Does The Mortician take inspiration from true events? Exploring key details of HBO's latest crime docuseries

The Mortician premiered on HBO on June 1, 2025. As per Rotten Tomatoes, the show, consisting of 3 episodes

“Unravels the haunting story of L.A.'s most infamous family-run mortuary; in the early 1980s, David Sconce took over the Lamb Funeral Home and engaged in morally questionable and inhumane practices to increase his earnings.”

Being a docu series, The Mortician explores the crimes of David Sconce, who ran the Lamb Funeral Home, throughout the 1980s. David took help of illegal and unethical means to cremate the dead bodies, and thus cheating his customers who put trust in him on the way.

The Mortician is based on true events

HBO’s three part docu-series The Mortician tells the harrowing saga of David Sconce and how he cheated and robbed people who used the services of his funeral home. As revealed in the documentary, he would pile up to 15 bodies in the industrial kilns to ensure faster burning of more bodies.

He did this to ensure that more bodies were burnt in a shorter amount of time, thus increasing his profits. However, this meant that the ashes of the deceased got mixed and the families of those people received those mixed ashes as the last memory of their loved ones.

Moreover, former employees of David also mentioned on The Morticians that he would even break the bones of the dead bodies to ensure that they would burn faster. For a person in whom his customers had so much faith and gave him the responsibility to cremate their loved ones, David completely misused the powers that came with his profession and showed zero morals or ethics.

He also used to steal jewelry and other valuables from the dead bodies. David’s ex-wife also appears in the documentary and she mentioned that while David rarely talked about his work, she saw him removing gold teeth from a body and he sold the gold later.

Since he used such unethical practices, David could offer his services at much lower cost than other funeral homes. This naturally raised concerns and suspicions, though until 1987 he continued his business successfully. It was in that year that David’s crimes finally came to public view.

It was a World War II soldier who informed the police about the excessive smell of burning flesh coming out of the funeral house that David owned. The police came and upon investigation, found trash cans that were full of ashes. This led to David and his parents’ arrest on charges of cremating the corpses in illegal ways.

While initially David denied all charges, he eventually admitted to some of them and was given a prison sentence of only five years. He got out after serving half of his sentence but was again put behind bars in 2013 for violation of his lifetime parole. He was again released in 2023, on parole.

The Morticians can be streamed on Max.

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