The Mortician

The Mortician is so much more than a gussied-up Wikipedia page. It’s something that is unlikely to ever leave you.

“The Mortician” reveals fresh angles into the decades-old case via a bevy of interviews with those who were there. But it’s Sconce himself who provides the most insight into his crimes when he alternately denies and then brags about his transgressions. .... In “The Jinx” fashion, Sconce’s own words at the end of this docuseries may come back to burn him.

The Mortician effectively shows just how ghoulish the things David Sconce did to people’s loved ones really was, and does so mostly through Sconce’s own words.

As all-encompassing as The Mortician’s breadth of interviews is, I couldn’t help but wish for a bit more of an inquiry into the cultural attitudes towards American grief and funeral rites that allowed the Lamb-Sconces to take things so far in the first place—and what it might say about us.

Ultimately, The Mortician keeps getting drawn back to Sconce, whose cold-blooded certainty is treated as if it’s more interesting than the victims’ grief. .... Rofé ends with a Jinx-style stinger: Sconce apparently, or at least plausibly, confessing to three murders. .... But, considering there’s no suggestion whom that mystery victim may have been, it’s a wan note to end the series on, more of a damp squib than a bombshell.

It’s true that not every true crime project indeed gets a remorseful subject, but the interviews that serve as the backbone for this one are particularly frustrating, and it feels like Rofé keeps hoping for a breakthrough moment a la “The Jinx” that never really comes.