The Recovery | Chapter 5

Speaker 1 We all take good care of the things that matter: our homes, our pets, our cars. Are you doing the same for your brain?

Speaker 1 Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 1 Studies have found that up to 45% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed by managing risk factors you can change. Make brain health a priority.

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Speaker 10 At participating McDonald's,

Speaker 2 this podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care.

Speaker 2 When all the corpses are found at Tri-State Crematory, it puts families in a justified frenzy. So many people just don't know what happened to their relatives' bodies.

Speaker 2 They don't know what to do about it, or how to resolve it, how to help the investigators help them. But one woman quickly figures out a way to help.
Both herself, her own family, and others.

Speaker 2 Her name is Terry Crawford. In early 2001, Terry's big brother Bobby is dying of kidney cancer.
Bobby is a lawyer in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He's a friendly, life-of-the-party guy.

Speaker 2 The kind of guy who on Thanksgiving goes out and searches searches the streets for people to invite over for turkey.

Speaker 2 After the doctors remove Bobby's kidney, only to discover that the cancer has spread, they try different experimental treatment. But it makes him feel like he constantly has the flu.

Speaker 2 So one day, Bobby decides to quit it all.

Speaker 11 Whatever time he had on this earth, he wanted to live it. He didn't want to be in the bed sick.

Speaker 11 And so he,

Speaker 11 one of the hurricanes that came through, I think was Andrew, he felt called by God to go help. So he got on his motorcycle and went down to help there.
He got his pilot's license.

Speaker 11 He did everything that he wanted to do and do with his family for the time that he had.

Speaker 2 As Bobby gets sicker, Terry goes on leave from her job directing a home health agency to help care for him.

Speaker 2 She's a trained nurse, and when a doctor tells Terry to just do whatever she can to make Bobby feel comfortable, she knows what that means. And she never leaves his side again.

Speaker 2 One day, she gets in Bobby's bed just to lay next to him.

Speaker 11 And when I did, I was about to close my eyes, and his breathing changed, and I knew.

Speaker 11 So I called my mother, and

Speaker 11 so my family all came up. So we actually started singing Bible verses

Speaker 11 around him.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 it was very difficult.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 so we told him Bobby is okay.

Speaker 13 And he just needed to pass.

Speaker 13 And so we sang hymns and just held him and talked to him when he took his final breath.

Speaker 2 As he was dying, Bobby told the family that he he wanted to be cremated. This is kind of shocking to Terry, because nobody in the family has ever been cremated before.

Speaker 2 But they cremate Bobby, and Terry's family splits up the ashes. They spread some of Bobby on a road where he liked to ride his motorcycle.

Speaker 2 They spread some of Bobby at his church, and some more at his favorite hole at a golf course he played with his buddies. In terms of putting Bobby to rest, Terry thinks her job is done.

Speaker 2 A year later, Terry gets home one day after work. She turns on the TV and sees sees the news about Tri-State Crematory.

Speaker 11 It was so devastating to hear that I said a prayer for all the families thinking how sad that they're going to have to go through this,

Speaker 11 knowing that their family members, their loved ones, had not been cremated but dumped like trash.

Speaker 11 So the next morning, I got up and I was fixing one of my daughters and my breakfast and the phone rang and and it was my sister-in-law and she could barely speak and she said Bobby went there and it's like what and she told me that Bobby had been sent to tri-state

Speaker 11 and

Speaker 11 I just dropped to the floor I kind of slid to the floor holding the phone

Speaker 11 and

Speaker 11 I just couldn't believe it and so then

Speaker 11 All of our thoughts were, we need to go try to find out what's happened. And they had a number to call, and we called the number, and they had a meeting place for all the family members to come in.

Speaker 2 Terry drives 45 minutes from where she lives in Tennessee down to Noble in Georgia. She's pissed off and looking for answers.
Hundreds of other families are feeling the same way.

Speaker 2 And like them, Terry attends meetings where all sorts of officials give updates on the recovery and identification of bodies. And that's all fine, but Terry is itching to do more.

Speaker 11 Of course, I wanted to go find my brother

Speaker 11 and

Speaker 11 so did the other family members and they were saying, you know,

Speaker 11 we couldn't do that, that,

Speaker 11 you know, they didn't go into detail about what they were finding or seeing, but it just stood to reason, you know, how long the person had been deceased and, you know, the state of their body.

Speaker 11 But that's not what you have in your mind when you know that your family member is missing. You think that, you know, they're just, they're there and you could identify them.

Speaker 2 One day she attends a press conference where the head of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, GEMA, is speaking. His name is Gary McConnell.

Speaker 11 And they were literally in the middle,

Speaker 11 they were in the middle of a briefing for the reporters. And I walked up to Mr.
McConnell, who is very large, tall.

Speaker 11 And so I tugged on his shirt.

Speaker 11 And he kind of pointed his finger at me and he said, can this wait? And I said, no, sir. I said,

Speaker 11 I need to work here. I said, my brother was sent here.
I'm a nurse. I can do something.
Please let me help.

Speaker 11 And so

Speaker 11 he looked at another Jima person and snapped his fingers and said, you know, take care of her,

Speaker 11 basically.

Speaker 11 And so they did. And so I had a job of...
contacting people to try to get their DNA.

Speaker 2 Terry quits her job and starts working for GEMA, helping them with the recovery effort. And it's a massive undertaking.
People from all over the country and the state are coming to work in Noble.

Speaker 2 They're even sending people from the World Trade Center site, from Ground Zero, to come down to Walker County.

Speaker 2 And with their help, investigators will finally figure out how long bodies have been piling up at a tri-state crematory, how many there are, and who, exactly who, is to blame.

Speaker 2 From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble. I'm Sean Raviv.

Speaker 2 Episode 5, The Recovery.

Speaker 2 It's been about a week since bodies were first discovered at Tri-State. Brent's in jail, at least for the time being.

Speaker 2 And many family members like Sheila Manus and Terry Crawford are awaiting word on whether their husbands, wives, parents, siblings have been found on the Marsh property.

Speaker 2 The media has descended on Noble. News vans and their comically large satellite dishes fill entire parking lots.

Speaker 2 Authorities have set up a seven-day-a-week toll-free number for family members to call if they think their relative might be at tri-state.

Speaker 2 In the first few days alone, hundreds of people come to the Walker County Civic Center looking for help.

Speaker 2 At least 400 workers from in-state and out, from dozens of agencies, have been brought in to help. Not to mention volunteers from all over Walker County.
Everyone is chipping in.

Speaker 2 The Red Cross provides grief counseling. The Georgia Baptist Disaster Relief Team helps with child care for victims.
The Salvation Army provides meals for emergency workers.

Speaker 2 The Batesville Casket Company of Batesville, Indiana works 24 hours a day to make receptacles for all the bodies being discovered.

Speaker 2 All of this effort is aimed at one thing, one goal, to find and identify every single body at Tri-State. And once that's done, to figure out how long the bodies have been there and who was involved.

Speaker 2 Was it just Brent, or did he learn this from his father, Ray Marsh, who started the business years earlier?

Speaker 2 Greg Ramey, special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI, puts in long hours.

Speaker 14 I didn't get to see my kids a whole lot. I mean, I would leave before they ever got up in the morning.
And it was,

Speaker 12 I mean, we were working 14, 16.

Speaker 14 18 hours a day. So when you get home, go in, get your shower, and go right straight to bed and sleep five or six hours, get back up, eat your bite of breath, and you're just gone again.

Speaker 14 So literally my wife had to bring the kids up to the Civic Center for me to even see them.

Speaker 2 The Walker County Civic Center campus becomes the hub of tri-state activity. The Civic Center building has a large auditorium that would fit nicely in a high school with a stage and everything.

Speaker 2 The kind of room where you could put on a baseball card convention. or a traveling production of Oklahoma.
That's where they give families daily updates on the recovery.

Speaker 2 Greg also calls the workers together most mornings.

Speaker 2 The police, forensic anthropologists, investigators, and other emergency workers doing the painstaking work of recovering remains, often in the mud, under cold February rain.

Speaker 14 Sometimes it was the same folks working for several days, and then we might have had a shift change overnight. You know, new folks coming in, so bring those folks up to speed.

Speaker 14 How many folks we had identified, how many bodies we had recovered, what the mission and goal was for the day.

Speaker 2 Before everyone separates to their different roles every morning, there's a group prayer, a moment of respite amidst a lot of challenging emotional and physical labor.

Speaker 2 Greg wears many hats in the tri-state case. He has to be a part-time manager, directing people from all the different agencies.

Speaker 2 A part-time forensics guy, getting up to snuff on how bodies decay and what cremains look like, and a part-time priest. when speaking with the families, some of whom he knows.

Speaker 2 And of course, that's on top of his actual job as the lead criminal investigator on this case for GBI.

Speaker 2 Behind the civic center is the agricultural building, where during normal times they'd hold animal shows or a farmer's market.

Speaker 2 But during these abnormal times, the Ag Building is used as a home base for the identification process. They set up offices and desks for staff to call funeral homes, families, hospitals.

Speaker 2 to gather whatever records they can find to help identify a body.

Speaker 2 Greg's criminal investigation depends on solid identifications for at least two reasons. First, he wants to know exactly how many times a funeral home paid to have a body cremated and it wasn't.

Speaker 2 That can help determine the number of charges that the DA can put on Brent.

Speaker 2 But Greg also wants to know when the body stopped being cremated, the window of time when things went wrong.

Speaker 2 So once a body is ID, he matches the name to funeral home records, or death records, focusing on the date that body was sent to tri-state.

Speaker 2 Terry Crawford is set up at the Ag Building, too.

Speaker 2 While waiting for updates on her brother Bobby, she's working for the state, gathering information from families for Greg and the other investigators to use to ID bodies.

Speaker 2 She spends a lot of time on the phone.

Speaker 11 They were trying to figure out how to make identifications.

Speaker 11 So then they asked all the family members to write down any identifying information, you know, like if there was a tattoo or missing teeth or

Speaker 11 a missing limb or anything that would identify that person to write it down.

Speaker 2 Terry's official title is DNA coordinator, and a big part of her job is to get family members to come in and get their blood drawn or to find another way to get DNA from them.

Speaker 2 If a body isn't easily identifiable through something like a tattoo, dental records, a serial number on a pacemaker, or maybe a piece of familiar clothing, like one body that is still wearing a pair of $800 cowboy boots, then DNA is the last and best resort.

Speaker 2 Terry's work for Jima and her own quest to find her brother's body, they become intertwined. She attends the family briefings for herself, but also encourages people there to give DNA samples.

Speaker 2 It's easy for Terry to talk to the families because she's one of them. But each night, she drives back to Tennessee and collapses into bed.

Speaker 11 It was mentally exhausting because you're dealing with everyone's pain

Speaker 11 and along with the pain that I was experiencing because of my brother?

Speaker 11 Would I have changed one iota of it? Absolutely not.

Speaker 11 I was privileged and humbled to be able to be there in that role to help people as well as I could

Speaker 11 and to hopefully make identifications.

Speaker 2 As they identify more bodies, Greg Ramie looks for patterns in the dates. If any of the bodies were sent to Tri-State before 1996, when Brent took over the business from his father Ray,

Speaker 2 then that would indicate Ray was guilty as well.

Speaker 2 Greg wants to know if this was just a Brent thing, or an entire Marsh family thing. And pretty soon, all the work that they're putting in, it pays off.

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Speaker 4 When cool, creamy ranch meets tangy, bold buffalo, the hole is greater than the sum of its sauce.

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Speaker 10 At Participating McDonald's.

Speaker 2 As Greg Raimi and Terry Crawford and a lot of other people at the Civic Center campus work to identify remains, five miles down the road, the search for more bodies in the Marsh property continues.

Speaker 2 Since the bodies were first discovered there, the effort has grown and become more organized. The biggest change is that a team from DMORT has arrived.

Speaker 2 I'd never heard of DMORT before reporting this podcast, but there are disaster mortuary operational response teams all around the country.

Speaker 2 The teams are made up of coroners, funeral directors, medical examiners, forensic experts, and other specialists that can help collect and identify bodies when there is a major disaster.

Speaker 2 And not just in the U.S. They're sent all around the world to help in the aftermath of tsunamis, hurricanes, or other natural disasters.

Speaker 2 They're kind of like spies in that they have to keep a go bag at all times and be ready to leave their day jobs to fly who knows where in the world at a moment's notice.

Speaker 2 DMort can come into almost any disaster situation and immediately assist local authorities.

Speaker 2 Two of the DMORT men called up to Noble.

Speaker 2 They don't live too far. They work in the funeral industry in South Georgia.

Speaker 17 My name is Michael Fowley.

Speaker 18 I'm the coroner in Doherty County, Albany, Georgia.

Speaker 19 Cedric Hill, and I'm funeral director.

Speaker 20 State says, funeral director in full continuous charge at Hill Watson People's Funeral Service in Columbus, Georgia.

Speaker 2 Michael and Cedric are best friends. They've traveled around the world together with DMort, helping with almost every major disaster you can think of.

Speaker 2 The Korean Airlines crash in Guam, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. They've become steady partners, a package deal.

Speaker 2 When one of them gets a call to get the go bag ready and head to the airport, they know the other is coming as well. They've spent countless days, hard days, working with dead bodies.

Speaker 2 And after those hard days, They often convene at night in the hotel of whatever city or country they've been deployed to.

Speaker 18 I think God had to give you a special gift to do what we was doing because, I mean, you saw from maggots, low flies, I mean, pure flies, I mean, you saw all kinds of stuff coming out of cats and spiders, all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 18 And just being able to deal with that, we had to talk among ourselves to hold it in. The secret, don't hold it in.
Talk to someone that can relate to you. That's because the people

Speaker 18 outside on the streets or whatever, even your family don't understand what you saw.

Speaker 22 A lot of times people

Speaker 18 don't know what you saw with your eyes.

Speaker 19 They think that you should be okay, but they don't know what you really saw.

Speaker 2 Cedric and Michael are so close that when Michael's wife died, Cedric did the funeral. And before she died, Michael's wife asked him to do the embalming and restoration of her body.

Speaker 2 As hard, impossible even as it sounds, Michael fulfilled her wish. Michael washed his wife in disinfectant.
massaged her limbs to prevent stiffening of the joints.

Speaker 2 He closed her eyes with eye caps, secured her jaw shut with wires. He drained his wife's blood and filled her veins with preserving chemicals.
He put makeup on her face to make her appear alive.

Speaker 2 He did her hair, dressed her, and made sure she looked pretty, like she would have wanted. And Cedric stood by Michael's side the whole time.

Speaker 20 I said, you just tell me exactly what you want me to do, and if you get to a point where you feel like you can't go any further, just let me know.

Speaker 2 After the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, Michael and Cedric were called to help with the recovery of remains in Manhattan.

Speaker 2 They've just returned home to Georgia from New York when they get a call from DeMort. It's about a place called Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Georgia.
There's a bit of whiplash.

Speaker 2 Everyone is still so focused on the terrorist attack in Manhattan, and Michael and Cedric haven't heard anything about what happened in Walker County, in their own state.

Speaker 2 Neither of them have heard of Noble, much less been there. But they pick up their go bags and drive up, because that's the job.

Speaker 2 For Michael and Cedric, arriving at tri-state is similar to arriving at ground zero. Like in Manhattan, to get to the site, they have to travel past families desperate for information.

Speaker 2 They're initially assigned to help with what's called gridding, a way of meticulously mapping where exactly remains are found on the property.

Speaker 20 You didn't go in and just start excavating.

Speaker 19 You had to go in and document.

Speaker 20 So we spent a lot of tedious hours doing something that didn't seem like it made a whole lot of sense.

Speaker 20 But in the end, it did because in essence, what you realize is that when you got back to looking at the grand scheme of things and you say, Okay, I have this.

Speaker 20 The question be, where did you get that from?

Speaker 19 And tell me the conditions under which you think that that was under, and then how long do you think it was there?

Speaker 17 When they were dealing with

Speaker 17 removing the ones from in one of the man-made graves he had, they had stakes out. Then you need to determine how many people was in this section.

Speaker 18 Was they seen thrown in, or was they laid neatly?

Speaker 22 How was it?

Speaker 17 So you got to document the head was on the 50-yard line, the feet was on the 30-yard, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 22 You got to be able to document where each person was and how they was inside their grave.

Speaker 2 A lot of the bodies are fragile, literally falling apart. And if you move them and a piece falls onto another body, it can make the already disastrous commingling on the property even worse.

Speaker 2 The last thing anybody wants to do is cause more uncertainty about the bodies they're trying to get back to the families.

Speaker 2 Certainty is that all these recovery workers have been brought here to return to the families. But certainty is unfortunately in low supply in Noble.

Speaker 2 For the podcast, we contacted a bunch of the funeral directors that sent bodies to Tri-State. Most didn't respond, and none who did agreed to an interview.

Speaker 2 But Cedric runs a funeral home, and Michael is a coroner and used to work at a funeral home. They're industry experts, and both of them are black.

Speaker 2 When he's in Noble, Cedric feels a heightened sense of responsibility because Tri-State Crematory belonged to a black family.

Speaker 2 He feels like he needs to correct the massive mistakes of another black person in the industry.

Speaker 20 I will say that we were certainly in retinet country, I'll be honest with you on that one.

Speaker 21 But I didn't necessarily feel, you know, threatened.

Speaker 20 I thought it was a positive to see a black man there on the positive side.

Speaker 19 So I felt like I carried a bloodstained banner, if you want to say it in that respect.

Speaker 15 Maybe I didn't, but I thought so.

Speaker 2 And even though it's so far away from Noble, what happened at Tri-State affects Cedric's funeral home, too. He gets calls from people asking, are these cremains you gave me really my mom?

Speaker 21 I think it was a real shock to many people in the black community to realize, do you mean to say a brother did this?

Speaker 20 And, you know, you're saying, not my brother.

Speaker 21 That's not what we do here.

Speaker 15 But yeah. But I think, you know, something went wrong there, and I'm not quite sure because they were well-respected.

Speaker 20 We all know the story. Well-respected people in a small community.

Speaker 21 And boy, that's a real small community.

Speaker 15 I'm serious. Being up there, it was really tight, real close, real tight.

Speaker 20 Everything every day was on there on television and radio.

Speaker 21 And it was radio talk shows every day with people from the community. And they allowed them to be able to express themselves.
I really appreciate that.

Speaker 20 But it was a bit much.

Speaker 19 It was a bit much.

Speaker 2 After a couple of weeks on the site, Michael and Cedric leave Noble, along with a lot of the other outsiders.

Speaker 2 Over the years since, they've been deployed together so many times, been through so much together. I think the two of them would make a great TV show, The Traveling Morticians.

Speaker 2 After searching the entire marsh property and a few other pieces of land they own, after looking at every inch of every building, after digging up eight mass graves,

Speaker 2 after clearing nearly every tree on the property, after removing the top layer of soil of most of the 16 acres, After draining a 6 million gallon lake and dredging the bottom with heavy machinery.

Speaker 2 After emptying every vault, every every casket, and every vehicle at Tri-State, the authorities announce a final count:

Speaker 2 339 bodies.

Speaker 2 It's a huge number on its own, more than twice the size of my high school class. Every one of them has relatives and friends who grieved them.

Speaker 2 339 bodies. 339 people.

Speaker 2 That's how many they find at Tri-State.

Speaker 2 And how many they have to identify.

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Speaker 4 When cool, creamy ranch meets tangy, bold buffalo, the hole is greater than the sum of its sauce.

Speaker 8 Say howdy, partner, to new Buffalo Ranch Sauce, only at McDonald's for a limited time.

Speaker 10 At participating

Speaker 2 Here's a little thought experiment.

Speaker 2 Imagine the bodies were never discovered. Imagine the gas man never went to tri-state, and the EPA agents never found a skull, and the GBI never showed up.

Speaker 2 Nobody would ever have known what was happening. They'd never have known that they'd gotten cremains that weren't cremains.

Speaker 2 Everybody would have been happy, right?

Speaker 2 I think so.

Speaker 2 And on the opposite end, if none of the bodies sent to Tri-State were burned, that also might have been better.

Speaker 2 Because then, at least theoretically, nobody would have had a lingering uncertainty about whether their relative was burned, about whether the cremains they received were them.

Speaker 2 They just know that they weren't. But what actually happened, the worst case scenario, is somewhere in between.

Speaker 2 That two out of every three bodies at Tri-State were burned. At least according to the authority's best guess, based on records provided by the funeral homes.

Speaker 2 The bodies they never found must have been burned, because where else would they be?

Speaker 2 In the days after the discovery, hundreds of families come to the Civic Center with urns full of cremains. They've dug up the urns from burial plots, and some still have mud on the outside.

Speaker 2 They've taken urns from mausoleums and from prominent places in their homes, and they turn the urns over to Greg Raimi and his colleagues to see if they're human.

Speaker 14 At night, after it got dark, we'd sit down with all the cremains that family members might have brought in that was supposed to be their loved one

Speaker 14 and go through those to make sure that they were real cremains.

Speaker 2 They cover a table with a white paper sheet and then pour out the cremains or whatever they are.

Speaker 14 We would look sometimes 20 or 30 sets of human cremains an evening after all day of working.

Speaker 14 And it wasn't just,

Speaker 14 okay, here we go. I mean, it wasn't that quick.
I mean, it was an examination. It was an investigation into them, looking at them and stuff.

Speaker 2 At the time, in 2002, it's nearly impossible to get reliably testable DNA out of cremaines. Technology doesn't allow it.

Speaker 2 So Greg and his colleagues, not all true forensic experts, just rely on what they've recently learned about human cremains.

Speaker 2 It's frankly a pretty unscientific process compared to what you'd expect from watching CSI.

Speaker 14 I was dirt dumb when it came to...

Speaker 14 crematory stuff, my figures, wood ash.

Speaker 14 I'd never seen a human body burn, so so I had no idea, but I learned a lot. When you pour out a real set of human cremains, there's no dust.

Speaker 14 When you pour it out, it doesn't go poo and little dusty particles don't float through the air. It is, it's the bone that literally has been burned.
You can see the bone marrow.

Speaker 14 You can see the outside edge of the bone, all that.

Speaker 14 So there's no dust, so to speak.

Speaker 2 Sometimes they pour out cremaines and Greg is able to tell a family, you're good. You've got your relative in there.
Even though he can't know for certain. Because how could he without a DNA test?

Speaker 2 But if the cremains appear human, they reassure the family that what they've got is their person.

Speaker 2 There are also times when Greg and the investigators carefully pour cremains onto the table, and everything looks good at first.

Speaker 14 But then you start going through there and you find in teeth, you know, little enamelized teeth, you know, and you're going,

Speaker 14 Okay, this person had dentures.

Speaker 14 It ain't them.

Speaker 15 You know.

Speaker 2 So Greg has to inform those people that they've gotten urn that probably contains someone else's ashes, or co-mingled ashes. It's a nightmare.

Speaker 2 Every body they find on the property goes to a portable morgue set up by DMort with a series of identification stations separated by curtains.

Speaker 2 These temporary morgues can process up to 140 bodies in a day. The remains are stored in a giant refrigeration unit until they're ready to be examined.

Speaker 2 When they are, first they're cleaned and decontaminated with a chlorine solution. Then each body is assigned a number.

Speaker 2 Depending on what's needed, the body might then go through stations for pathology, radiology, fingerprints, odontology, where the teeth are examined, and maybe DNA testing.

Speaker 14 They would sequence the body to lay it out. You know, skull, sternum, scapula, shoulder, arms.

Speaker 14 hands as much as we could recover, the pelvic girdle, spinal column, and they'd lay it out all the way up to the cervical bone. I mean, take pictures of it.

Speaker 14 If there was an armband or something, they'd note that, you know, okay, the armband, it's got last name Neil handwritten, you know, kind of like that.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of data coming in between the reports from the forensic anthropologists and medical examiners and the information being gathered from funeral homes, families, and hospitals.

Speaker 2 It all goes into a database and they use that to find matches.

Speaker 2 When Greg approves a match, someone calls up the family and delivers the good news. Then they release the remains back to them.

Speaker 2 One of the first bodies found on the Marsh property is a man who died all the way back in 1990, almost immediately giving investigators the idea that this could go back more than a decade.

Speaker 2 A couple days after the first discovery, the state medical examiner says that some of the bodies could have been a tri-state for more than 20 years.

Speaker 2 Since Brent was only eight years old then, The statement at the very least implies that Ray Marsh must be guilty as well.

Speaker 2 And if you follow the online forums and the chatter around town, it's clear that a lot lot of people think just that.

Speaker 2 But as the investigators make more and more positive IDs, as 10 identifications become 50 and then 100, Greg begins to establish a pretty clear time window.

Speaker 14 We had some

Speaker 14 bodies that were found that were from 97.

Speaker 14 And we only ended up, I think we ended up with

Speaker 14 maybe a total of six or seven from 1997.

Speaker 14 And then in 98, the number kind of jumped up to 20-ish or so.

Speaker 14 But then you hit ninety nine, and boy, the numbers really jumped forward.

Speaker 2 Except for the 1990 body, all the others they ID are from 1997 or later, with the vast majority from 2000 and 2001. Brent took over the business from his father in 1996.

Speaker 2 So all the bodies are from the Brent years.

Speaker 2 And like Gregg says, the numbers show a clear, increasing pattern each year. As if Brent first tested the waters in 97, and when nobody said anything, he got a little more cavalier.

Speaker 2 And the bodies kept piling up right until the end, with the last one coming in just two days before the police showed up at the Marsh house.

Speaker 2 As for that 1990 body, it turns out that the man did die all the way back then in Georgia. But seven years later, his wife decided to exhume him and have him shipped to New Mexico, where she'd moved.

Speaker 2 The easiest way to do that was to have the body cremated first. So in the end, it seems clear that Ray Marsh, Brent's father, was not running Tri-State Crematory during the bad years.

Speaker 2 Everybody they ID is from the Brent period.

Speaker 2 Once they've narrowed the window to Brent's time only, they stop analyzing DNA samples from the families of people who were sent to Tri-State in the 80s or early 90s.

Speaker 2 It's a way to reduce their workload and save money.

Speaker 2 Terry Crawford, the nurse working out of the Ag building, is given the message.

Speaker 2 But every day, she gets calls from families who want to give their DNA, who want 100% certainty that their relative isn't one of those bodies still unidentified.

Speaker 2 Terry doesn't want to tell them, No, sorry, your body is too early, so she ignores the orders from her boss.

Speaker 11 My mind was blown. It's like that is my sole purpose for being here.

Speaker 11 And he was telling me that I was being overzealous in collecting DNA to get matches.

Speaker 11 And so

Speaker 11 he told me if I didn't stop, that he would have me removed.

Speaker 2 Terry has a few reasons to believe that those in charge of the recovery process are wrong.

Speaker 2 Or worse, that they're lying to her and everyone else about the final count of bodies and the time period when the bodies started accumulating at tri-state.

Speaker 2 First is the admittedly strange timing of what turns out to be the final body count.

Speaker 2 On February 26th, the number reaches 339 bodies. That same day, the chief medical examiner tells reporters, quote, We have a lot of ground we still have to excavate.

Speaker 2 We have no idea how many bodies are buried, how far back this goes, end quote.

Speaker 2 A Walker County official also says the same day that they found a number of burial pits that are deeper than any they've found before.

Speaker 2 And also that same day, Georgia's governor Roy Barnes receives a letter from the director of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Speaker 2 from whom the governor has requested millions of dollars in aid to fund all the tri-state work. The letter is very clear.
FEMA rejects the request for federal funding.

Speaker 2 And then that number,

Speaker 2 339, never budges. It becomes the final number, the one that news reports and anyone who mentions the case today still uses.

Speaker 2 Terry believes the rejection of federal funding stopped the recovery effort in its tracks, and that had it continued, they would have found more bodies, maybe older bodies.

Speaker 11 When they did not receive a federal declaration, then the state was now responsible for the funds associated with recovering bodies.

Speaker 11 And so

Speaker 11 they

Speaker 11 wanted it stopped. They didn't continue to search because there were more pits with more bodies in it.
So

Speaker 11 it was

Speaker 11 halted. It was absolutely halted at that point.
And it was just, it was heartbreaking. So

Speaker 11 I knew what was going on,

Speaker 11 but you know, everybody just seemed to go along with it. It's like, oh, oh well, we don't have money, so let's pack up.

Speaker 2 Terry also has a personal reason to want the effort continued. Her brother Bobby has not been found yet.
And after the final count has been tallied, she's told that Bobby is not among them.

Speaker 2 She's also told that a sample of Bobby's cremains are human and therefore assumed to be him.

Speaker 2 But when Terry asks for a second opinion from two other forensic experts, she says she's told the cremains are adulterated, that at least some part of them is not human, more likely cement or some other material.

Speaker 2 So the differing opinions leave Terry confused, to say the least. She does everything she can to find his body, to convince her bosses to keep searching for him, but she never finds Bobby.

Speaker 2 Eventually, Terry quits.

Speaker 2 She holds a press conference announcing her belief that the recovery effort has ended prematurely, that there are still bodies to be found and identified and returned to families, like her brothers.

Speaker 2 She even writes a book about it.

Speaker 11 It makes me feel really sad because I think he could be identified or he could have been identified or they could have let me know what happened to him. I think there was a cover-up.

Speaker 2 Former GBI agent Greg Raimi denies Terry's claims of a cover-up. He's confident that they found every single body on the Marsh property.

Speaker 2 He's also confident about the time window window he and the other investigators established for when the bodies sent to Tri-State were not cremated, and the fact that Ray Marsh did his job burning bodies, while Brent did not.

Speaker 2 No cover-up has ever been proven. But I don't think Terry should be ignored or written off.

Speaker 2 Whether she is right or wrong about Bobby's cremains, not only did she spend many long days helping victims of Tri-State while working for Jima, helping them get their relatives returned, She also in some ways represents the many families who don't have certainty, who don't have a final definitive answer about their body, who still to this day do not know whose ashes they have.

Speaker 2 When Terry quits Jima and leaves the tri-state work behind her, she leaves with another big question.

Speaker 2 She wants to know why Brent Marsh didn't burn so many of the bodies he was responsible for.

Speaker 2 I think the main reason I wanted to look into this story, to do this podcast in the first place, is because I share Terry's curiosity. I also wanted to know why someone would do this.

Speaker 2 What specific kind of circumstances could drive someone who otherwise seems perfectly normal to do a thing like this.

Speaker 2 It just didn't seem possible to me.

Speaker 2 It's time now for me to really turn towards hunting down an answer to that question and to another related question.

Speaker 2 Even if Ray Marsh, the father, was a perfectly responsible cremationist during his day, what about the rest of the family? Some of them lived on the property.

Speaker 2 How could they not know what was happening?

Speaker 2 To answer that, I'll have to go back in time and visit Noble.

Speaker 16 We're coming up on the Marsh property now, which I'll show you.

Speaker 16 From here on, all this property on both sides of the road is Marsh property.

Speaker 16 That's where the crematorium was.

Speaker 2 Down this road?

Speaker 16 Yes, right just down this driveway.

Speaker 2 That's on the next episode of Noble.

Speaker 2 Noble is a production of Waveland and Campside Media. Noble was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me, Sean Raviv.
Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer.

Speaker 2 Sierra Franco is our associate producer. Editing by Jason Hoke, Johnny Kaufman, and Matt Scher.

Speaker 2 Fact-checking by Kaylin Lynch. Sound design, mixing, scoring, and original music by Garrett Tiedemann.
Our theme music is La Lucha Esuna Sola by the band Esmerine.

Speaker 2 Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slavin, David Eichler, Ashley Warren, Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Mara.

Speaker 2 Jason Hoke is the executive producer at Waveland. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

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