldn’t make me any money. It would hurt everybody in my family. I would run the risk of being in jail the rest of my life. You know, I don’t do things like that.”
  

• He was still angry about the size of his bail.
  

• He could not understand why his bail had been set so high, while the bail for his parents had been set so low. Actually, he added, they were accused of more serious crimes than he, such as embezzlement.
  

  “Conspiracy for assault,” he sneered. “Even if that was a viable charge, the bail of half a million dollars is ludicrous. Absolutely ludicrous. To say that I’m a threat to these people who I haven’t seen or spoken to in over a year was appalling. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at my dad and I started getting tears in my eyes. I go, ‘What is going on here? I came in here to voluntarily surrender.’ Why did the D.A. say I was going to have a five-thousand-dollar bail and it wasn’t five minutes before you raised it?”