In a heated sentencing hearing Wednesday, a judge rebuked a Long Beach man he said preyed on young addicts, using them for sex and—in one case—letting a man die and then disposing of his body so that the drug-fueled parties he hosted could continue without scrutiny from police.

The home of 55-year-old Scott Leo was “a house of horrors,” Judge Daniel J. Lowenthal said before handing down the maximum sentence of six years and eight months in state prison.

Jurors convicted Leo earlier this month of furnishing meth, furnishing the party drug GHB and maintaining his home on Eighth Street as a place to use drugs.

“It was ‘Silence of the Lambs’ in Long Beach,” according to Lowenthal, who said Leo “lured young men” before defense attorney Matthew Kaestner interjected loudly: “That’s not correct.”

“Don’t interrupt me,” Lowenthal responded and continued: “He lured young men, many of them who were vulnerable and struggling with addiction, to his sex dungeon with the promise of drugs.”

The “dungeon,” according to testimony at trial, was Leo’s basement, where he kept sexual apparatuses and drugs. One of the men who visited it was Zach Kennedy, a 31-year-old who’d moved to Long Beach from a small Pennsylvania town.

Leo’s home was the last place Kennedy was seen alive in October 2017. After an extensive search by his family and friends and several visits to Leo’s Eighth Street home by police, detectives found his body buried in the yard.

Kennedy’s feet had been severed to fit him into a plastic bin that Leo hid underground, according to authorities.

Kennedy had died after taking the party drug and sedative GHB at Leo’s home, according to text messages Leo sent a friend that night.

According to the text messages shown at trial, Leo said he believed Kennedy was “in a g-hole,” slang for overdosing on the drug. Leo also sent photos of Kennedy, apparently unconscious and slumped forward in the bathtub.

At one point, Leo seemed to panic, urgently asking the friend to call him, but the next morning, he reported that Kennedy had popped up no worse for wear. Kennedy, however, was never again seen alive.

It’s possible Kennedy could have survived if Leo had called for help as he was overdosing, according to a medical examiner who testified at a 2020 hearing. Instead, Leo headed to Home Depot the next morning to rent an auger and tamper, perfect items for digging a large hole in his yard and then filling it in, according to police.

Prosecutors argued that Leo’s inaction and the accusation he provided the GHB was enough for him to face a murder or manslaughter charge, but judges repeatedly threw them out after Leo’s attorney argued that they were an overreach under California law. Only people with a special relationship with the deceased, like a parent watching over a child or a doctor caring for a patient, have a duty to intervene in potentially deadly situations.

But that escape from legal consequences doesn’t negate Leo’s moral culpability, Lowenthal said.

“His failure to call for help represents a fundamental breakdown in human decency,” the judge said, and Leo’s decision to dismember and hide the body denied his family a proper burial.

Meanwhile, Lowenthal said, Leo continued hosting parties just feet away from where Kennedy’s body lay underground.

When Kennedy’s family and partner came to the courtroom lectern Wednesday to express their own grief and ask for the maximum sentence for Leo, defense attorney Kaestner objected.

Leo, he said, had been cleared of any criminal liability for Kennedy’s death. Kennedy was a consenting adult, not a victim in this case and it was inappropriate for his loved ones to position him as one.

“He was terribly addicted to drugs and no one intervened,” said Kaestner said. It was not Leo’s duty to take care of Kennedy, he argued: “His family, his friends needed to intervene, and they never did.”

In their statements, read into the record by a victim advocate, Kennedy’s loved ones rejected this characterization.

Kennedy was a human being with a precious soul and a carefree spirit, “not trash that you can throw away,” his partner John Hill said.

It would be easy, Kennedy’s sister wrote, to focus on all of her brother’s bad decisions in life instead of his effortlessly cool personality and incorrigible sense of humor that are now forever snuffed.

But, she said, “The awful truth is, the only person he ever hurt was himself.”

Man who buried missing overdose victim in yard convicted on drug charges