A Family Business (26 page)

Then Person began expressing his alarm at the situation described during the four months he had sat listening to the parade of ninety-plus witnesses. As he progressed through his ruling, his comments became increasingly scathing.

Although he admitted he was appalled by the nature of the testimony—words powerful enough to have “made the strongest stomach feel uneasy”—he had been considerably impressed by the character of the witnesses and the solidity of Lewis’s presentation.

“Only very few of these witnesses had, in this court’s opinion, any arguable motivations to fabricate testimony for these proceedings, and in most instances where the court may have had some doubts in its mind, these witnesses were generally corroborated substantially by physical evidence presented here or by the testimony of other witnesses,” he said.

As one witness followed another, he continued, he began to perceive the breadth and depth of what had been occurring behind the mortuary’s closed doors.

“The picture beginning to emerge,” he said, “was one of a family funeral business with a long and proud history in the Pasadena community and with family generations passing it down to one another, which for some reason or reasons started to be motivated by a desire at almost any cost to procure the largest number possible of human remains for cremation by outbidding its competitors, and once having succeeded in cornering of the local market for cremations, viewing its perceived triumph by deciding to cast aside morality as well as legality in virtually every aspect of its expanding enterprise in the handling of human remains thereafter.”

It was these “unholy and unfettered” ambitions, Person added, that led to the stunning array of charges on his desk, charges “ranging from conspiracies of various types, forgery, grand theft and embezzlement, to wrongful handling of trust funds, to falsification of death certificates, to mass cremation, to commingling of human remains, to unlawful removal of body parts from human remains, to, in David Sconce’s case, grand theft auto, receiving stolen property, to conspiracy to commit felonious assaults upon competitors as well as those who had threatened to reveal the unlawful practices rumored to be occurring in the family enterprise, to robbery, to solicitation of murder of his grandparents as well as the district attorney who is prosecuting the case against him, to bribery, to dissuading witnesses from testimony, to solicitation of perjury, to witness intimidation, and, as to David Sconce and Laurieanne, bribery of a witness, and finally, as to each defendant, conspiracy to obstruct justice.”

Person paused, apparently overwhelmed anew by the magnitude of the accusations.

“Clearly,” he began again, “the picture emerging was not unlike the portrait hidden in the attic of Dorian Gray in that as more and more evidence was presented, the uglier the picture became. The picture, like that of Dorian Gray, was hidden to all except the Sconce family. Outwardly, with the possible exception of David, members of the funeral industry as well as their customers believed that the Lamb Funeral Home was one of the most revered of all such businesses in the area. Only after they expanded the scope of their business in the sale of organs, which was virtually unknown to all who did business with them, did outsiders who had compassion for the potential customers begin to see what the portrait really looked like behind the scenes.”

Why the Sconces operated as they did, Person said, he had no firm idea. “The court does not have the benefit of knowing for certain what was going through the mind of each of these defendants. [But] it does have the benefit of the circumstantial evidence as to the motivations of these defendants in taking the course of action which was taken in furtherance of their enterprise.” And those motivators, he added, appeared to be “avarice and amoral ambition.” These, he clearly implied, were, in his opinion poor precepts upon which to base a business, particularly one that served a vulnerable public.

Barely containing his outrage, Person pointed out the inherent weakness of the Sconce argument that organs were freely donated.

“Not one document received into evidence or any testimony in support thereof in this matter persuades this court that any donor or other authorized person voluntarily intended to make a gift of any body part to the Lamb Funeral Home, Coastal Cremations, Inc., or Coastal International Eye and Tissue Bank.” As far as the practice of removing organs, Person said, “It was clearly done without authority of law.”

It was his opinion, he added, “that no contract was entered into by any of the donors or other authorized persons by virtue of the execution of Authority to Cremate forms where said forms were in fact made out by the appropriate donors or otherwise authorized persons.

“The court finds beyond a reasonable doubt that the Authority to Cremate forms which contained any of the variations of the phrase ‘to remove tissue’ did not lawfully authorize defendants herein to remove corneas, whole eyes, hearts, lungs, or brains.”

However, it would not be very long in the future before Person’s opinion on this issue was directly contradicted in a way that would leave prosecutors and others who had followed the case deeply shocked. But in May 1988 it was Person’s opinion that counted.

Citing the fact that David, when he applied for a permit from the state to open the tissue bank, claimed that his plans were limited to working with eye tissue only, Person said:

“How could approval to remove eye tissue ever be in good faith presumed to be approval to remove brains, hearts, or lungs? The defendants argue that the approval was general…to remove whatever organs they wanted. This court respectfully disagrees with that position. All it does in this court’s opinion is reveal that the defendants wanted to appear to be in compliance with the rules by obtaining some kind of approval as required, but then to set their own parameters for the scope of the approval in light of the lucrative business that could be done with the additional forms of organs.”

In addition, Person added, the Sconces tried to deceive their, own employees into believing that appropriate authority had been given for removal of organs. “Even then,” he said, “one of them, Lisa Karlan, was persistent in her belief that the Authority to Cremate form was not legally sufficient to do so and was ultimately terminated for, among other things, her adherence to the position that the entire record reveals was a logical and legally sound one.”

In Person’s opinion, the Sconces’ actions had been neither inadvertent nor unintentional. “It is clear to this court,” he said, “that these defendants worked hand in hand to commit fraud and deceit upon the donors or other authorized persons by violating their fiduciary duty to those persons by the active, intentional concealment or nondisclosure of the material facts which were in the defendants’ exclusive knowledge with the actual knowledge that there was concealment intended to deceive those persons who signed the Authority to Cremate forms with the ‘to remove tissue’ clause.

“On the surface,” Person concluded, “the Sconces treated the affected customers with dignity and respect, and all believed they had been treated fairly. However, the Sconces’ unspoken plans to profit by the sale of human organs and tissue, which they believed would probably never be discovered, were blatant actions that exhibited the propensity to take unfair advantage of unknowing persons in perhaps their most difficult moments.”

If Person had been the trial court judge, the Sconces undoubtedly would have been called accountable, in toto, for the long list of alleged transgressions. That was beyond his responsibility, however. His job was limited to ruling on the probability that they had committed the crimes with which they were charged. About that, he had no doubt. But that was the end of Person’s involvement. From his court the case transferred to superior court, where it eventually landed on the desk of Judge Terry Smerling.

Philosophically, a more direct opposite of Person could not have been found. When Smerling finished reviewing the same evidence that had been presented before Person, his conclusions were markedly different. Once Smerling began working on the case, it no longer was recognizable as the same one that had landed on his desk. In the end, Smerling, who
did
have the responsibility to call the Sconces accountable, gave them everything except the keys to his car.

Before then, however, David had one more chance to explain to investigators his involvement in the series of events that had been outlined in the preliminary hearing. That time, though, the investigator was not Diaz, but a Detective Robert Hopkins, who had come into the case late and via a rather circuitous route.

A twenty-four-year veteran in law enforcement, Hopkins was a member of the police department in Simi Valley, which is in Ventura County rather than Los Angeles County, where the charges outstanding against David were filed. Hopkins got involved because the Ventura County and Los Angeles County district attorneys offices had decided to look more closely at events surrounding the death of Tim Waters.

That, too, had come about in a rather roundabout way. When Steve Warren was testifying about zytel, he explained how he had expressed his skepticism to David about the efficiency of poison as a murder weapon. However, David had told him not to worry, he had already proved a poison would work with “that Waters guy,” Warren testified, quoting David. When Warren said that, Lewis jumped as if he had been poked with a cattle prod.

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Unknowingly, Warren had hit on a particularly sensitive point when he brought up Tim Waters. In his own mind, Lewis had believed that Tim had been murdered and that David was involved. But proving it was something else. He had been trying for months to penetrate the shield that seemed to surround the case, but he had had little luck. There was no doubt that David initiated the February 12, 1985, attack on Waters; he had Galambos’s confession regarding that, plus Dave Edwards’s admission that he had gone to Burbank to do the same thing and had abandoned the plan only because there was too much risk that he would be arrested. Also, there was unassailable physical evidence that Tim had been severely beaten. But assault was not murder; building a case for Tim’s murder would be much more difficult. Before he could even consider developing a case against David in connection with Tim’s death—even though both Galambos and Edwards swore that David had bragged independently to them about killing Tim—Lewis would first have to be able to substantiate that Tim’s death was indeed a homicide. The stumbling block there, of course, was Dr. Holloway’s report, which stated that Tim had died of natural causes.

Long before Steve Warren suggested a connection, Lewis had been on the phone with Dr. F. Warren Lovell, who had been Holloway’s boss. Lewis correctly felt that discourse with Lovell had to be handled with utmost diplomacy. Lewis was a DDA in Los Angeles County and Lovell was the coroner in Ventura County, therefore Lovell was under no obligation to go out of his way to help the prosecutor. As far as Ventura County was officially concerned, Tim had died a natural death. The county had enough murders to handle as it was without having to go out of its way to find one more.

Choosing his words carefully, Lewis asked Lovell if his former assistant possibly could have made a mistake during his autopsy. “Is there
anything
in the file that might suggest that Tim’s death might have been a homicide?”

While Lewis kept the line open, Lovell retrieved the file. Twirling a pen, the prosecutor waited impatiently. In the background he could hear Lovell flipping pages. After what seemed an interminable period, the coroner grunted. “That’s strange.”

Lewis dropped the pen. To date no one he had talked to had ever even hinted that something might be amiss.

“What’s strange?” he asked cautiously.

“We never ordered any toxicology tests done,” Lovell said.

Lewis thought he was going to scream. He wanted to make a case for murder by poisoning, and no one had done any toxicology tests on the suspected victim.

“Can we do it now?” he asked very carefully. “Can we exhume the body?”

“No need to that,” Lovell replied cheerily. “We routinely file tissue and fluid samples on all the bodies we autopsy.”

“Would those samples still be there?” Lewis asked, his hopes rising for the first time.

“Let’s see,” Lovell said. “Waters died in 1985. We keep the material for five years. Yes, the samples should still be here.”

“Can you do the tests?” Lewis begged. “Can you run the tests and tell me if he was poisoned?”

“We don’t have the proper equipment, but I’ll send the material to Foster City and see what they can come up with,” Lovell said, referring to a crime lab near San Francisco. It was reputed to be one of the best facilities of its kind in the county.

“Great,” said Lewis. “Let me know what they find.”

Lovell dispatched the specimens on October 6, 1987. At the same time, he began the paperwork to back up his action. Lovell’s instincts told him something was not right as well, and he wanted to make sure all his bases were covered. On November fourth he countermanded Holloway’s natural-death ruling and filed a new report listing both the cause of death and the manner of death as “undetermined.” As imprecise as that sounded, the action was significant because it acknowledged officially that there may have been more to the incident than was initially believed.

As the weeks slipped by and Lewis became more involved in the preliminary hearing, he pushed Tim Waters to the back of his mind. He never quit wondering about the incident, but he was too busy to do a lot of about it. Occasionally, when he had a few minutes, he checked in with Lovell just to see if he had heard anything from the lab, and the answer was always no. Then one day he got some encouragement.