A Family Business (16 page)

The second case did not even involve cremation directly, but rather what happened afterward. As cremation had grown in popularity, it had led to an increased demand for “spreading.” Rather than burying the remains or keeping them in a vase at home, a number of relatives of persons who had been cremated asked that the remains be spread in scenic areas—into the harbors and bays, or over the state’s most majestic mountain range, the High Sierras. Frequently, the requests were made by the deceased before he or she died.

Since funeral directors and cremation service operators did not have sufficient staff to take care of such requests, “spreaders” came into being. These “spreaders” periodically visited funeral homes and cremation services, picking up remains, which they then contracted to scatter at specific locations. One such spreader was a pilot named B. J. Elkin, who serviced close to a hundred funeral homes and cremation services in the Bay Area. When Elkin was paid to scatter remains over the ocean or the bay, he gassed up his light plane and flew off to do the job. But when he had remains that were to be spread over the Sierras, he seldom got beyond the foothills. Instead, he loaded them in the trunk of his car and drove to the nine-acre plot he owned in Amador County, where he dumped them on the ground.

Other landowners finally complained so loudly that investigators were sent in to examine the claims. What they found were a number of piles of pulverized bone sitting on top of the ground like residue from a Boy Scout jamboree. Experts were called in to examine the debris, and they determined that the site contained remains of more than 5300 persons.

Relatives who had believed that what was left of their loved ones had been taken to the High Sierras subsequently filed suit seeking compensation for injuries they had suffered because of Elkin. The courts agreed with the plaintiffs, ruling that people—that is, relatives of the deceased—contracting with a funeral director or cremation service had a right to expect that their wishes would be carried out. The courts then ordered the payment of almost $53 million in damages to the relatives—$31 million to be paid by Elkin and the funeral directors, and the remaining $22 million to be paid by cremation service operators.

But neither of those cases, unlike the one involving David, involved potential criminal activity as well. When investigators examined the material at Oscar’s Ceramics, they were revolted by what they found, but they also were disheartened when they realized that they could do very little to make David accountable. But from what they had seen, they felt sure that David’s activities had gone beyond multiple cremations. If they dug deeply enough, they were certain they would be able to find evidence linking David to one or more felonies. The question was, how deeply did they have to dig?

On Thursday, January 29, 1987, nine days after the raid on Oscar’s, deputies from San Bernardino County knocked on the door at Lamb Funeral Home. Since they were unaware of the depth of the operation in Pasadena—and since it was beyond their jurisdiction anyway, except as it pertained to what happened in San Bernardino—they were looking mainly for documents that would shed more light on what had been going on in Hesperia.

As it happened, the search warrant included Jerry and Laurieanne’s residence, which was above the funeral home. When they knocked on the door, Laurieanne met them with a Bible in her hands. And as they searched the apartment, she was one step behind them, reading loudly from scripture and condemning their intrusion.

Before they finished their search of the funeral home, they uncovered a cache of gold-filled teeth, which they correctly suspected could only have come from cadavers. That was what they had secretly been hoping to find: evidence of a possible felony. When the deputies left the funeral home a few minutes later, they took David and Jerry with them, in handcuffs. Father and son were taken to the Pasadena jail and booked for investigation of theft of the gold teeth. Although they were quickly released on $1500 bail, investigators felt their search had been a success.

But that was only the beginning.

On Wednesday, February 11, a force of thirty-five men representing the San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and Orange counties sheriffs’ departments and the coroners’ offices from San Bernardino and Orange counties—which was involved because documents recovered in Hesperia hinted that one of the cremated cadavers may have come from an Orange County community—showed up with warrants at four locations where they suspected additional evidence might be found: Lamb Funeral Home; a building in Santa Fe Springs that was used as a headquarters for the CIE&TB; an address that turned out to be only a CIE&TB mail drop; and the residence of Lawrence Lamb. However, the officers turned up little of value on that sweep. No new charges were filed.

But by then the Sconces had begun to fight back. The first thing they did after David’s and Jerry’s arrests was hire a high-powered attorney, a well-known lawyer from Pacific Palisades named Roger Diamond, who specialized in handling cases for porn shop operators and environmentalist groups.

Diamond began earning his money by calling a news conference and bitterly denouncing law enforcement authorities and reporters. Branding the searches “Gestapo tactics” and an “outrage,” the lawyer angrily labeled reporters “vultures,” and accused them as well as the investigators of harassing “innocent people.”

Despite Diamond’s protestations, the case against the three began to build. A week later auditors sent in to examine the funeral home books discovered how Laurieanne had manipulated the transfer of $100,000-plus in interest money to her special account.

Other leads turned up as well. Gradually, tediously, investigators filled their notebooks. As the net widened, it became obvious that the case was too big, too widespread, to be handled in San Bernardino County, especially when it looked as though the center of activity was in Los Angeles County. This realization was the impetus for a meeting in the Pasadena courthouse, a meeting that brought together the various persons involved in the case up to them. It also brought in one totally new participant, a prosecutor named Walt Lewis.

At first he had no idea what was going on. Walt Lewis, in fact, initially feared he was getting slaphappy. From every direction names and facts were being bounced off him, until he felt like the backboard at a Lakers warmup session.

“…Clear evidence of multiple cremations…Galambos…Jim Dame…a cup full of gold teeth…Ron Hast…skimming…preneed accounts…Steve Nimz…Jerry…mining body parts…“Mom”…Dave Edwards…bodies stacked like cordwood…barrels of human remains…”

He listened and his confusion grew; his head was whirling. Oh Lord, he asked himself, what did I do to get into this?

Seated around a table in the law library on the ground floor of the Pasadena courthouse were almost a dozen men, men whose names had been as unfamiliar to Lewis a few minutes earlier as those then being tossed around the room. He glanced again at the sign-in sheet that had circled the room and ended up in his hands. Who
were
these people? Lewis asked himself.

Concentrating on the organizations they represented rather than their names, he ran down the list one more time. Present, he noted, were delegates from the sheriffs’ offices and the coroners’ offices in both Orange and San Bernardino counties. Someone from the San Bernardino County Department of Environmental Health Services was there, too, as was someone from the state department of consumer affairs. At one end of the long, polished wood table was a man from the fire department in Hesperia, although Lewis was not sure exactly where Hesperia was. At the other end was someone from the San Bernardino Air Pollution Control District. Somewhere in the group was an auditor from the state Cemetery Board, and somewhere else was a detective from the Pasadena P.D.

In spite of his initial bewilderment, Lewis felt a strong surge of professional excitement. For a man who thought he had seen everything in his nineteen years as a prosecutor with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, he instinctively knew that what was unfolding in front of him was a one-of-a-kind situation, a case so grotesque that Stephen King—much less Walter Lewis, deputy district attorney—could not have dreamed it up on his most imaginative day.

A slight, unassuming man with graying hair, a soft voice, and large, sad, blue eyes, Lewis had been totally unprepared for what he had innocently walked into. An hour earlier on that morning in mid-March, 1987, he had been slouching peacefully in his second-floor office, the comparatively commodious sanctuary of the assistant head deputy of the Pasadena branch of the L.A. D.A.’s office. Almost dozing, Lewis had been distractedly disposing of a stack of dull documents when, unexpectedly, his boss, Beverly Campbell, stuck her head in the door.

“What are you working on?” she asked pleasantly.

“Not much,” he had replied, thankful she had not caught him in a yawn. “Just cleaning up some paperwork.”

When he said that, Campbell smiled enigmatically. Lewis would never forget that. Nor would he ever forget what she said next. “There’s a bunch of people in the library,” she commented wryly, “Why don’t you go see what they want?”

What they wanted, he quickly learned, was direction. For the last six weeks the men gathered around the table had been trying to unravel a convoluted case that dealt with a series of exotic crimes uncovered as a result of a search of a manufacturing facility in Hesperia, which, Lewis subsequently ascertained, was across the mountains in San Bernardino County.

However, Oscar’s was not, as originally suspected, the beginning and the end of the operation. It had become increasingly apparent to investigators as they went along that Oscar’s was only a newly-grown tentacle on a monster whose den was not in San Bernardino County at all. Rather, its trail led outward from San Bernardino County to all points of the compass. Clearly, the scope of the scheme carried it beyond the capabilities of local officials. That was why those dozen men were there. They wanted to know what charges should be filed and who had jurisdiction. They were urging that the investigation be passed on to an organization with a much longer arm, perhaps the attorney general’s office, which could operate throughout the state. Failing that, it should at least be assumed by the L.A. D.A.’s office, since it looked as though the operation was headquartered in that county, specifically in Pasadena. For that reason it seemed logical to brief the local district attorney. That was where Lewis came in.

As he listened in growing astonishment to the discussion flowing around him, Lewis was both fascinated and revolted. Over the years, he had dealt with just about every variety of depraved human there was, every kind of deviant that could be produced in a sprawling metropolis like Los Angeles, from child molesters to psychopathic killers. During his career he had tried uncounted rapists, thieves, and murderers. And he had done it in an efficient, businesslike manner.

After being exposed to criminals and their crimes for an extended period, the individual incidents ceased to make a major personal impact: Lewis could deal with a brutal killer and the crime as objectively as a postal clerk could sort the mail. Naively—although he would, by most standards, be considered anything but naive—he thought that he would never again be shocked at learning about the depths to which some people could sink. But he was wrong. Never before had he been exposed to allegations as abhorrent as the ones being leveled in the law library. But as nauseating as the details were, Lewis found himself unaccountably propelled by a compulsion to root out the entire intrigue; to find the source of the mutant growth and expose it to the sunlight.

Looking back many months later, Lewis was not sure that if he had been given a choice, he would have become involved. True enough, in the L.A. D.A.’s office options were a rarity: the DDA’s played with the cards that were dealt them. And Lewis had been chosen, no matter how haphazardly, for the assignment. But as assistant head deputy, he could have passed the file along. Traditionally, the chief aide’s role is that of a paper shuffler. By taking the job, the assistant agrees to an unwritten rule to put aside courtroom ambitions. But the more Lewis heard about the case, the more hooked he became. Before he left the law library that afternoon, he had decided to insist upon being allowed to prosecute, a position he partially justified to himself by claiming that it was his
responsibility
to follow through. Truth be told, once he heard the outline, he knew that as a career prosecutor he could no more have turned down the opportunity to pursue this strange case than a fireman could refuse to respond to an alarm.

Never before, at least not since he shed the idealism of the young lawyer, had Lewis become personally involved in a case as he would in the following months. His decision to prosecute would prove a fateful one, one that would come back to haunt him in a very literal sense.

In the long run his determination would prove both a blessing and a curse. His prosecution would be diligent; too diligent, in fact, for his own physical and psychological good. But his investigation also would be exhaustive, carrying him and a score of others down paths none of them could possibly have foreseen, leading to difficulties none of them could have anticipated. The results would be traumatic and long-lasting. Before his involvement was complete, lives, including his own, would be irrevocably changed; the case would impact upon the DDA as no other case had ever done, and probably as no other case ever would.

Also in the room that day, sitting quietly off to one side, was a dark-skinned, rather fierce-looking man with chiseled features and straight black hair, a visual descendant of Geronimo or some other Apache chief. His name was Dennis Diaz and he was a Pasadena police detective. At the time, he was thirty-nine years old and a veteran of eighteen years with the department, a man who had seen life from both sides of the squad-room railing.