A Family Business (10 page)

David seemed to take great pleasure in keeping Edwards and Augustine around, since they were both ex-jocks, members of the group that David felt most comfortable with. When talking about them to others—in their absence, of course—he frequently referred to them as “my niggers.” Whether they were aware of what David was calling them is not clear. But as Edwards confessed later, they had their own nicknames for him. Sometimes he was “Captain Cremator,” but usually he was known as “Little Hitler” because he liked to strut around barking orders, and because there was a definite, dark side to his personality.

Much of the time, David was easy to get along with, provided things were going his way. He joked with the workers a lot, but he was always bragging about one thing or another, particularly his athletic prowess. He told a lot of people that he had actually played for the Seahawks, even though most of them knew he had not, and he exaggerated his college football accomplishments. He was very vain about his physique and about how strong he was. Lifting dead bodies was hard work, and David prided himself on how well he could perform. Frequently, if an especially old or frail person came into the funeral home, David would eye the individual up and down, then, behind his back, whisper: “That’s a one-hander!” meaning he thought he could heft the elderly person with only one hand. Sometimes, if the person appeared ill as well as frail, David would comment, “There’s fifty-five dollars!” meaning he appeared to be an immediate candidate for the retort.

Edwards had not been working for David for very long before he learned that his boss not only had a terrible temper, but that he held grudges for a long, long time. Sometimes, too, he was just mean.

One day, for instance, David came to work in a particularly foul mood, complaining about how a neighbor’s tree was shading his swimming pool. It blocked the sun, he whined, and the leaves fell into the pool, which required that he clean it more often. On that day, he decided to do something about it.

“How would you and Danny like to get rid of that tree for me?” David asked Edwards.

Intrigued by the unusual request, Edwards agreed. The next day he and Galambos rented a chain saw, drove to David’s neighborhood, went into the neighbor’s yard and cut down the tree. Perhaps intimidated by the size of the two men—Edwards was six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds; Galambos was six-foot-three and weighed 245—no one said a word to them. Not right away anyway. But then they had a problem. When the tree fell, it knocked down a power pole and caused an electrical failure. When the power company crew showed up, Edwards and Galambos had a
lot
of explaining to do.

David got a good laugh when Edwards recounted the incident. Still chuckling, he pulled out his wallet and counted out $600, which he handed over with a job-well-done grin. Edwards pocketed $400 and gave the rest to Galambos.

Several months later, in August 1984, more than eighteen months after Edwards had begun working at the funeral home, David approached him with a second unusual request. There was another mortician, David said, who was giving him trouble. The man, Ron Hast, published an industry newsletter and he was threatening to expose David and his parents for performing multiple cremations. By then it was whispered within the funeral home community that David was cremating more than one body at a time. If anyone took the time to run the figures on a calculator, they could see it was the only way he could charge as little as $55 per body and still stay in business. That Hast was promising to make the rumors public was bad enough, but even worse than the threat of exposure, in David’s eyes, was the fact that Hast had telephoned Laurieanne and told her what he planned to do. That upset his mother terribly, David said. And having his mother upset was something that David could not tolerate.

David pulled Edwards aside and explained the situation to him. If Hast carried through on his threat, David added, he and his parents would have to shut down their operation. Then they all would be out of work. Would Edwards be willing to help keep that from happening?

Edwards nodded. “What do I have to do?”

“I want you to beat him up,” David replied. “Him and his friend, Stephen Nimz. If you do, I’ll pay you eight hundred dollars.”

David suggested that Edwards might want to get some help, probably from Andre Augustine. Edwards agreed and went off to recruit his roommate.

A couple of nights later, having gotten the Hast/Nimz address from David, Edwards and Augustine knocked on their door. When Nimz answered, they told him they were college students looking for odd jobs to help pay their way through school. Did he have anything they could do?

When Nimz said no, they thanked him politely and left.

The next day, Edwards went back to David and said he was going to need some more help. Did he have any objection if he brought Galambos into it as well? David said no.

So that night the three former football players, who together weighed almost half a ton, got ready for the unsuspecting Hast and Nimz.

Gathering at the apartment shared by Edwards and Augustine, they hatched a quick plan. Galambos would buy a badge at a toy store and they would pretend they were cops, as a ruse to draw Hast and Nimz out of the house. Once they got them outside, they could attack them and then make a hasty retreat.

They agreed it was a good idea and got ready to go. At the last minute Edwards ran back inside. From a drawer he extracted a squirt bottle that was made to resemble a flashlight. Then he dashed into the kitchen and started dumping liquids into the device. In went some ammonia. Then some vinegar. Then some jalapeño juice. Then he just started grabbing bottles at random, pouring whatever was handy down the spout. Finally they were ready. They jumped into Galambos’s gray Toyota Celica for the trip across town to Hollywood Hills, where Hast and Nimz lived.

When they got there, Galambos and Edwards went to the door. According to the plan, Galambos would flash the badge and be the spokesman. Edwards would carry the fake flashlight, and Augustine would hide in the bushes along the drive, ready to jump out if the others needed help. They were confident the scheme would work; they certainly looked husky enough to be cops.

Hast answered the door. Calmly, Galambos produced the badge and told the mortician they were policemen investigating a hit and run. They thought Hast’s car was involved and they would like to inspect the vehicle. Hast readily agreed. He called Nimz, and the two men led Galambos and Edwards into the garage. They had taken no more than two steps into the building when Edwards yelled, “Now!”

At the signal, Galambos slugged Hast on the chin. The mortician fell to the floor. Simultaneously, Edwards sprayed the vile liquid from the fake flashlight into Nimz’s face. As Nimz’s hands went to his eyes, Edwards punched him on the jaw. Nimz went down too. Pivoting, Edwards pointed the spray bottle at Hast, who was squirming on his back. But before he could squeeze it, Nimz bounced to his feet and started running down the driveway. When he saw Nimz coming, the 265-pound Augustine leaped out of the bushes and threw a perfect body block, just as he had practiced on countless football fields. Nimz grunted and went tumbling to the concrete. Augustine, Galambos, and Edwards, laughing wildly, ran to Galambos’s car and drove hurriedly away.

An hour later Edwards telephoned David and told him everything had been taken care of. “Good,” said David. “Did you do a good job?” Edwards assured him they had, embellishing the tale with an exaggerated account of the amount of physical punishment they had inflicted upon the pair. A couple of days later David gave Dave Edwards $1200 and told him to split it with the other two.

After that incident, Hast made no more threats about exposing David and his parents. But regardless of what Hast did or did not do, the rumor about the multiple burns at Pasadena Crematorium continued to spread. It proved so persistent, in fact, that Laurieanne felt compelled to try to eradicate it herself. On November 14, 1983, she wrote to the crematorium’s clients. In her letters she did not acknowledge the existence of the rumor but described the Pasadena Crematorium’s policy. All of their cremations, she wrote, were done one at a time. She also invited mortuary directors to inspect the facility as long as they called ahead. She signed the letters as the crematorium’s secretary-treasurer and manager.

10

Unhappily for the Sconces, Ron Hast was not the only one in the local industry spreading the rumor about multiple cremations at Pasadena Crematorium. Hast’s partner in the mortuary was a man named Alan Abbott, who also had another business—a limousine rental service that specialized in furnishing vehicles to the movie industry. His partner in
that
enterprise was a grossly overweight young man named Tim Waters. In addition to the limousine rental company, Waters also owned a cremation service called the Alpha Society.

While both Tim and David operated cremation services, their businesses differed in one major respect: Tim Waters did not have a crematorium of his own. Nor did he have a funeral home. He had a storefront in Burbank with a couple of desks and a telephone. His service was strictly that of a middleman. For a fee, he would collect bodies and deliver them to a crematorium, then return the remains to his clients. He had no cold room, no retort, and he did not prepare bodies for cremation.

Since Tim had to pay a crematorium and still make a profit, he could not come close to matching the fee David was charging for roughly the same service. David’s advantage was that he did not have to deal with a middleman. He performed the same services as Tim except he carried the process one step further: He actually cremated the cadavers. That and the fact that he was cremating a number of cadavers at one time, not one at a time as other crematoriums were doing, meant he could seriously undercut the fees of any of his competitors.

Tim’s only way to fight David was to convince his clients that Pasadena Crematorium was acting illegally and hope that they would react by retracting their business from David and giving it to him. Although Tim evidently had no
proof
that David was performing multiple cremations, he was sharp enough to deduce that was the
only
way David could be offering the service for $55.

In some ways Tim and David were remarkably alike. For one thing, both were highly competitive and felt that anything was fair in business. At the time, one of Tim’s best friends was Richard Gray, who was working as an embalmer. In the late spring of 1984, the shy, slight, deep-voiced mortician had confided to Tim that he was planning to give up embalming and start his own cremation service, which he was going to call the After-Care Funeral Society. Tim’s first reaction was shock, then anger. Like David, he had a quick temper and was not above bullying someone to try to get his way. If Gray went ahead with his plan, he would be a competitor. And Tim was not enthused about that possibility.

At first Tim tried to verbally discourage Gray from opening the competing service. When that didn’t work, he tried to dissuade his friend from using Pasadena Crematorium for his cremations, pointing out that he strongly suspected David was performing multiple burns. Perhaps he thought that would convince Gray that the business he was thinking about entering was a very cutthroat one indeed, and that might make him think twice about jumping in. But if that had been Tim’s motive, it failed.

Although Gray had been shocked by what Tim had said, his reaction was to go straight to Jerry and Laurieanne and confront them with the accusation. They laughed. “That’s ridiculous,” said Jerry.

Not satisfied, Gray went to David.

“Where did you hear that?” David wanted to know.

Gray replied that it came from his friend, Tim Waters.

“Well, it isn’t true,” David said, adding: “I guess I’ll have to go have a talk with your friend.”

A few days later, when Gray was delivering several bodies to Lamb Funeral Home to be cremated, David told him that he and his father had gone to Tim’s office but he had not been in. David said he had also tried to find Tim at the Holiday Inn in Burbank, where he lived, but he had not been there either.

Gray did not pursue the issue further; he was having troubles enough of his own. Just before he was scheduled to open his service, someone cut the telephone lines going into his office, and a few days later someone slashed the tires on his car. Although Gray did not know it for a fact, he strongly suspected that his friend Tim was behind both acts of sabotage, indulging in a misdirected effort to try to convince him not to open a competing service. The reason he suspected Tim was because Tim had been aware of both incidents almost as soon as they occurred.

“How did you know?” Gray asked when Tim telephoned to commiserate.

“A little bird told me,” Tim replied.

Things came to a head early that summer for the two old friends. Tim called Gray one afternoon and suggested they have dinner together at a restaurant called Otto’s Pink Pig in Van Nuys. Since he and Tim usually dined together at least once a week, Gray thought nothing about it.

That evening, Tim picked Gray up at his office and they drove to the restaurant in Tim’s car. From Gray’s point of view, it was a pleasant meal. Tim did not even mention business until after they had finished. While Gray was having coffee and Tim was sipping water, Tim reached in his pocket and pulled out a check. Slapping it on the table, Tim pointed out that it was blank. “I’ll pay you what you’ve already invested in setting up your operation if you’ll get out of the business,” Tim proposed.