SIMI VALLEY : Experts Testify on Oleander Poisoning

Poisonous extract of oleander was found in the body tissues of a Burbank mortician who died in Simi Valley in 1985, medical experts testified Tuesday at a preliminary hearing for the murder trial of David Wayne Sconce.

Sconce, 33, is accused of using oleander to poison Timothy Waters, 24, a rival undertaker who allegedly threatened to expose Sconce in 1985 of violating California funeral home laws at his family’s mortuary.

Sconce is serving a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to paying two men to beat Waters. He also is serving five years for pleading guilty to stealing dental gold from bodies and disposing of up to 8,000 bodies a year in multiple cremations at his family’s Lamb Funeral Home in Hesperia.

In 1988, the Ventura County coroner, Dr. F. Warren Lovell, ruled that Waters succumbed to oleander poisoning April 8, 1985.

In Ventura County Municipal Court on Tuesday, Lovell and a toxicologist retraced the steps they took to pinpoint oleander as the cause of Waters’ death.

Investigators who viewed Sconce as a suspect in the case suggested that Lovell test Waters’ tissue samples for poison. Lovell tested for arsenic but found none, he testified.

He then mailed preserved samples of Waters’ blood, liver, kidney and urine to Randall Baselt, a Foster City toxicologist.

Baselt testified that his lab also tested the samples, referring to a list of chemicals found in the Lamb Funeral Home and an excerpt on plant poisons from a book called “The Poor Man’s James Bond” which Lovell had received from investigators.

The samples tested negative for ethylene glycol, a major component in automobile anti-freeze, but positive for oleander, Baselt said.

But on cross-examination by defense attorney Roger Diamond, Baselt admitted that his laboratory had never before tested for oleandrin, the extract of the oleander plant, that it followed only a general description of a test devised by another expert, and that only two of the three tests proved there was oleander in Waters’ body.

Sconce frequently consulted with Diamond during the hearing, whispering questions that Diamond then asked of the experts.

During the complex technical testimony Tuesday, Sconce’s father, Jerry W. Sconce, passed a note to him through a defense investigator, despite a state law forbidding courtroom audiences from communicating with defendants.

Prosecutors intercepted one note and handed it to the bailiff, who glared at Sconce’s father and mother and offered to eject them from the courtroom.

Testimony is expected to continue today.