A Family Business (True Crime) by Ken Englade

Paperback:  This harrowing true story spanned from the 1980s to 1991.  When David Sconce, with his wide, easy smile, blond, curly hair, Paul Newman-blue eyes, and broad, solid shoulders - weightlifter's shoulders with the arms and chest to go along - appeared in Hesperia, Southern California, in the sizzling summer of 1986, he was considered a remarkable catch for the community.  A handsome, pleasant, bright and ambitious young entrepreneur, a Los Angeles yuppie who was intelligent enough to recognise Hesperia's potential.

Always a fast-talker, he told anyone who would listen that he was a young businessman trying to make his fortune by investing in the future.  And he was universally believed.  After all, he was a personable guy.

David told Hesperians that he had been searching throughout Southern California for a location for a small manufacturing plant he planned to build.  He was, he said, a manufacturer of heat-resistant tiles for the space shuttles, those little rectangles of ceramic material that cover the spacecraft like scales on a fish.  After a lot of looking, he decided that Hesperia was the place where he wanted to locate his production facility.

In October 1986, he secured a building permit from the city and erected a plain-looking oversized metal shed - his basic facility - which he surrounded with a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.  The only way to enter the site was through a gate secured by a sturdy padlock.  The building itself was empty except for David's custom-made equipment:  two industrial-sized kilns, which David said he needed to bake the space shuttle tiles.  He christened the new business Oscar's Ceramics, naming it after his father-in-law.

That autumn, Oscar's Ceramics went into production but it was not making ceramic tiles.

There was one thing that was odd, and that was the smell.  On occasion, the odour that drifted down from Oscar's Ceramics was incredibly foul.  At times, a nauseating black smoke belched from the company's chimney and settled over that section of the community like a cloud from hell.  The smell was downright repulsive;  sometimes it seemed strong enough to shrivel a yucca.  When asked about this stench, David would shrug, flash his lopsided grin and apologize, explaining that he found it offensive too but it was one of the unfavourable by-products of his manufacturing process.  "Nothing I can do about it," he would say.  "Sorry."

In A Family Business (1992), acclaimed true crime author Ken Englade recounts one of the most horrifying and lurid cases in Californian history and exposes the twisted personalities of a fourth-generation funeral empire at the centre of the plot.  Mutilation of corpses, falsification of death certificates, theft of body parts and conspiracy to murder were just some of the  gruesome charges levelled against charming sociopath David Sconce and his cold, calculating parents, who would seemingly stop at nothing to destroy their rivals.

About the author:  Ken Englade is an investigative reporter and bestselling author whose books, dealing with high-profile trials, include Beyond Reason, To Hatred Turned, Cellar of Horror, A Family Business, Deadly Lessons, Murder in Boston, and Blood Sister.  He was a public information officer for the Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency.  In 2010, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Louisiana State University School of Mass Communications.  He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife Heidi.