“I don’t want to be cremated,” director Joshua Rofé said in a recent interview. “I know that for sure.”
After Rofé made the shockingHBOdocuseries The Mortician, you can understand why. The three-parter focuses on a mortuary scandal that one of his interviewees called “the ultimate incendiary point for which we now have massive regulations … regarding cremation”.
Many who watch the piece may feel the same about their final arrangements as Rofé does concerning his. The Mortician is an exploration of a sprawling, twisted 1980s criminal case that vaulted the Lamb funeral home in Pasadena,California, and its co-proprietor David Sconce to national infamy amid charges of carrying out mass cremations at a ceramics kiln; stealing and selling corpses’ gold jewelry and dental fillings; stealing and selling corpses’ organs; delivering fake ashes to people mourning dead loved ones; and plotting violence against adversaries in the mortuary business.
The series – debuting on Sunday – in part casts Sconce as an exceptionally malicious actor in a profession with mostly honorable practitioners. And his downfall led to industry reforms at protecting consumers of mortuary services in the US, including laws that allowed for crematorium inspections and made it a felony to furtively take dental gold or silver from corpses.
But, as both The Mortician and a scan of news headlines establish,mortuaryscandalsthatechothe one centering on Sconce and the families with whom he did business persist. Rofé alluded to aguilty pleain April from a Colorado funeral home owner accused of keeping a dead woman’s body in a hearse for more than a year as well as improperly storing others’ cremated remains. His series nods to other relatively similar cases over the years in Georgia, Vermont, Tennessee and Texas.
None of that is to say the mortuary industry is particularly vulnerable to attracting the proverbial bad apples, Rofé said. He remarked: “People do fucked up things in every business in the name of money.”
Yet, he added, “as it relates to the business of death, it becomes a bit more grotesque” when that happens.
And there’s so much grotesqueness in The Mortician that Rofé couldn’t find a place for one of the most disturbing anecdotes he said he has personally ever elicited in his career. It’s one that’s included directingLorena– examining the infamous case of the woman who cut off her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife in Virginia in 1993 – andBob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, which partially delved into a fight over the renowned landscape artist’s estate.
The anecdote in question came from Louis Quinones, who used to drive a van that retrieved bodies for Sconce’s mortuary to cremate. Quinones recalled how one day he was in a cold storage room where the mortuary kept bodies on shelves, and he instinctively kicked a blanket on the floor aside that he believed had been left there haphazardly. But he felt there was something under the blanket, which he removed and discovered was the corpse of a baby.
Quinones told Rofé that he looked at the name written on the baby’s ankle tag – and realized that he had delivered what was supposed to be the infant’s ashes weeks earlier to the child’s mother after she had paid for a cremation.
“That is another level of depravity,” said Rofé, who also madeSasquatch, which zeroed in on a mythical monster and a murder.
But there was no space for that recollection from Quinones in a series that spends a total of about 180 minutes recounting how Sconce first cornered the cremation market in his community by charging just $55 a body, undercutting the competition. The funeral home he owned and ran alongside his parents then went from conducting fewer than 195 cremations in 1981 to more than 25,280 just five years later – inviting a law enforcement investigation that uncovered the brutal, illegal shortcuts he took to register that increase in volume of about 12,860%.
It was impossible at that rate for the mortuary to determine whose ashes belonged to whom. So it handed ashes back to client families at random – which they had no idea about for years.
Furthermore, investigators determined that, to maximize his profits, Sconce abided by his mortuary’s taking – and selling – everything from rings and clothes to eyeballs, hearts and livers. Those efforts required the mutilation of bodies and had not received permission from people who had entrusted Sconce to care for their dead.
The details of Sconce’s legal fate – including in connection with criminal charges that he killed the owner of a rival mortuary – are out there for those who are so inclined to find out ahead of The Mortician’s airing. But suffice to say he went on to a series of incarcerations from which he was paroled. That parole happened as Rofé researched Sconce’s story in archived newspaper articles and weighed retelling it in a docuseries styled after theLos Angelesnoir films the director said he devoured after moving to the city at the beginning of his career.
He picked out Sunset Boulevard, DOA, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. The Mission Revival-style mortuary inextricably tied to Sconce would have been at home appearing in any of them.
Rofé and his team, mostly based in LA and New York, had two days’ notice that Sconce was being released from a prison in Sacramento, California. But they got there in time to greet him at the prison gates and subsequently capture whatHBObilled as the first – and evidently only – interview Sconce had given since his parole, making it an easy decision for him to finish what became The Mortician.
Some of the comments Sconce offered have already made the news. “To me commingling of ash is not a big deal,” Sconce says in one rant on The Mortician, an excerpt of which was in a trailer clip that drew media coverage. “I don’t put any value in anybody after they’re gone and dead – as they shouldn’t when I’m gone and dead. That’s not a person any more.”
He continued: “That’s not your loved one any more. And it never has been. Love them when they’re here. Period.”
Rofé couldn’t discuss much of his interview with Sconce without spoiling the series for prospective viewers. But what he could say is he was gripped with how Sconce shifted from demonstrating himself to be “the king of deflection” – even with respect to things that court documents presented as proven facts – to “being so upfront about other incredibly disturbing things that you couldn’t believe somebody was not only coping to but trying to rationalize as something that there’s nothing wrong with”.
“And I still can’t believe some of the things he said on camera,” Rofé said. “If you [are] shocked watching, do understand that I was shocked having it said to me in person.”
The Mortician begins on HBO on 1 June with a UK date to be announced