VENTURA : Man Says Mortician Felt Beating Was Just

When David Wayne Sconce learned that rival mortician Timothy Waters had been savagely beaten, he responded that Waters got what he deserved, another mortician testified Thursday during Sconce’s preliminary hearing on a murder charge in Ventura County Municipal Court.

Waters had spread word among Southern California morticians that the Sconce family’s mortuary, the Lamb Funeral Home, was violating state funeral home laws, testified Donald Richard Gray, a retired mortician.

Gray testified that he was just opening his Aftercare Funeral Services mortuary in Van Nuys in 1984 when Waters warned him not to contract with Sconce for cremations because the Lamb Funeral Home burned more than one body at a time and stole dental gold from the bodies it handled. Gray said he repeatedly mentioned the allegations to Sconce, who denied them.

Gray testified that while helping transfer bodies from his station wagon into cardboard cremation containers at the Lamb Funeral Home in February, 1985, he told Sconce that Waters had been severely beaten.

Sconce is serving a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to paying two men to beat up Waters, and another five-year sentence for pleading guilty to stealing gold from bodies and conducting multiple cremations.

In the Ventura court, he has been accused of poisoning Waters with oleander to silence his allegations about the Lamb Funeral Home operation.

Dr. Fredric Rieders, a Philadelphia-area toxicologist, testified Thursday that he conducted extensive chemical tests in 1988 that conclusively proved that oleander was in Waters’ system and caused his death.

Waters’ sister has testified that oleander grew wild near her Zuma house, where Waters spent the last weekend before he died. But prosecutors have not presented evidence on the specific form of oleander that Waters ingested.