Cover Story: I see dead people

You know a situation has spiraled out of control when even the most conservative attempt to put things in perspective can sound irrelevant next to the kind of emotional hyperbole that has been flowing out of tiny Noble, Ga., over the past few days. The gruesome spectacle at the Tri-State Crematory has been compared to the carnage of a plane crash or a battlefield; it was likened to war-torn Bosnia by no less than U.S. Sen. and Vietnam vet Max Cleland. State Rep. Doug Teper, D-DeKalb, describes it as “a scene out of Stephen King, or worse.”

So defense attorney Ken Poston had his work cut out for him last Friday in trying to win bond for his new client, accused corpse mishandler Brent Marsh.

“With due respect to concerns [of families of the mishandled], nobody got killed up at the Tri-State Crematory,” Poston offered somewhat hesitantly to Magistrate Judge Jerry Day. Poston appeared understandably chagrined at needing to mention this detail.

Frankly, what else is there to say at this point? “Hey, it’s not like he killed anybody” may seem a feeble defense (it wouldn’t be much help to the Enron gang, for instance), but it’ll have to do for now as Walker County, Georgia and the civilized world attempt to wrap its collective mind around what has taken place on the Marsh family’s 16-acre homestead.

And, as speculation and anger surge through this rural community on the outskirts of LaFayette, it’s important for Poston to keep people focused on the facts — which are easily as bizarre as any, more sinister, exaggeration of Marsh’s misdeeds.

The horrific discovery came Feb. 15, after a woman walking her dog called state authorities to report finding a human skull on the crematorium property, Teper says he was told by county Coroner Dewayne Wilson. (Wilson, along with other investigators, has been muffled by a gag order.)

Lodged inside the throat of the skull was a piece of plastic that Wilson recognized as a plug commonly used by undertakers to prevent leakage of embalming fluid.

The coroner brought two deputies along that weekend when he visited Tri-State to ask Marsh if they could inspect the premises. Sure thing, Marsh replied. They asked to look inside a nearby shed; again, no problem, Marsh told them.

The door was jammed and, once they had forced it open, they found out why. “It was piled 4 feet deep with bodies,” Teper recounts Wilson as saying.

“What is all this?” a horrified Wilson asked. Marsh began making introductions, which went something like, “Well, this is Mrs. Smith who passed about three years back and right there is old Mr. Jones from over Dalton way ...” according to Teper.

“At that point, they think it finally dawned on Marsh that the game was up,” Teper says. “He said, ‘Well, if you need me for anything else, I’ll be up at the house,’ and walked away.”

Perhaps it was the alarmed reaction of his visitors that first tipped off the otherwise oddly relaxed Marsh that there might be something actually wrong with stacking bodies like cordwood.

Teper was among a handful of legislators from the state House Appropriations Committee who toured the Tri-State property last week to aid lawmakers in determining how much state money should be set aside to help fund a massive cleanup effort that could take the rest of the year.

“Literally, every place they’re digging they’re finding bodies, so every inch of those 16 acres is a potential crime scene,” Teper says.

Last week, the sound of heavy equipment and earth-movers resonated across the Tri-State property, which sits at the crest of a small rise on a short residential lane about 500 yards off U.S. 27 just north of the outskirts of LaFayette, the county seat. A backhoe was busy digging up the yard behind Marsh’s modest brick bungalow, two houses down from the crematorium entrance.

A small army of reporters and photographers from Chattanooga and surrounding counties, and as far away as Los Angeles and London, streamed back and forth between the caravan of news vans parked along the highway and the street frontage along the Tri-State site.

Every few minutes, a dump truck carrying gravel would rumble up the street or an unmarked, windowless van driven by men dressed in white jumpsuits would pull away, carrying its grisly cargo to the undisclosed location where the county has set up what the Georgia Bureau of Investigation terms its “temporary morgue.”

There, inside two large, air-conditioned tents is a virtually assembly line for corpse identification: the remains are catalogued and examined by one of 14 full-time pathologists; fingerprints are taken from the freshly dead and DNA is extracted from the majority that are in advanced decay; an anthropologist studies loose bones to determine age and gender; finally, the bodies are bagged and stacked until a positive ID can be made.

When the planned clear-cutting begins in the dense woods behind the crematorium and huge pumps start draining water from the nearby acre-plus lake, the property will likely roar like a large construction site — and require as much manpower.

Between the recovery work, the forensic efforts, counseling for distraught families and the intense security at each location, more than 500 people are involved daily in cleaning up the Tri-State mess, not counting prosecutors and lawmakers. The short-handed county has even drafted probation officers for the gruesome search.

There’s nothing about unincorporated Noble to set it apart from any other mile-long stretch of highway between LaFayette and Chickamauga in extreme northeast Georgia. Nestled in a long valley between Pigeon Mountain and the Armuchee Ridge, LaFayette is a city of about 6,700 that’s familiar to the metro Atlantans who pass through there to climb nearby cliffs and explore Georgia’s foremost network of caves.

There’s scarcely a shop, restaurant or church in the area where you can’t come across somebody who knows the Marsh family — Brent, his sister, Lashea, and their parents, Ray and Clara.

An English teacher in local high schools for many years, Clara is a top Democratic Party operative who was once named Walker County Citizen of the Year. She kept the books for the family business.

Ray Marsh opened Tri-State Crematory in 1982 and built up a clientele that included dozens of funeral homes in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. He turned the business over to Brent in 1996 after suffering a stroke that left him confined to wheelchair.

Once an apparent candidate for taking over the family crematorium, Lashea is a mortuary school graduate who works as a funeral home director in Chattanooga, but still lives in Noble.

In addition to the Tri-State land, the Marshes own tracts of nearby land and several rental properties. Mobile homes account for about half of the neighboring residences.

Jane Autry, who runs a small antique shop a half-mile down the highway, is as mystified as anyone at the family’s secret. She’s been a guest in the Marsh home and says Clara sometimes stopped by her store.

“All of them are well-educated, smart, clean and really attractive — Mrs. Marsh is in her 60s, but still very striking,” she says. “They’re just so perfect.”

Nowhere was this incongruity more surreal than during Friday’s bond hearing in downtown LaFayette when Poston announced that, only that morning, Brent Marsh had resigned his seats on the Walker County Department of Family and Children Services board and the local tax equalization panel.

Virtually overnight, the tall, strapping, 28-year-old Marsh, had gone from being a pillar of the community to a figure of universal contempt, reviled in much the same way as a serial killer or longtime child molester.

Sitting silent and utterly impassive during the hour-long hearing, he wore a bullet-proof vest and was flanked by deputies, more for Marsh’s own safety than out of concern that he may attempt escape. The judge will have decided whether to grant him bond by the time this paper hits the streets.

Townsfolk may admit to knowing the Marshes, perhaps even to having been a friendly acquaintance, but don’t hold your breath waiting for someone to stick up for them or insist that the Tri-State necropolis must be the result of some kind of terrible misunderstanding.

Along with their shared disbelief, horror and grief, Walker County residents are mad as hell at Brent Marsh, both for the callous treatment of their deceased family members, and for tarring them with a notoriety that could take several generations to live down.

That anger can manifest itself in ways that are unseemly, but not entirely unexpected in an overwhelmingly white, rural community deeply shamed by the alleged actions of a black resident. A spate of death threats against Marsh has been phoned in to local authorities, along with the suggestion that he be released from jail so he could be treated to a dose of homemade justice.

Trying to grasp how anyone could have discarded the bodies of his own friends and neighbors so casually rather than discharge his professional obligations, a white LaFayette storekeeper on Thursday mused: “He’s a black guy, so I guess he thought it’d be easy money.”

Yet that’s what’s so baffling about this case: Brent Marsh is not perceived to be either lazy or indifferent to his community. And how could spending years digging graves for hundreds of bodies, not to mention mixing up fake ashes, be any easier or more profitable than simply having a crematorium fixed, if that was indeed the problem? And even if it were marginally more convenient to dump the remains, how could a rational person imagine it was worth the risk?

Teper has a theory. “The whole situation reminds me of an office worker who gets behind in his paperwork, so he chucks it in a drawer,” he says. “After a while, he’s spending more time finding new places to hide his papers than on doing any actual work.”

It’s a similar mentality to that of the postman who is discovered hiding 20 years’ worth of mail in his apartment. (Except that tampering with mail is a federal offense, while junking human remains doesn’t even violate state law.) It may start with a few letters here and there, but eventually reaches a point where it seems more prudent to cover up the crime than to correct it.

Of course, there’s a world of difference between a magazine sweepstakes notice and the body of someone’s beloved mother. But that difference wouldn’t have quite the same resonance for someone whose job involves dealing with death every day, especially someone who literally grew up around corpses.

“The site looks like the guy was picking up bodies from funeral parlors and, if he didn’t have time, he’d just toss them somewhere,” Teper says. “Then, when he got the time, he’d dig a hole and bury them. What makes it confusing for the GBI is that it looks like he’d reopen a hole he’d dug years earlier and maybe forgotten, so you’re finding newer bodies stacked on older ones.”

The disturbing level of detachment it took to carry out such an operation is easier to picture in someone who interacted professionally only with similarly dispassionate morticians, someone who was never exposed to the reality check of grieving family members.

Finally, imagine that planting bodies in the back yard is the way one was taught the trade. After all, there’s been no evidence so far that Brent Marsh even knows how to operate a crematorium. Call it a case of “like father, like son.”

State Rep. Mike Snow, D-Chickamauga, concedes that he considered Brent’s father, Ray, a friend. He helped out the elder Marsh in 1992 by passing a local bill that gave him a two-year reprieve from needing to get a funeral director’s license, a measure that would have meant more regulatory scrutiny. Ray Marsh eventually went to court to successfully argue that because Tri-State Crematory did no business with the public, it was not subject to state inspections under Georgia law.

Much as he wants to believe his old friend had no part in the five-to-a-casket burials at the crematorium, Snow (whose own will calls for him to be cremated at Tri-State) says: “It’s hard for me to believe that nobody else in the family would have known about this.”

But Ray Marsh, 78, is unlikely to be much help to the investigation. While it’s been widely reported that he’s ailing, Snow says, “I’ve heard he has Alzheimer’s.”

Snow is leading the charge to close what many see as a loophole in Georgia law by making crematories subject to random inspections and making it a felony to desecrate a corpse.

While Teper signed Snow’s bill, he intends to be watchful that it isn’t broadened through some act of reactionary zeal to make it a crime simply to “mishandle” parts of a dead body, a revision that could effectively shut down women’s clinics.

“I’m concerned about what the crazy anti-abortionists might do with this bill,” he says. “Everybody thinks it’s so easy to make laws, but it’s very tricky.”

Speaking of which, Ken Poston, a former state legislator himself, has the tricky task of convincing a jury or a judge that Brent Marsh has been wrongly accused of defrauding his funeral-home clients; more likely, he’ll somehow try to downplay the level of wrongdoing. Neither will be easy.

Certainly, Poston can be expected to remind jurors as tactfully as possible that the actual laws his client is charged with breaking lie somewhere on the seriousness scale between shoplifting and DUI.

And, if the case does go to trial, it’s a given Poston will request a change of venue to get Marsh far away from anyone whose family or friends might have been adversely affected by the years of malfeasance at Tri-State Crematory.

How about Alaska?

scott.henry@creativeloafing.com??