David Sconce. [Photograph by Courtesy of HBO]
HBO’s latest documentary offering, which premiers tonight at 9 p.m., chronicles the systematic desecration that occurred behind the respectable façade of the former Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, where families surrendering their dead unknowingly fed a machine that reduced human remains to profit margins.
The funeral home, founded in the late 1920’s by Lawrence Lamb as a highly-respected family business in Pasadena, became the epicenter of what prosecutors would call an industrial-scale violation of human dignity.
But Rofé, whose previous work explored the underbelly of American institutions, understands that Sconce’s story illuminates a more profound cultural reckoning with how we process death in a society that treats everything—even our final moments—as business opportunities.
The scope of Sconce’s operation defied comprehension: in 1986 alone, investigators estimated Lamb Funeral Home cremated approximately 8,000 bodies—several times more than any other funeral home in California.
The artistic vision here lies not in sensationalizing Sconce’s grotesque practices—the mass cremations, the harvesting of dental gold with pliers in what he called “popping chops” —but in positioning these acts within the broader context of an industry built around humanity’s most vulnerable moments.
According to Deputy District Attorney Walter H. Lewis, Sconce claimed to make $5,000 to $6,000 a month selling the pilfered gold alone.
When Sconce tells Rofé’s camera, “I don’t put any value on anybody after they’re gone and dead,” he articulates a callousness that escalated beyond desecration into violence: Sconce faced charges for hiring strongmen to assault rivals and for soliciting the murder of family members, including his mother and grandmother.
Rofé’s execution serves this larger vision through meticulous attention to the victims’ voices, particularly the unnamed former client who declares, “They violated and desecrated my father. It’s unconscionable.” The director allows these testimonies to resonate against Sconce’s matter-of-fact descriptions of efficiency: “I could cremate one guy in two hours, or you could put 10 of them in there and take two and a half hours. So what would be the difference? There is none.” The juxtaposition creates a devastating portrait of how industrial logic, when applied to death, can become monstrous.
The crimes finally came to light on January 20, 1987, when firefighters responding to complaints about smoke and putrid odors at a corrugated steel building in Hesperia—about 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles—discovered dozens of partially cremated bodies and cans filled with human ash. This grisly discovery in the high desert exposed an operation that had been running with devastating efficiency while families believed their loved ones were receiving dignified individual cremations.
The documentary’s cultural impact extends beyond exposing past crimes to examining how industry structure can enable exploitation. The vast majority of funeral directors serve grieving families with genuine compassion and ethical practices, yet is the NFDA willing to examine systemic vulnerabilities?
“While the actions chronicled in this documentary are both horrifying and real, documentaries often dramatize real events for emotional impact, and viewers should be mindful that important context or nuance may be left out in favor of a compelling narrative,” the Association says flatly.
While correctly noting that Sconce “is not representative of the funeral profession as a whole,” this defensiveness sidesteps the more important question of how industry practices—families making expensive decisions under intense emotional pressure and time constraints—create conditions where bad actors can exploit trust that ethical operators rightfully earn.
“The Mortician” arrives at a moment when Americans increasingly question institutional trustworthiness across every sector—healthcare, finance, government—making Sconce’s betrayal feel less like historical curiosity and more like prophetic warning. The series suggests that when society transforms sacred rituals into market transactions, we create conditions where David Sconces inevitably emerge to exploit our collective denial about death’s commercialization.
Sconce’s criminal trajectory spans decades: sentenced to five years in 1989 for mutilating corpses and mass cremations, he served only two and a half years before his 1991 release. After his release, he violated the terms of his probation and was re-incarcerated.
Executive producers Steven J. Berger, Jonah Hill, and Matt Dines have positioned this series within HBO’s tradition of examining American institutions through their failures. But Rofé’s achievement lies in recognizing that the Lamb Funeral Home scandal reflects our broader cultural inability to separate human dignity from economic opportunity. In his own words, he found “a chilling story about the business of death that was distinctly L.A. noir but was also layered with our relationship with grief and loss.”
The subsequent episodes, airing Sundays at 9 p.m. through June 15, promise to explore how Sconce’s crimes unraveled and their aftermath. But tonight’s premiere already establishes the series’ essential question: In a culture that commodifies everything, how do we protect the sacred moments when profit motive should never intrude?
How to Watch HBO’s “The Mortician”
HBO’s three-part docuseries, “The Mortician,” premieres tonight—Sunday, June 1 at 9:00 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max. The series explores the chilling crimes connected to Pasadena’s Lamb Funeral Home in vivid detail.
Episode Schedule:
- Episode 1: June 1, 2025
- Episode 2: June 8, 2025
- Episode 3: June 15, 2025
Each episode will be available to stream on Max the same day it airs. Viewers can watch live on HBO or catch up on-demand at their convenience.
