Sconce’s employees were cremating anywhere from five to eighteen bodies at a time … and that’s per furnace. They would then dump all of the ashes together in huge barrels. When it came time to collect the ashes for the families, employees were instructed to collect 3.5 to 5 pounds for female remains and 5 to 7 pounds for male.
But wait, it somehow gets worse! On November 23, 1986, the crematorium caught fire after two employees tried to break the company record by putting nineteen bodies in each furnace. It is believed that the fire was the result of the bodies being packed in there so tight that it clogged the chimney. Bear in mind that the inside of these furnaces were only slightly larger than a phone booth, and the world record for the number of live people stuffed into one of those is only fourteen.
So, the fire meant they were out of business, right? This nightmare was finally over, right?!? Not yet. David Sconce secretly set up a new crematorium about 70 miles away in a warehouse in Hesperia, California. He had to operate the new business under the license of a ceramics factory, because that’s what the massive diesel fueled kilns he was using were designed for. Another part of his cover story was that they were using the ovens to make heat shield tiles for the Space Shuttle.
Bodies were cremated there for two months until December 23, 1986 when a neighbor called in an air quality complaint over all of the horrible smoke the furnaces were belching out 24/7. When the neighbor was told it was just a ceramics factory, he shouted, “Don’t tell me I don’t know what burning bodies smell like! I was at the ovens at Auschwitz!”
When Assistant Fire Chief Will Wentworth went to investigate the facility, he found everything inside covered in soot, and trash cans filled to the brim with ashes and prosthetic devices. Just in case the universe hadn’t made it obvious enough what was really happening in that warehouse, when Wentworth opened one of the kilns, a human foot fell out… still burning.