A Family Business (9 page)

Another reason for secrecy was that Laurieanne, Jerry, and David feared that they would lose business if it became widely known that they were operating a tissue bank. Their clients—other funeral homes or cremation services, likely would quit sending cadavers for cremation if they thought those bodies were first being stripped for tissues and organs, even if authorized by the ATC form. Many of
their
customers were justifiably sensitive about having organs removed from the bodies of their loved ones. Also, the Sconces’ clients felt that before they could recommend organ and tissue donation, special counseling with the customers would be necessary, and the Sconces shrewdly judged that many of these clients would be unwilling to take on the added responsibility—
if they knew about it
. They wanted to make sure they did not. Possible reaction from their clients was presumably another major reason that the ATC form was written in vague terms, that and the obvious reason that the Sconces figured they could harvest more body parts if no one outside the operation knew exactly what was going on.

While the Sconces felt that a certain amount of concealment was paramount, they also realized they could not keep their plans entirely under wraps. They had to raise enough money to get CIE&TB started, and to do that they had to reveal a minimum number of details. Actually, the Sconces were in a precarious position, one that required some very delicate handling. Realizing this, it was no surprise that Laurieanne was selected to make the initial fund-raising contacts, since she had such a winning way with people. No doubt about it, her demure, soft-sell approach was more useful in this context than Jerry’s hard-sell or David’s flippant attitude. Additionally, there was one other advantage in having her as the front person: She was a Lamb, and the moneyed people of Pasadena respected the Lambs.

In the end, raising the money did not prove to be an extremely difficult task. While the exact amount of cash Laurieanne brought in is unclear, it is known that her fund-raising efforts were so successful that she actually turned down some people who wanted to invest, telling them they had already raised all that was needed. What would prove significant about Laurieanne’s efforts, especially in light of later developments, was the personal role she took in the fundraising for the tissue bank. In an attempt to make a criminal case against all three Sconces, prosecutors later would point to Laurieanne’s alleged complicity in setting up the tissue bank as one of the major indicators that she was indeed involved in its operation.

Sometimes, when talking with friends or potential investors, Laurieanne referred to the tissue bank as something the family had been thinking about for years, ever since her sister Linda had died in the plane crash in the Canary Islands. Many of those aboard the two planes had been burned, and when doctors tried to help survivors, they discovered there was a shortage of skin tissue that could be used for grafting. That brought the issue home to her, Laurieanne said, explaining that her desire to open a tissue bank was one way of memorializing her sister.

And then there was the letter. In making his case for Laurieanne’s complicity, one prosecutor would refer specifically to a letter from Laurieanne to a woman who eventually invested $15,000 in the tissue bank project. On October 1, 1985, Laurieanne wrote the woman telling her how wise her investment decision had been. In the letter, Laurieanne claimed that the tissue bank’s operating room already had a long list of physicians anxious to use the facility, and that the prep room was going to be functional within two weeks. What was notable about the letter, in the prosecutor’s opinion, was Laurieanne’s frequent use of the plural possessive: She liberally laced the document with references to “we” and “our.”

8

Laurieanne’s possessiveness was not lost on George Bristol. While he had agreed to go into the operation believing that he would be a fifty-percent partner, David soon disabused him of that notion. Even before Bristol could get settled in, David explained that there had been a change in the way the proceeds would be split. Instead of getting half of the profit, as had been promised, Bristol would get only one-third. David would get another third, and the remaining third would go to Jerry and Laurieanne.

In addition, Bristol also was supposed to draw a weekly salary of $200. But that turned out to be an illusion as well. Often the checks were for less, and sometimes they didn’t come at all. Finally, at Bristol’s insistence, David drafted a contract specifying that Bristol would get $30,000 a year from the CIE&TB. At least Bristol had something on paper, but it was a far cry from the quarter of a million dollars he envisioned receiving when he quit his Orange County job.

Not surprisingly, Bristol felt as though he had been cheated. And as time went on, he became increasingly disillusioned about working with David. It had not taken him long to realize that he’d become entangled with some very strange people. But David was more than strange. Bristol also felt he might be dangerous. And he had reason for this opinion. One day he and David had gotten into an argument over Bristol’s handling of the CIE&TB affairs, and it built to the point where David started screaming at him.

“If you’re really unhappy with me,” Bristol screamed back, “I’ll quit.”

That really set David off. Bounding across the room, he wrapped his hands around Bristol’s throat and slammed him against the wall.

“If you try to quit,” David growled, “I’ll kill you.”

After that, Bristol began carrying a .45-caliber pistol in the nylon knapsack he took with him everywhere.

The odd thing was, Bristol’s weapon was only one of several floating around Lamb Funeral Home at any given time. David almost always carried a gun. Sometimes it was a small pistol and sometimes it was a huge .380-caliber handgun that had been given to him as a Christmas gift from the man to whom he sold the dental gold. The man had also given Jerry a matching weapon, which he occasionally toted, although Jerry preferred a smaller pistol, one he could fit into the shoulder or ankle holster he habitually sported.

Father and son also had an affinity for shotguns, and they invariably carried one in the van when they were out on a job. At times Lamb’s resembled an armed camp more than a funeral home, a situation that even Laurieanne did not find unsettling or unusual. In a letter to an auditor with the Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers, she casually mentioned that the neighborhood in which the funeral home was located had gotten so rough that employees were “forced” to carry guns even on the job.

There were other reasons, too, that Bristol began feeling increasingly uncomfortable around David. One day he came to work and found David in a particularly dark mood. Solicitously, Bristol asked what the problem was.

“It’s the competition in the cremation business,” David replied. “It’s driving me crazy.”

When Bristol replied there was not much he could do about the competition, David got a strange look in his eye.

“You know what I’d like to do,” he said, phrasing it as a statement not as a question. Knowing that David was going to tell him anyway, Bristol waited in silence.

“I’d like to get some plastic explosive and stick it in one of these cases,” he said, referring to a cadaver waiting for cremation.

“What?”
Bristol asked, astounded.

“Then I’d send it to one of my competitors,” David said, “and when they stuck it in the retort, it would explode.
That
would get rid of the competition.”

Disturbing to Bristol, too, were the frequent disputes he witnessed between David and Lisa Karlan, another tissue bank specialist David had sweet-talked into coming to work for CIE&TB. As it turned out, Karlan’s career with CIE&TB was both tumultuous and short-lived. While she was still there, she and David argued constantly, usually about the wording in the ATC forms. Their discussions often ended in shouting matches that would leave David fuming for hours.

Jim Dame, another worker, witnessed one such quarrel. After the two wore themselves out yelling at each other and stalked off to separate corners, David had turned to Dame and said: “That girl has gone too far. One of these days she’s going to wind up dead.”

Karlan’s term of employment at CIE&TB was measured in weeks, but even after she left, her disagreements with David did not cease. They continued to argue over money. Their telephone calls invariably ended the same way their face-to-face disputes had: David would remain in a ferocious mood, snapping at anyone who crossed his path. Bristol was passing David’s desk one afternoon while David was having a telephone argument with Karlan. He intended to go on by, but David’s tone of voice made him stop. When he did, he heard David say: “For five hundred dollars I can have you shot. For a thousand I can have you killed, and then I’ll burn up the parts so no one will know what happened to you.” As Bristol stood there staring, David slammed down the receiver. Turning to Bristol, he said: “I’ll kill anyone who threatens me or my family.” Bristol walked away.

Bristol tried to justify David’s tantrums as mere manifestations of a bad temper, but then he had a conversation with David that made him rethink his position. After that, he began to believe that David was far more menacing than he had originally thought.

The incident occurred just before Christmas 1985, less than four months after he had joined CIE&TB. Bristol was on his way to work one morning when David stopped him in the carport outside the building. Apropos of nothing they had discussed before, David began telling Bristol how much he hated his grandparents, Lawrence and Lucille Lamb.

“My grandfather keeps interfering with things,” David told him, “and my grandmother told me once that she would see to it that I was never part of the business.”

Although Bristol had thought that David could do little to astonish him any longer, he nevertheless was shocked.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“You have good contacts,” David replied “and I need your help.”

Bristol was suspicious. “What kind of help?” he asked softly.

“I need a poison,” David said. “An untraceable poison, one that can simulate a heart attack.”

“What do you want to do with the poison?” Bristol asked, fearing he already knew the answer.

“I want to use it on my grandparents,” David replied.

By now Bristol was totally intimidated by David, and he feared if he turned down the request for help, David would fly off the handle.

“What you need to do,” Bristol told him, “is talk to one of the assistant coroners in L.A. One of them ought to be able to help you.”

The response seemed to mollify David, and he let the subject drop for the time being. He did not, however, forget about it.

Practically every time David saw him after that, he asked about the poison. However, Bristol managed to avoid a direct answer. Finally, David let his exasperation show.

“Goddamn it,” he exploded, “I need the shit. I’m ready to go to their house,” he added, referring to the Lambs’ retirement house on the Colorado River.

Bristol didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

David’s eccentricities and unpredictable moods were balanced in part by attempts at generosity. To keep his business going at the volume it was, David had accumulated a large fleet of vehicles. When he was feeling philanthropic, he parceled these out among his workers and some of his customers. One of the beneficiaries of David’s largesse was a man named Richard Gray, who operated a small cremation service and brought his business to David. Once when Gray’s station wagon had broken down and repairs promised to take a long time, David flipped him the keys to one of the vans and told him to keep it as long as he needed.

On another day he did the same for George Bristol. Knowing that Bristol had long envied his white Corvette, David surprised him with an almost identical car. “Take it,” David had said. “Keep it as long as you like.”

Bristol was only mildly astonished when he learned soon afterward that the vehicle had been stolen, boldly driven off a local dealer’s lot by another of David’s employees. Oddly, even though he knew it was hot, Bristol continued to drive it almost up to the time he quit.

PART THREE

The Victims

9

George Bristol had discovered that working for David was a strange, uncomfortable experience. And Dave Edwards, like Bristol, also was developing mixed feelings about his employer.

Initially, Edwards had been astonished by some of the things he saw taking place at Pasadena Crematorium, but he was not overly concerned because he was not directly involved. Although David sometimes asked him to hold the flashlight while he searched a cadaver’s mouth for gold-filled teeth, and David occasionally called upon him to help stack bodies in the retorts, those were not tasks Edwards was required to perform on an everyday basis. Most of the time, in fact, he was on his own, working just about when he wanted, with no one looking over his shoulder. Besides, as Bristol also had learned, David was a benevolent employer. He regularly bought the crew lunch and took them along to sit in his box at the Kings games.

But there was another demonstration of employer loyalty that deeply impressed the ex-football player: Not long after Edwards began working at Pasadena Crematorium, David demonstrated allegiance to his employee in a very unusual way. Edwards had been out partying one night and was stabbed in the side. The wound was serious enough to keep Edwards in bed for several weeks. During that time, David continued to pay him his salary, and even arranged for Edwards’s roommate, another massive, black, ex-football player named Andre Augustine, to drive his van. That in itself was unusual, but the really strange part of the story had to do with David’s attitude toward the stabbing. One day while Edwards still was recovering, David pulled Dan Galambos, their mutual friend, aside at a Kings game and asked him to take a message to Edwards. “Tell Dave,” David told him, “that if he can find out who it was who stabbed him and he wants to get rid of him, I can burn the body and no one will ever know.”