‘The Mortician’ Review: An Eye-Opening Look at the Depraved Practices of a Grave-Robbing Narcissist
Death is terrifying. It’s coming for us all, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Many of us, myself very much included, try to eschew thoughts of mortality from our periphery, opting to live in a state of denial. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have people, like mortuary workers, who consciously accept death as a natural part of the circle of life and take it in stride. The latter is surely a healthier outlook and one I’m working toward adopting. With that said, under the wrong circumstances, constant proximity to death may have the potential to desensitize in an unhealthy way. The new three-part true crime docu-series The Mortician, out now on Max, examines a case very much like that.
The Mortician follows disgraced former undertaker David Sconce, a funeral worker who descends from a long line of funeral workers. Sconce was born into the Lamb family, who were well known locally as the proprietors of the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, CA. Sconce got into the trade organically, attending mortuary school at the suggestion of his parents. Not long after he joined the trade, Sconce began cutting corners, breaking laws, and profiting off of the deceased. His cavalier attitude eventually caught up with him, but not before he desecrated countless corpses, breaking the hearts of thousands of families when all of his misdeeds finally came to light.
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When he joined the family business, Sconce quickly came to understand that it was far more cost-effective to mass-cremate several people all at once than to follow standard protocol (and the law) and process one person at a time. With the remains of multiple people fired in the cremation chamber at the same time, there’s no way of telling which ashes should be delivered to which family. As such, the unscrupulous mortician just divvied up the cremains to unsuspecting families who believed he was doing the right thing.
Over the course of the series, director Joshua Rofé chronicles Sconce’s reckless endeavors, peppering the proceedings with interview footage from surviving family members who eventually learned the ashes returned to them weren’t entirely (if at all) the cremains of their loved one.
It is heartbreaking to watch these people confront the uncomfortable realization that they’ve been duped and that they are now the stewards of what might well be a perfect stranger’s ashes or, perhaps, a collection of strangers along with bits and pieces of the loved one whom they entrusted to Sconce.
Getting the remains of a loved one back in a box is an emotionally vulnerable experience. It marks a level of finality from which you cannot return. The person you loved is now a pile of ash. Yet, there’s comfort in knowing that you have what remains of their physical being. Now, imagine learning, some years later, that the small piece of that loved one you’ve been holding on to may well be an amalgamation of different strangers. It’s hard to even imagine the level of devastation that brings.
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If unsanctioned mass cremations were Sconce’s only crime, he would be a monster. However, his criminal endeavors go far beyond that. He has also been accused of and convicted of a series of other cynical and illegal practices. The list ranges from removing gold teeth and jewelry from the deceased to harvesting their organs and tissue without consent. That’s not an exhaustive list; you’ll learn there’s more to the story than that if you check out the series.
If Sconce understood the consequences of his actions and took accountability, The Mortician might be easier to sit through. However, the key figure in all of this takes zero accountability for the harm he’s caused. When he sits for his interview with director Rofé, Sconce constantly deflects, justifies, rationalizes, and even laughs about the evil he’s perpetrated. As he describes his numerous incarcerations, he’s quick to tell us all how he’s the victim in this, with no grasp of the irony at play. He feels victimized because he got caught, yet he has no perspective on the pain he’s caused others.
Equally nauseating are the crime scene photos that illustrate some of the series’ most shocking and horrifying developments. After the facility Sconce was operating out of burned to the ground, he relocated to a warehouse full of kilns, which he repurposed as cremation chambers. That illegal operation drew unwanted attention from law enforcement, and the police captured photographic evidence of the burning human remains. Rofé sears those images into our retinas, forcing us to confront Sconce’s criminal handiwork. I was so mortified that I had to look away a couple of times.
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With that said, the crime scene photos serve an important purpose. They give us a window into the depths of Sconce’s depravity and serve as a reminder of the damage he’s caused. They make an excellent onscreen counterpoint to his attempts to shirk responsibility and deflect ownership for his cynical criminal endeavors.
The Mortician is a decidedly dark docu-series that I don’t intend to watch again anytime soon. I’m still glad I got the chance to see it. The reporting is informative and unflinching, and the case examined within is a fascinating one. Although it’s taxing to spend three hours listening to a violent narcissist tell us all that he’s really not such a bad guy, we have all the information we need to make up our own minds.
If you’re curious to experience The Mortician, all episodes are available now on Max.
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The Mortician
Summary
This docu-series is not for the faint of heart.
Categorized:Reviews
