In the first year that David Sconce managed the Lamb Funeral Home's cremation services, the number of cremations jumped from 194 to 1,675. By 1985, the number had reached 8,173 annually. The two ovens at the crematory ran 16 to 18 hours a day. Sconce pushed employees to pack as many bodies as possible into each cremation, sometimes framing it as a competition. His employees gave him a nickname: "Little Hitler."

The volume alone was suspicious. But it took an external incident to trigger the formal investigation. In January 1987, officials were alerted by reports of noxious black smoke — and the smell of burning human flesh — coming from a building at the Oscar Ceramics plant in Hesperia, about 70 miles from Pasadena. When they entered, they found several hundred pounds of human remains. The caller who had reported it put it bluntly to fire officials: "Don't tell me they're not burning bodies; I was at the ovens at Auschwitz."

The investigation that followed uncovered a systematic violation of the trust families extend when they hand over the remains of people they loved. Sconce had been conducting mass cremations — multiple bodies burned together in a single session — and mixing the resulting cremains before returning them to families who believed they had received the remains of their specific loved ones. He had been removing gold teeth and selling them to a jeweler; a former employee testified that Sconce boasted of making thousands of dollars a month this way.

Under a company called Costal International Eye and Tissue Bank, Sconce was also selling organs and body parts. In a three-month period, the operation sold 136 brains, 145 hearts, and 100 lungs to a North Carolina firm that supplied medical schools — all without the consent of the deceased or their families. Laurieanne and Jerry Sconce, David's parents, were separately accused of embezzling $100,000 in interest from 172 prepaid funeral trust accounts.

The legal proceedings ran for nearly a decade. David Sconce pleaded guilty in September 1989 to 21 counts of mishandling remains and served roughly half of a five-year sentence. Additional charges followed: he pleaded guilty in 1997 to a murder-for-hire plot targeting a funeral home rival and received lifetime probation. He violated that probation, and in 2013 he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He was released on parole again in 2023.

Laurieanne and Jerry Sconce faced separate trials. A jury acquitted them on some counts, declared mistrials on others; eventually, in April 1995, both were found guilty on conspiracy and other charges and sentenced to three years and eight months each. A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of families of an estimated 16,000 decedents was settled in 1992. The case has been the subject of multiple books and, in June 2025, an HBO three-part documentary series, The Mortician, which included interviews with David Sconce and the families whose relatives had been in the Lamb Funeral Home's care.