A Family Business (14 page)

During the period between the attacks on Hast, Nimz, and Waters, and the planned assault on Strunk, David and Galambos continued to see each other at the Kings games, and David continued to bring Galambos up to date on his activities and plans.

One night when David was in a particularly bad mood, he complained bitterly about his grandfather, Lawrence Lamb. The old man was giving both him and his mother a lot of trouble, David confided, and he was thinking about getting rid of him. He decided to take a direct method: He planned to poison his grandparents’ jug of mineral water. It was, in essence, the same scenario he outlined for George Bristol.

Galambos, who knew David fairly well by then, figured David was just shooting off his mouth again. Then David leaned closer. Getting very serious, he asked quietly: “Would you be willing to kill someone?”

Galambos stared at him for a long time. “No!” he said firmly.

After that, David did not mention his grandparents again to Galambos. But one night he had other news.

“Remember the guy you ‘did’?” David asked. “The fat guy?”

“Sure,” Galambos replied.

“Well, he died,” David said.

“Oh, yeah,” Galambos said, surprised.

“Yeah,” David said. “It was a coronary.”

“Oh,” answered Galambos, not sure how to respond.

“But it wasn’t really a coronary,” David added.

Galambos waited.

“Actually, I poisoned him,” David added. “I took him to a restaurant and I got him away from the table and I slipped some poison in his drink.”

“Is that right?” Galambos said, not believing a word of what he was hearing.

“That’s right,” David said. Then he changed the subject.

David’s separate conversations with Edwards and Galambos about his grandparents and Tim Waters occurred in the late spring or early summer of 1985. After that, David said no more to Galambos or Edwards, but he had similar conversations with others. There was, for instance, George Bristol, to whom David confided early in 1986 about planning to kill his grandparents. Plus, there were two other curious incidents at roughly the same time.

One of them occurred in the summer of 1985, only a few months after Tim Waters died, and it indirectly involved the Strunks.

Steve Strunk was already working for David when David hired Steve’s brother-in-law, Ron Jordan. After a few months Jordan apparently decided he had no stomach for the job at the crematorium. He was particularly disturbed by the multiple cremations, the mixing of remains, the yanking of gold-filled teeth, so much so that he decided to quit. But more than that, he told his brother-in-law that he was wrestling with his conscience about whether he should report these obviously illegal activities to the authorities. On one hand, he told Steve Strunk, he knew he should. But on the other hand, he had great qualms about becoming a stool pigeon. He told his brother-in-law he was going to think about it some more. Jordan had just finished fixing up an old boat and was going to take it on a shakedown voyage down the coast. By the time he got back, and had the time and solitude to think the problem through, he expected to have made a decision about reporting David’s activities. Then he said something very strange. If anything happens to me, he said, “it will be David’s fault.”

Strunk shrugged off the comments. But just hours after the conversation, Jordan was found dead in his apartment in Newport Beach. He was on his knees and a rope ran from his neck to a pull-up bar he had installed in a closet. Orange County officials ruled the death a suicide. There was no note, but authorities deduced that he died while performing an autoerotic act. Allegedly, he had been masturbating while cutting off his own air supply, a method claimed by some to heighten the sexual experience. His body was buried soon afterward without any toxicology tests being performed. Although Jordan’s name would come up several times later, investigators were never able to develop any evidence of wrongdoing. It was, nevertheless, a peculiar circumstance which, for awhile, had investigators running down blind alleys trying unsuccessfully to find evidence of murder. But they could hardly afford not to, given the bad things that happened to other people who crossed David.

The second incident involved three other funeral home employees—John Pollerana, Bob Garcia, and Brad Sallard—and a man named Elie Estephan. Pollerana and Garcia were long-time employees of David’s, and Sallard was the brother of David’s second wife, Barbara, whom David had married in 1984 when she was twenty-six and David was twenty-eight. A shy, dark-haired woman, Barbara was working as the supervisor of the interior design department at a branch of a major West Coast department store when she and David met. David quickly established strong ties with the entire Sallard family, putting his brother-in-law on the payroll and naming the Hesperia operation after his father-in-law.

Estephan, an Arab-American gas station owner, became part of the narrative in a complicated and interesting way. He was married to Frank Strunk’s daughter, Cindy. After rejecting David’s offer to buy his business, Strunk sold the cremation service to Estephan. This, however, did not deter David from continuing to try to get hold of the operation. It led to the development of a convoluted plan which David hoped would get him the business and make his brother-in-law, Sallard, rich in the process.

After he took over the cremation service, Estephan and Cindy began having marital problems, so they separated. Soon after that, David introduced Sallard to Cindy. They hit it off immediately and began dating.

In June 1985, Estephan and Cindy decided to divorce. Realizing that Cindy would need a lawyer, David offered the services of the attorney who handled routine matters for the funeral home. To help facilitate the new relationship, David accompanied Cindy to her first meeting, and sat in on the session. When the attorney asked Cindy what assets she and her husband had, Cindy mentioned a $250,000 policy on Estephan’s life. She was listed as beneficiary.

Soon after that, David was in the Estephan cremation service office when Estephan and Cindy got into a loud argument. Screaming at her soon-to-be-divorced husband, Cindy tried to run from the room. Estephan grabbed her and pushed her down a short flight of stairs. She was angry but unhurt.

The next day, David pulled his worker, John Pollerana, aside. Pollerana had also been in Estephan’s office when the argument broke out and had witnessed the incident in which Estephan pushed Cindy. “If I give you ten thousand dollars, will you get rid of Elie?” David asked him.

Pollerana shook his head.

Two weeks later Pollerana was chatting with another worker, Bob Garcia, when Garcia mentioned that David had offered
him
$10,000 to kill Estephan.

Pollerana was surprised. “David offered me the same thing,” Pollerana said, “but I told him I wouldn’t do it.”

Garcia, however, was more amenable. Garcia told David that he would either find someone to do it or he would do it himself.

In the meantime, Cindy and Sallard had moved in together and gave every indication that the relationship was getting serious.

Remembering what Cindy had said about the life insurance policy on Estephan, David began formulating a two-pronged plan which revolved around Estephan being murdered.

Once Estephan had been killed, David planned to arrange for another of his employees, Jim Dame, to buy the Estephan nee Frank Strunk cremation service. Ostensibly, Dame would be the owner but the purchase money would come from David, who would call the shots. The advantage of having the service in Dame’s name would be that David would then own
two
cremation services, while the fact that the second business was in someone else’s name meant that he could also service clients who, for one reason or another, did not want to do business with the Sconces. He would, in effect, be working both sides of the street.

The second part of the plan had to do with the insurance money. When the company paid off on Estephan’s death, the money would go to Cindy, who was living with Sallard, and she would presumably share her wealth with her lover.

Although Garcia had expressed a willingness to accept David’s offer, he said he wanted to enlist some help. With David’s blessing—and an updated promise of $15,000—Garcia approached an old acquaintance from his days on the street, an ex-convict named Herbert Dutton. Together they began plotting to kill Estephan. One way to do the job, Garcia suggested, was to blow him up in his car. Another was for Garcia and Dutton to ambush Estephan on the freeway and shoot him. In the end they settled on the car-bomb plan.

To make sure Garcia could identify Estephan and therefore kill the right man, David took Garcia to a fast-food restaurant across the street from Estephan’s gas station, where they took turns watching the potential victim through a pair of binoculars. Frank Strunk, Estephan’s soon-to-be-former father-in-law saw David and Garcia and confronted David.

“What are you looking at?” he demanded to know.

“Just the gas station,” David replied.

For the next three weeks—almost daily, Garcia said—David would sidle up to him and ask him the same question: “Is he still walking?”

“Don’t worry,” Garcia always answered, “we’ll take care of it.”

However, word about the incident with the binoculars had gotten back to Cindy, who insisted that Sallard tell her what was going on. Not satisfied with his reply, Cindy told her lover that she feared for her life and was moving out. As she left, Sallard warned her not to tell anyone what she had heard because no one would believe her anyway. If she insisted and tried to repeat the tale, Sallard said, she had better “watch her back.” Sallard did not want to see her endanger herself.

Disappointed with the abrupt end to Sallard’s and Cindy’s romance, and perhaps unhappy with Garcia’s apparent procrastination, David withdrew his offer. “Forget about it,” he told Garcia abruptly. “Disregard doing it.”

Eventually David would be called to answer for the various incidents and alleged plots, but not for several years. In fact, it was not until mid-1987, two years after Tim Waters’s death, that officials learned of David’s alleged conversations with Edwards and Galambos about the dead cremation service owner. It would be another year after that before scientists could pinpoint what they thought was a poison in Tim’s system, and six months after
that
before David would be charged with Tim’s murder.

In the meantime everything seemed to be going David’s way. The year 1985, in fact, proved to be an extremely good one for him. His cremation business boomed and he was deep into plans to move his operation statewide.

The next year, 1986, also started out well for David and his parents. That was the year they opened the tissue bank, and at first it looked as though it would be the moneymaker he had hoped.

One avenue that George Bristol had opened for David after he began working for the tissue bank was with a firm called Carolina Biological Supply. On one day alone, October 20, 1986, the CIE&TB shipped 24 brains, 24 hearts, and 20 lungs to the Burlington, North Carolina, company. Over a three-month period, CIE&TB sent the supply house a total of 136 brains, 145 hearts, 100 lungs, and one spinal column. In return, David received a check for $29,262.05. This did not include some two-dozen corneas David sold to various institutions for approximately $525 each.

But then things turned downhill. In the end, 1986 was not kind to David; his salad days were over. Despite the year’s optimistic beginning, things quickly started to unravel. And once they began to go, they went fairly rapidly.

14

In making the decision to open the tissue bank, David’s freed outstretched his ability to control. Up until then he ad been able to keep the multiple cremations and the stealing of dental gold a moderately well-kept secret. Although an ATC form was required for every cadaver that he put in the retort, the document was treated routinely by just about everyone concerned. If anyone asked—and very few did—about the wording of the form, Laurieanne would glibly explain it away. But after he created the CIE&TB and started removing tissue and organs, the situation got dicier. At that point the forms David used for securing releases from next of kin began going through a marked evolution.

The forms basically consisted of two paragraphs of small print explaining what was involved when a cadaver was turned over to a crematorium for incineration. The important part of the form was the second paragraph, the one that dealt with tissue removal. (Organs were never mentioned, apparently because it was assumed that organs were composed of tissue, and if tissue removal was permitted, that applied to organs as well.)

In one of the soon-to-be-discarded versions of the form, there were several words in large type and in capital letters. The document read: “The undersigned hereby requests & authorizes COASTAL CREMATION Inc…TO REMOVE TISSUE, REMOVE PACEMAKERS, cremate & to cause final disposition of the remains…”

In its next progression, the document used the same wording, but the phrase about removing tissue and pacemakers was relegated to lowercase and assigned to the same small type as the rest of the document.

In still another version, the wording was changed considerably. In that rendering, the phrases about removal of tissue and pacemakers were separated and an entire sentence was devoted to tissue. It read: “The undersigned does hereby make a donation of any or all of the usable tissue [to] Coastal International Eye & Tissue Bank.” The operative word, of course, was “donation,” which implied that whoever signed the form was surrendering rights to use of the tissue. It was a point that would prove extremely argumentative later when courts tried to determine whether there was any criminal liability.