A Family Business (22 page)

However, Lewis discovered quickly that it was not going to be all clear sailing; the prosecutor still had more than a few problems. The biggest obstacle he faced, and one that would prove almost overwhelming in the weeks to come, was that his case was far from static.

Because
the situation was so complicated, the investigation had to be exhaustive. And although it had been under way for seven months, it still wasn’t finished; new leads kept popping up with regularity. Even as the preliminary hearing progressed, Diaz brought Lewis new information on the Sconces’ illegal activities virtually on a daily basis. Lewis had no idea, from one day to the next, how many more witnesses he was going to have to subpoena, or that the list was going to grow like an athlete on steroids.

The result was often controlled confusion. For Lewis it meant laboring in the court by day and in his office by night. Instead of being able to reserve the evenings to prepare his presentation for the following day, he was forced to spend that time dealing with new witnesses and new evidence.

By the time he was just a few weeks into the hearing, Lewis already had lost count of the number of nights that he dragged himself home too exhausted to do anything except fall into bed. Except for one thing. Usually at the end of such a day, seeking irony where he could find it, he rallied enough to repeat to himself, like a mantra, Laurieanne’s comment to her son about the extraction of gold-filled teeth: “How much AU did you get today, honey?” It kept him going. If I ever write a book about this, he told himself, that is going to be the opening line.

21

Actually, the least of Lewis’s worries was momentum. Once it began, the hearing barreled along like an eighteen-wheeler thundering across the Mojave. It created a force of its own, plowing a distinctive, disturbing furrow across the tranquil facade that the City of Roses presented to the world. Once Lewis started calling his army of witnesses into the courtroom called Division 6, the alleged atrocities that had been occurring at the city’s preeminent funeral home/crematorium became a prime topic of conversation from Victorville to Ventura. For salacious detail, it could not be topped; the parade of horrors seemed to have no end.

In his methodical fashion, Lewis had organized his material—at least as best he could in view of the tidelike surge of witnesses—so that testimony would move, as closely as possible, from one topic to another in what he hoped would eventually be a seamless circle, or more accurately, an unbroken noose, around the collective necks of Jerry, Laurieanne, and David.

On the whole, his plan was admirably successful. For a few days witnesses trooped in telling stories primarily about multiple cremations. Then another group came in and talked about the sale of body parts. And then another about the forging of ATC forms. And so forth. But since every topic had its own scandal attached, it became a spectator’s haven. On any given day a citizen with a couple of hours to kill could pop into the courtroom and be almost certain of hearing some titillating details. There was, in fact, so much to choose from, it was difficult to say which was the most shocking. Every area that Lewis explored had its own sad side.

At the beginning, though, he seemed cautious. Like a runner launching on a marathon, he had to first establish a pace before he could settle into a regular rhythm. As a result, he began with the rather tedious material, the kind that was unlikely to stimulate many headlines: the forgery and embezzlement charges. Doggedly, he proceeded to demonstrate the basis for those accusations.

A man named Clarence Turner and his sister-in-law, Jean Bodenshot, testified that Lamb Funeral Home had taken care of the arrangements for the funeral of Turner’s wife, Helen. When investigators compiled a list of organ donors, one of the names on the sheet was Helen Turner, and according to the paperwork, Clarence had signed the consent form.

However, when Clarence took the stand, he denied ever giving authorization for organ or tissue removal. It was something he never would have done, he said, because his wife had died of cancer and he would have worried about a recipient getting a diseased organ.

His claim was backed up by Bodenshot, who had actually made the arrangements with Laurieanne. She testified that organ donation had not even been discussed.

The prosecution’s handwriting expert, Georgia Hanna, testified that Turner’s purported signature was an apparent forgery. Although she could not determine who
had
signed Turner’s name, other than it was
not
Clarence Turner, she felt that the signatures of the two witnesses to his signing—Jerry and Laurieanne—were both signed by Laurieanne. This implied that she also signed Turner’s name, or at least was aware of fraud by claiming to be a witness to a signature she knew was not authentic. Laurieanne later told a reporter that the law allowed her to sign someone’s name if she had received consent over the telephone. But Turner denied this as well.

In the same vein, a woman named Claudine Johnson denied that she had agreed to the removal of organs or tissue from the body of her sister, Clara Hildebrandt, and that the signature on the consent form was not hers. More damning evidence was developed by Diaz that showed that Hildebrandt’s heart had been removed
the day before
Johnson met with Laurieanne at the funeral home, allegedly to sign the form permitting organ removal. Hanna testified that, in her expert opinion, Johnson’s name had been forged by Laurieanne, who also signed her own name, and Jerry’s, as witnesses.

The third case involved Carolyn Anderson Scholl, the woman whose name was misspelled in her purported signature on the consent form. According to her, Laurieanne had mentioned the tissue bank but she had never asked if any of Frank Holzkamper’s organs were to be donated. If Laurieanne
had
asked, Scholl said, she would have refused. The only document she signed for Laurieanne, Scholl said, was an ATC form. At no time, she testified, did Laurieanne tell her that by signing the ATC form she was also authorizing organ removal.

When she was shown a donor consent form purportedly carrying her signature, Scholl denied ever having seen the form before, much less signing it.

A few minutes later Hanna testified that she was “nearly positive” the “Schull” signature was in Laurieanne’s hand.

These cases, while admittedly dreary in comparison to what was to come, could not simply be ignored.

“The forgeries alleged in these…counts constitute a fraud not only against the immediate next of kin of the deceased whose signatures were forged, but in a larger sense…against the public,” Lewis argued. Furthermore, he continued, the import was broader yet because the recipients of the organs also were defrauded in the sense that they thought they were getting material that had been donated, not stolen.

To put this testimony into context one had to remember that the forgery case against Laurieanne almost certainly would be contested hotly when and if Laurieanne was ever forced to stand trial on the charges. The evidence against her was authenticated primarily by the prosecution’s handwriting expert. At trial, Laurieanne’s lawyer undoubtedly would call experts of his own to refute Hanna’s claims. Laurieanne’s conviction or acquittal on the forgery counts probably would rest largely on whose experts were the most credible.

However, the situation was different in the embezzlement case, where the district attorney’s evidence against Laurieanne was much stronger. The main prosecution witnesses in that phase were Skip Jones, the auditor for the State Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers, and Lillian Garcia, a savings supervisor at the institution where Lamb Funeral Home’s preneed accounts were on deposit.

In the embezzlement phase, Lewis was not dealing with arguable interpretations of loops and swirls in a person’s signature, but with actual documents filed and signed by Laurieanne in a bank officer’s presence.

When the DDA called Garcia to the stand, she said that the special account—No. 01–847664, or for easy reference in the court, the “664 account”—was opened on February 15, 1984, and was designed specifically to receive interest money from Lamb Funeral Home’s 172 preneed account holders. After March 20, 1986, the money was transferred to the account automatically at the end of every quarter.

Eventually, Garcia said, the total in the 664 account grew to $100,365.52, of which an even $100,000 subsequently was disbursed to Lamb Funeral Home, David, David’s brother Gary, and an equipment service. That money included some $23,000 from two new preneed accounts which Laurieanne had not opened, as required by state law, within thirty days. These accusations spun off as separate charges against the couple.

In his argument before Person, Lewis contended that both Jerry and Laurieanne participated in the money transfer scheme, and that the practice persisted even after state regulations had been explained to Laurieanne in exhaustive detail by Skip Jones.

Also, the prosecutor added, the fact that Laurieanne’s brothers later replaced the $100,000 after they took over operation of the mortuary, did not make up for the fact that Jerry and Laurieanne had broken the law by diverting the money in the first place.

“If a guy gets caught after robbing a bank and then he gives the money back, that doesn’t mean he will not be charged with bank robbery,” Lewis explained.

By this time Lewis was starting to find his stride. Having established that there were some strange things going on at Lamb Funeral Home, he proceeded to demonstrate just
how
strange. Without breaking his gait, he segued smoothly into the issue of multiple cremations, calling a string of witnesses to corroborate his accusations.

Former employees Jim Dame, Steve Strunk, and Leon Packard testified that remains would be scooped from large metal barrels into boxes that were to be returned to next of kin. Ostensibly, the containers held the remains of their loved ones.

“There was like a table where there was empty boxes with name tags on them,” testified Strunk.

How many boxes? asked Lewis.

Strunk replied that there were twenty or thirty. “They were filled up with ashes that were scooped out and placed into each one.”

“Did you ever see Laurieanne Lamb scoop out ashes from the trash can and place it in boxes?” Lewis asked.

“Yes,” Strunk replied.

“And did you see that on more than one occasion?”

“Yes.”

In addition to Laurieanne, Strunk testified, he also had seen David and Jerry perform similar operations “numerous times.”

Once, Strunk added, smoldering remains were tossed into a Dumpster, and when the trash bin caught fire, Laurieanne extinguished it with a garden hose.

It was Strunk, too, who gave damaging testimony about the habit among all three Sconces of referring to dental gold as “AU.”

“When you heard Laurieanne Sconce use the expression ‘AU,’ can you think of a particular incident?” Lewis asked.

“Yes,” Strunk replied, adding that the incident occurred in the back room of Lamb Funeral Home and she was talking to David. “The exact words I heard were ‘How much AU did you get today, honey?’”

“And what did David respond?”

He showed her a styrofoam cup, Strunk said, which was half filled with gold teeth.

Besides showing his mother gold teeth that had been extracted from the mouths of cadavers, Strunk said he also had heard Laurieanne and David talking about the contest among the workers to see who could shoehorn the most corpses into the two retorts.

Strunk also testified that he took a take-back to one mortuary, supposedly representing one of its customers, before the body had even been cremated.

Dame said when he first went to work for David, his job was that of an ash sifter. It was his duty, he continued, to take the remains that were delivered to the funeral home in large metal trash cans and spread twenty to twenty-five pounds worth on a long empty table. He then would carefully go through the dark gray substance searching for bits of metal, which he would discard. Since the remains were still in fairly large chunks, the next step of the operation involved putting the material in a commercial cement mixer which contained two shot puts. When the mixer was turned on, the metal balls would tumble and crumble the pieces of bone.

“Did you ever get this ash from any place other than a large trash can?” Lewis asked.

“No,” Dame replied.

When asked what conclusions he drew from this practice, Dame replied that he believed that when ash was packaged to be returned to survivors, it never came from just one body.

When his father died, Dame said, he pleaded with David to cremate his body alone. David promised to take care of it.

Asked to describe the incineration process at Pasadena Crematorium, Andre Augustine said:

“There were racks in the crematorium and bodies were on the racks. I saw David take bodies off the racks, put them on his shoulder, and load them into the retort.” He put them in head first, Augustine said, one on top of another. “If they weren’t all the way forward in the retort, he would go around to the other end, use a hook and pull them up to the front of the oven.”

“Is the hook sharp on the end?” Lewis asked.

“Yes,” Augustine replied.

“Where did the hook go into the body?”