The Furnace | Chapter 4

Speaker 3 We all take good care of the things that matter: our homes, our pets, our cars.

Speaker 4 Are you doing the same for your brain? Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 7 Studies have found that up to 45% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed by managing risk factors you can change.

Speaker 9 Make brain health a priority.

Speaker 10 Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment.

Speaker 11 Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com.

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Speaker 13 Hi everyone, I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia Diambra.

Speaker 15 And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.

Speaker 20 From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets.

Speaker 13 Listen to Park Predators Now wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 22 This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care.

Speaker 22 Campsite Media

Speaker 22 McCracken Poston, maybe the best lawyer in Northwest Georgia, grew up in the 1960s in the tiny town of Graysville with a cemetery next to his house.

Speaker 22 There were graves there for Confederate soldiers and for old friends of McCracken's family.

Speaker 12 It was our playground when we were kids. We would lay down on the graves and when Halloween kids would come by, we would jump up from the graves.
We were never afraid of the place.

Speaker 12 And one tombstone was shaped like a lectern.

Speaker 12 So we would play, you know, politician or preacher there and have everybody else sit out and listen to the preaching.

Speaker 22 One day when he was five years old, McCracken went missing. The whole family was searching for him and they found him at the cemetery attending a funeral.
He dressed himself up and everything.

Speaker 22 For the better part of a decade, he'd attend every funeral, whether he knew the person or not.

Speaker 12 And Graceville, you have to understand,

Speaker 12 there was not a lot going on.

Speaker 12 An event like a funeral, that was big in the town. That and the Easter Sunrise Service.

Speaker 12 And my job became,

Speaker 12 after an embarrassing incident when one of the neighborhood dogs was in heat, my job became to put up all the dogs before the Easter Sunrise service.

Speaker 12 And then that extended to put up all the dogs before the funerals because you didn't want a bunch of dogs lining up and making out while you're trying to eulogize somebody.

Speaker 22 Graysville was in the segregated south, sitting just below the Tennessee border. It was a small and isolated place.

Speaker 22 A place where if you never leave, you might have a distorted view of what the world is like. Maybe 90% of the families in the county were white.

Speaker 22 In McCracken's early days in school, the N-word was tossed around pretty liberally, but it wasn't allowed in his house. His grandmother was a big influence on the family.

Speaker 22 She didn't have much formal education, but she was a thinker, and her thinking led her to believe that all were equal in the eyes of God.

Speaker 22 And so so did McCracken.

Speaker 22 Manners were important too. And McCracken's mother would have him take trays of ice water to the people working in the cemetery.
And that's how he met the gravedigger.

Speaker 12 In those days, a lot of the graves were hand-dug.

Speaker 12 It's an old, old cemetery. I got to know a black man

Speaker 12 who dug graves. He would hand dig what seemed like a perfectly square six-foot-deep rectangle.

Speaker 22 The gravedigger was slim and light-skinned. Usually wore coveralls.
McCracken would stand around and watch him dig, completely enthralled.

Speaker 12 And it would be especially exciting if he hit a lot of rock because he brought some dynamite with him.

Speaker 12 And that was, you know,

Speaker 12 he didn't say, get out of here, kid. He just let me watch the process.
And then, of course, he'd make sure I was safely away and he'd blast the thing. And

Speaker 12 it was exciting.

Speaker 22 When he was around 10 years old, McCracken was watching the man close up a grave. The funeral home had already packed their tents up and left.
But they'd forgotten a wooden folding chair.

Speaker 22 And McCracken pointed it out. The gravedigger gave McCracken the chair and said, why do you hang on to it, kid? And McCracken kept the chair as he grew up.

Speaker 22 He kept the chair when, as a teenager, he started volunteering in Democratic politics.

Speaker 22 Statewide campaigns often didn't have anyone living in Northwest Georgia, so McCracken could step in and be their guy there.

Speaker 22 The general store in Graysville, where McCracken caught the bus to school, was run by two brothers, Pete and Bud Brown. McCracken treated the place like it was the front steps of the White House.

Speaker 12 Wooden floor, screen door.

Speaker 12 I used them as a prop, and

Speaker 12 I really started realizing this is kind of a rare thing. This is Americana.
This is what reminds everybody of 40, 50 years ago.

Speaker 12 So with the Brown brothers' permission, I started bringing candidates by.

Speaker 22 He worked on a lot of campaigns, even Jimmy Carter's presidential run in 1976.

Speaker 22 McCracken kept the gravedigger's chair through college and grad school. By the time he got his law degree, he decided he was good enough at politics to run for himself.

Speaker 22 So in 1988, McCracken got on the front steps of Pete and Budd's store and announced his candidacy for the Georgia House of Representatives.

Speaker 22 At only 28 years old, McCracken Poston became one of the youngest legislators in the history of Georgia. And after eight years at the State House, McCracken made bigger plans.

Speaker 12 I ran for Congress in 1996 and

Speaker 12 was whipped pretty badly and soundly in that race. This whole region

Speaker 12 turned red that election. I was the first Democrat to lose that congressional seat since the Civil War.

Speaker 22 He was also the last Democrat to win even 30% of the vote in his district. These days, Northwest Georgia is represented in Congress by Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Speaker 22 After he lost the election, McCracken focused on his law practice. He made a name for himself defending Alvin Ridley, the Zenith Man, a local television repairman and town weirdo.

Speaker 22 The police and national tabloids accused Ridley of holding his wife captive for decades and then murdering her.

Speaker 22 On the eve of the trial, McCracken discovered that the man's wife had a condition called hypergraphia that led her to keep meticulous diaries.

Speaker 22 He found 10,000 pages of her writings in Alvin Ridley's house. describing a happy, if strange, life with her husband.
And McCracken used those diaries to exonerate his client.

Speaker 22 He wrote a book about the Alvin Ridley case. It's called Zenith Man, Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom.

Speaker 22 The case gave McCracken a ton of press and boosted his reputation as someone who was willing to take on unusual clients.

Speaker 22 And so, a couple years after the Zenith Man case, in February of 2002, it makes sense that McCracken gets a call from a friend of the Marsh family.

Speaker 22 asking him to represent Brent in the Tri-State crematory case. McCracken has heard about Tri-State on the news by then.
He knows that if he takes the case, people will be pissed.

Speaker 22 But then he remembers the chair, and the nice man who let him watch as he dug perfectly rectangled graves by hand and as he blew up rocks with dynamite.

Speaker 22 He remembers the name of the gravedigger, Ray Marsh, Brent's father. So McCracken takes the case.
And he's a good fit.

Speaker 22 Because a lot of people think that what happened at Tri-State Crematory is so evil, so reprehensible, that Brent doesn't even deserve a lawyer.

Speaker 22 But McCracken sees holes in the case and in people's impression of his client.

Speaker 22 And it's not long before he publicly challenges deeply held traditions about death and how we treat the dead

Speaker 22 by raising a controversial question:

Speaker 22 Is what happened at Tri-State Crematory really as bad as it seems?

Speaker 22 From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble.

Speaker 22 I'm Sean Ravive.

Speaker 22 Episode 4,

Speaker 22 The Furnace.

Speaker 22 When McCracken Poston, attorney at law, takes on Brett Marsh as a client, it's not some carefree decision.

Speaker 22 It's just a few days after the discovery, and hundreds of families whose loved ones' bodies were sent to the crematory are furious. And McCracken knows that.

Speaker 22 He sees them on TV very clearly describing their feelings.

Speaker 12 I think someone definitely dropped the ball, and I am so angry about it all. I don't know what to do.
A callous disregard

Speaker 12 and disrespect

Speaker 22 to families' loved ones.

Speaker 12 The people that are running this thing are animals. They need to just do whatever the worst is to do to this man.
He knew what he was doing. It was wrong.

Speaker 22 I've spent a lot of time speaking with the families, the victims of tri-state crematory, like Sheila Manus, who helped lead the angry online forums and loved her husband so much she would unwrap dozens of Hershey kisses for him to take on hunting trips.

Speaker 22 But I still find it difficult to channel that grief and anger today,

Speaker 22 to present in full now exactly how people felt then.

Speaker 22 Maybe the best way to try to comprehend the anger of all these families is to imagine it was you.

Speaker 22 Imagine a person you love. Maybe it's your mother, your father, your sibling, your partner, someone who raised you, or was raised with you, who formed you, knew you better than you knew yourself.

Speaker 22 Imagine a person who is so important in your life that it feels like they're a physical part of you.

Speaker 22 Now imagine that person dies. and you never get to see them again.

Speaker 22 Never get to share those jokes and memories again. Never get to laugh and cry with them again.

Speaker 22 And then imagine that weeks or months later, when you're still processing this horrible permanent death, that you find out that the business you paid a lot of money to peacefully transition your one-of-a-kind person from Earth to whatever comes next, that you paid to cremate them, has instead taken their body and let them rot on their property, to be infested by insects and eaten by scavengers, left their body in a pile of trash, or buried them in a shallow grave.

Speaker 22 How would you feel about the person or the the people who did it and about anyone who takes their side?

Speaker 22 The anger becomes very visible in Walker County once bond hearings begin for Brent. Armed guards are stationed on rooftops near the courtroom for his perp walks.
Brent is put in a bulletproof vest.

Speaker 22 On one walk, someone spits at him and a woman tosses an urn at him and the ashes hit two of the reporters swarming Brent.

Speaker 22 On another occasion, When Brent is being escorted to a patrol car, deputies have to restrain a woman screaming bloody murder at him.

Speaker 22 On the news before a court hearing, he's seen holding a piece of paper in his cuffed hands. Here's McCracken.

Speaker 12 Unbeknownst to each other,

Speaker 12 both Brent and I wrote letters to our wives that we had on us.

Speaker 12 And I think I just told her this is an important part of being American, is

Speaker 12 making sure that the Constitution applies to all Americans. And, you know, if this is something that takes me out, I'm very sorry.
You know, I'm very, very sorry.

Speaker 22 The anger mostly stays out of the courtroom, although there is one attempt by the daughter of someone sent to tri-state to bring it inside.

Speaker 12 She was caught trying to smuggle a sword into the courtroom, disguised in a cane,

Speaker 12 because nobody knew her to ever use a cane, and she's not that old a woman. And suddenly she's walking with a cane, and one of the officers says, let me look at that.

Speaker 12 He pulls out a long sword out of it. So I may have been the first lawyer since the 1700s to get run through.

Speaker 22 Because of incidents like this, the sheriff argues that Brent will be safer if he stays in jail. And a judge agrees.
So that's where Brent stays for now.

Speaker 22 McCracken is a confident guy and a good lawyer, but he begins to worry that Brent might spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Speaker 12 The way they charged him, the potential sentencing was over 8,000 years.

Speaker 12 Now, my reaction was

Speaker 12 four times the time since Jesus walked the earth is excessive.

Speaker 12 And that's what you say in the Bible Belt to get people's attention because they're thinking, you know, he may be right.

Speaker 12 We should have just charged him with one times the time since Jesus walked the earth. I mean, what's the difference? You get a past 100 years.
There is no difference.

Speaker 12 You know,

Speaker 12 it's crazy.

Speaker 22 McCracken is also worried about the fate of Brent's family, especially his parents, Ray and Clara. Before the discovery of bodies, they're well respected in the community.
Now they're an easy target.

Speaker 22 Clara's position as a drug-free schools resource teacher is eliminated.

Speaker 22 An advisory committee she's on threatens to kick her off, and her bank closes her account and sends her a check, saying they no longer want her business.

Speaker 22 Ray started the crematory and ran it for nearly 15 years before Brent took over. Clara and Ray lived a stone's throw away from the bodies that piled up.

Speaker 22 To many, including the authorities, they don't seem innocent.

Speaker 22 As McCracken expects, the anger quickly spreads to him too. The woman who he pays to clean his home hears about his new client.
She calls the house and yells at him.

Speaker 12 And she said, I told everybody you wouldn't represent that.

Speaker 12 And I said, well, I don't think we can work together anymore.

Speaker 12 And she agreed and hung up.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 so I thought, this is interesting.

Speaker 12 This is a guy who, without a doubt, needs a lawyer.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 there was a huge potential for injustice in this thing.

Speaker 22 Taking on the case of a a guy who everyone hates actually appeals to McCracken. He's still steaming from losing his house race so handily a few years earlier.

Speaker 22 And he's at a point in his life where he kind of wants to stick his middle finger up at the people of Georgia's 9th congressional district.

Speaker 12 I was still kind of pissed off at the world, to tell you the truth, from, you know, the total rejection of me by the voters.

Speaker 12 And I felt this during the Alvin Ridley case. So what if he's the boogeyman in town that you use to scare your children into behaving? You know, I'm going to represent him, you know, and

Speaker 12 I actually remember thinking that, you know, that I'll help him and that'll show them not to jump to conclusions.

Speaker 22 If it's unpopularity McCracken wants, he's going to get it. In defending Brent Marsh, it will become his job to put it crudely.

Speaker 22 to diminish the worth of dead bodies, of our earthen vessels, to argue that the families are overreacting, that they're being a bit dramatic.

Speaker 22 He'll have to somehow argue that what Brent Marsh did to hundreds of bodies was not as bad as it looks.

Speaker 22 And in order to do so, he'll have to get granular about what exactly Brent Marsh was paid to do, what exactly it means to cremate a body.

Speaker 22 He'll have to get people asking: Is cremation an immaculate process performed by reverential purists on hallowed ground?

Speaker 22 Or is it just another job?

Speaker 1 We all take good care of the things that matter.

Speaker 3 Our homes, our pets, our cars.

Speaker 4 Are you doing the same for your brain? Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 7 Studies have found that up to 45% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed by managing risk factors you can change.

Speaker 9 Make brain health a priority.

Speaker 10 Ask your doctor about your risk factors factors and for a cognitive assessment.

Speaker 11 Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com.

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Speaker 22 During one of my many conversations with McCracken Poston, he told me that one thing he's learned in his decades working as a defense lawyer is that a good client is one who keeps their fucking mouth shut.

Speaker 22 That's what he told Brent Marsh. And that's what Brent has done ever since, with just a few exceptions.

Speaker 22 On the day the bodies were first discovered, February 15, 2002, Brent didn't have a lawyer yet, and he spoke to investigators on the scene about his crematory furnace.

Speaker 22 He told them he'd been having trouble with it for months.

Speaker 22 And as proof, police did find some bodies that were partially burned, as if Brent tried to cremate them, but the fire went out halfway through.

Speaker 22 To try to figure out the state of the furnace, the police and lawyers bring in experts to inspect it. One of the experts is a man named Chuck Crawford.

Speaker 22 Chuck runs a funeral home in Nashville with his wife, and they have their own crematory. They opened it in 1998, back when cremation wasn't even half as common as it is now.

Speaker 22 According to Chuck at least, funeral directors, as a very general rule, they prefer burial to cremation because you make more money embalming bodies and selling caskets than you do handing over ashes.

Speaker 12 When I first put the machine in, I literally got phone calls from some of my friends in the industry. And I was asked the same question every time.
Why are you promoting cremation?

Speaker 12 And I said, you know, it's not a matter of promoting anything. It's a matter of seeing what's coming.

Speaker 22 Chuck was right that cremation was coming. In 1973, cremation rates hit 5% for the first time in the U.S.

Speaker 22 By 1998, it was closer to 25%.

Speaker 22 And it's gone up about a percent each year since, to the point where it's more common now than burial.

Speaker 22 But back in 2002, it's far less common in the South. And so when the lawyers and investigators are looking for an expert nearby who doesn't have a connection to tri-state, they have limited options.

Speaker 22 Chuck's not too far away in Nashville. And when he gets a call and the lawyer on the other end is like, hey, we need you to come down and inspect this crematory for us.
He says, sure thing.

Speaker 12 And one of the things that struck me was driving out there, the pine trees are amazing, you know. And it's really pretty, but it was isolated.

Speaker 12 The grounds themselves, there was an old hearse parked in a building. Their residence was there.
It was a nice house and big lake and all these things.

Speaker 12 It was just an interesting property because when you think about, about contrast that with funeral homes.

Speaker 12 These big Victorian homes with white columns and big hearses outside and antique furniture and you drive down to this place it just seemed like a stark contrast to what the funeral industry portrays itself to be.

Speaker 12 I mean you think about any funeral home you can think of. The grass is manicured, the sign is perfect, everything is great.

Speaker 12 If you see a funeral home with a broken shutter and the car's got a flat tire, isn't it going to give you an indication something's wrong over here?

Speaker 22 Chuck's point is about how funeral homes tend to present themselves.

Speaker 22 As dignified places for the dead to spend their final moments above ground, as places and people who care deeply about your loved one and treat them as a member of their own family.

Speaker 22 They seem to grieve with you.

Speaker 22 But what about the funeral homes and funeral directors that work with Tri-State?

Speaker 22 They sent their clients' bodies to Noble for a nice profit. a really nice profit.

Speaker 22 Brent Marsh was charging just $200 to $300 to drive from Noble, pick up a body, drive it back, burn it, or so he said, and then return the ashes to the funeral home.

Speaker 22 He did all the work, or again he said he did, and some of the funeral homes would turn around and charge $1,000,

Speaker 22 sometimes more, for the cremation that they didn't even perform, that it turned out nobody performed in a lot of cases.

Speaker 22 All that, and few of the funeral home directors admit to ever visiting Tri-State Crematory, at least in recent years before Brent is caught.

Speaker 22 If they did visit, and saw bodies lying around in piles of junk, would they still have used the place?

Speaker 22 In my opinion, it was their duty, if not the law, to inspect the place they were sending bodies. But they didn't.

Speaker 22 As Chuck looks around the Marsh family's property, assessing things and taking it all in, he spends a moment enjoying the breeze.

Speaker 12 I remember standing there and listening to the wind through the trees and thinking about the people that had been in that field. You know, that's where they were left.

Speaker 12 It was a contrast how peaceful and serene it could be if you thought about the carnage that had happened there, right?

Speaker 22 You considered the sort of displacement of dead bodies against the wishes of the family to be carnage?

Speaker 12 Yeah,

Speaker 12 when you do this for a living, you realize that

Speaker 12 you put somebody in the ground that's permanent. This is the final chapter of their life.

Speaker 12 And without getting carried away, you realize how important it is.

Speaker 22 Chuck walks up to the crematory building. It's brown, not too big.
On the outside, it looks kind of like a cabin. He goes inside.

Speaker 22 There's an office, a small ante-room, and the room that holds the furnace, which is also called a retort in the industry.

Speaker 22 When police first searched the building, they found one body in the furnace itself, and six more on the floor. But by the time Chuck gets there, all of the bodies have long been cleared out.

Speaker 22 Chuck goes straight to to the furnace room. The retort is called a power pack and it's made by a company with the mundane name Industrial Equipment and Engineering.

Speaker 22 It was purchased in 1982 by Brent's father. The power pack is about six feet wide and eight feet tall.

Speaker 22 It's got what looks like a freezer door at waist level and a retro-looking control panel to the right of the door. The front of the machine is lined with 70s style wood paneling.

Speaker 22 Behind the stainless steel door is a coffin-shaped chamber lined with fire bricks, which are made to withstand high temperatures.

Speaker 22 Sticking out on top of the furnace and through the roof is a metal smokestack with a rain collar. When you're running the power pack by the book, this is how it goes.

Speaker 22 You put the body in through the freezer-like loading door, feet first, using cardboard rollers. You close the door and lock it.
Turn on the power.

Speaker 22 30 minutes later, after some preheating, the ignition burner lights to heat the main chamber to 1650 degrees. Two and a half hours later, the burner turns off, and the cremation is done.

Speaker 22 So three hours total from start to finish, give or take.

Speaker 22 When you open up the door after, all that remains of the corpse is brittle bone.

Speaker 22 That's if you're doing it right.

Speaker 12 But there's a lot that can go wrong.

Speaker 12 The big fear of the crematory is burning one out. And if you get a body burning too fast, that steel will melt eventually.

Speaker 12 If the brick is damaged and the heat can get through to the steel, it could melt it.

Speaker 12 And then you've got an introduction of all kinds of air coming in there, and it's like opening the window in a house fire.

Speaker 22 The tri-state furnace hasn't been used for a while by the time Chuck inspects it. But he sees some troubling signs there.
It doesn't appear to have been maintained properly.

Speaker 22 It's common for fire bricks to crack because of the repeated and intense changes in temperature after so many cremations. But the tri-state furnace bricks have more than cracks.

Speaker 22 Some of the bricks are broken. The floor has gaping holes.
The fan blades are dirty. The smokestack has rust holes as well.
It might be dangerous to even turn it on.

Speaker 22 After the retort has done its job, reducing the body to just bone, the remains are pulled out of the furnace and sorted.

Speaker 22 The bones are put into what's called a pulverizer machine, or a processor, which looks like someone combined a stock pot with a blender.

Speaker 22 It's got large blades at the bottom and can grind the bones down to what we think of as ashes in just 30 seconds. But Chuck doesn't find a pulverizer anywhere.

Speaker 22 or at least not the kind you'd find in his crematory.

Speaker 22 He does find something else.

Speaker 22 He finds a wood chipper.

Speaker 2 We all take good care of the things that matter.

Speaker 3 Our homes, our pets, our cars.

Speaker 4 Are you doing the same for your brain? Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

Speaker 7 Studies have found that up to 45% of dementia cases may may be prevented or delayed by managing risk factors you can change.

Speaker 9 Make brain health a priority.

Speaker 10 Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment.

Speaker 11 Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com.

Speaker 13 Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia Diambra.

Speaker 15 And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.

Speaker 20 From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets.

Speaker 13 Listen to Park Predators Now wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 12 I found a wood chipper that had bone fragments in it, what seemed to be bone fragments. And I mentioned to one of the attorneys that I think he was using this as a processor.

Speaker 22 Chuck Crawford worked for a tree company when he was young. So he spent a lot of time around wood chippers.

Speaker 22 This one at Tri-State Crematory is small, the size of a lawnmower.

Speaker 22 There's a square intake chute, which then narrows like a gramophone, so whatever is dropped into it goes straight to the spinning blades.

Speaker 22 From what Chuck can tell, on the output end, it's connected to a sort of stovepipe on the roof of the building. He examines the wood chipper closer, because he sees a familiar coating within it.

Speaker 22 It seems that Brent, or someone, has turned the wood chipper into an ad hoc bone pulverizer.

Speaker 12 I can just tell

Speaker 12 without even having to touch it, just from what I've seen in my own machine, that that was probably bone dust. It will stick and continue to pile up.

Speaker 12 It's like snow, you know, when you have snow and it's drifting, you know.

Speaker 22 It's kind of weird that Chuck has experience with both pulverizers and wood chippers, but it gives him a unique perspective on all this.

Speaker 12 I thought, hey, this would work. Would this reduce the bone fragments into the powder that you need? Yeah, but is it right? No.

Speaker 12 Right?

Speaker 22 What's wrong about it?

Speaker 12 Number one, the machinery that we use is

Speaker 12 made just for that specific purpose. We have ventilation to protect the employees.
We have the ability to recover all the bone fragments that we can. That was shooting them out of stack, right?

Speaker 12 The dust was going out the stack.

Speaker 12 And what we're charged with by law is to recover all of the human remains that is practicable, right? Which is an interesting word.

Speaker 12 And when you think about we're, in our case we're vacuuming brick how much dust can you get out of brick and one of the questions I got asked was don't you think there's going to be commingling absolutely the process is inherent with commingling there's going to be some remnants of the prior case you can't possibly get it all out Chuck shocks me when he says this I visited his crematory in Nashville It's impeccable.

Speaker 22 Looks clean like a hospital. His furnace is inspected every year.
He's careful about replacing bricks when they need replacing, about maintenance and sanitation.

Speaker 22 He vacuums out the furnace after every cremation. But even Chuck doesn't get 100% of your ashes in the urn.

Speaker 22 And it's not because he made a mistake, or because he doesn't care about you or your loved one. It's because cremation isn't perfect.
You just can't get every single remnant into the urn.

Speaker 22 There's always going to be some lost in between the cracks. And chances are that some tiny amount of the previous cremation will end up in your urn.
Comingling of ashes, as he calls it.

Speaker 22 The same exact word that investigators use when they talk about bodies that are found commingled on the marsh property. Comingling is a part of the cremation process that nobody talks about.

Speaker 22 It's not something that the funeral industry would want to explain to customers. Because we want to believe that this is a flawless, sacred process.

Speaker 22 But it's not.

Speaker 22 It never is.

Speaker 22 I asked Chuck if the retort, the furnace at Tri-State, is sort of like the the wood chipper. It isn't up to his standards, and it seems wrong.
But would it have worked?

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah. Yeah, it had all the fundamental qualities.
It was big enough. It was steel.
It had brick on the inside. It had the moving parts that you know it could have worked.

Speaker 12 But I had no ability to gauge how long it had been shut off or when the last time it was turned on. I have no idea.

Speaker 22 But your impression was it hadn't been used in a while.

Speaker 12 Correct.

Speaker 22 Do you recall on a scale of one to 10 how you would have rated the state state of this retort probably at least on the low end of three

Speaker 12 this is not to be completely inoperable there'd be big chunks of ceiling missing and everything else you know i would not run this machine but there's there's worse conditions you know machines that are broken are broken have you seen worse than this before no i haven't

Speaker 22 in the end chuck's inspection of the crematory doesn't lead to a lot of definitive answers a broken or substandard crematory furnace isn't an excuse for accepting bodies, not burning them, and then giving people fake cremains.

Speaker 22 Brent's defense won't be about practical things like was the furnace working.

Speaker 22 It'll be about subjective human things, emotional things, about what price you deserve to pay for messing with dead bodies, and really, for contaminating the memories of those who are still living.

Speaker 22 McCracken Posten has watched families yelling and screaming as Brent walked to and from the courthouse.

Speaker 22 He's watched elected officials, in his opinion, pretending to be sympathetic and concerned for the families. He's watched packs of cameras recording it all.

Speaker 22 And something begins to dawn on him.

Speaker 12 I had the creeping sensation that

Speaker 12 this is all theater. These people are

Speaker 22 only,

Speaker 12 you know, showing their emotions when the cameras show up.

Speaker 22 And McCracken licks his lips. Because if this is theater, few are better at it than him.
He's been doing theater theater since he was a teenager on the front steps of the general store in Graysville.

Speaker 22 If the politicians and the families and the prosecutor want theater, he'll give it to them.

Speaker 12 When you kind of set this tone of, you know, we are being so solemn and that

Speaker 12 lawyer's, you know, making us mad and those kind of things, I think you're just kind of setting yourself up for

Speaker 12 the short end of the stick as the theater plays out.

Speaker 22 Highlighting the drama can benefit Brent's case in very real ways.

Speaker 22 Walker County has already spent a lot of resources on the recovery of bodies at Tri-State, and McCracken knows that a trial will be expensive for the county.

Speaker 22 Even more so if McCracken can convince a judge the only way for the trial to be fair is if it's held in a different county.

Speaker 22 A surefire way for McCracken to do that is to show that he and Brent are in danger.

Speaker 22 So even though McCracken doesn't really feel like he's in danger, he scours the internet, and especially the forum moderated by the families, for threats. He finds them, but nothing too damning.

Speaker 22 He gets a few angry calls at his office, too, but they aren't menacing enough to sway a judge.

Speaker 22 Then one day, when McCracken is making an appearance in a local access channel, he remembers that the brother of the cameraman is the Imperial Wizard of the North Georgia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Speaker 12 The reason I know is every election I ever ran, they would call in and denounce me

Speaker 12 on the air, and I would smile and, you know, it was just kind of an understanding we had, you know,

Speaker 12 that I would be denounced. And then I would go on and win.
And it was just kind of a great understanding. I never felt threatened by them.

Speaker 22 McCracken tries to get the Imperial Wizard to call into the station and threaten him publicly to prove to the judge that Brent can't get a fair trial in Walker County.

Speaker 12 And so I kind of taunted the brother, saying,

Speaker 12 well, I don't guess the Klan is what it used to be.

Speaker 12 And he goes, What do you mean? I said, Man, I hadn't had the first threat. You know, they're just, they're just, they're just nothing anymore, are they?

Speaker 12 And I get a phone message at my office from the Imperial Wizard of the

Speaker 12 North Georgia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And

Speaker 12 he said, I, I, I'm sorry, I got cancer and I can't get involved in this.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 he later later died.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 I just thought, well, there you go. The closest thing I had to it was two little old ladies calling in and telling me I needed to die.

Speaker 12 I mean, it was just hardly, I was too embarrassed to lead with them because they just weren't that threatening.

Speaker 22 McCracken's KKK ploy fails, and he doesn't get his change of venue in the end.

Speaker 22 But he does manage to get a jury brought in from another county, and they'll have to be housed and fed for the duration, upping the cost of the trial.

Speaker 22 McCracken calls the county's attorney constantly to remind him how expensive this is going to be for them.

Speaker 22 Eventually, the attorney estimates that in order to finance the trial, property taxes in Walker County will have to go up 25%.

Speaker 22 And as if defending Brent Marsh and threatening to raise property taxes isn't enough to bring about the rage of his neighbors, McCracken also publicly makes the one argument that nobody wants to hear, even if it may be in the back of their their minds.

Speaker 12 One of the first things I said was, it's not like anybody died here.

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 there was just this

Speaker 12 universal kind of reaction to me saying that, where people were going, you just don't understand our culture and

Speaker 12 you're wrong.

Speaker 22 McCracken is pointing out one of the great ironies of this case. There's so much gore, so much rotting human flesh, skeletons, mass graves, hundreds of dead bodies, even a damn wood chipper.

Speaker 22 And at the center of it all, a mysterious man from Noble, who refuses to talk. It's impossible to see all this and not think about how much it resembles a horror movie.
But it's not a horror movie.

Speaker 22 Brent's not a serial killer. He didn't kill anybody.
Not a single one of those bodies is dead because of him.

Speaker 22 Saying all of this, though, it's not something that makes McCracken or the marshes any more popular.

Speaker 22 McCracken has to be very careful how he talks about these issues in public and when expressing his opinions about death.

Speaker 12 You know, this is the Bible Belt, and there's some deep

Speaker 12 feeling that

Speaker 12 bodies are going to pop up out of the ground in the final days.

Speaker 22 But, you know,

Speaker 12 in my family there's burials. I don't think of that as my parents in that grave.
I think they're not there. Their spirits are gone.
So it really doesn't matter.

Speaker 22 McCracken isn't saying Brent didn't cause anyone harm. He's just saying the criminal case should be treated less like the horror movie it resembles and more like the fraud case it is.

Speaker 22 But because it involves dead bodies, you can't just treat it like a bunch of stolen laptops.

Speaker 22 The investigators, in particular, have to treat the bodies with meticulous care. Because they were once people's relatives, yes, but also because many are yet to be identified at this point.

Speaker 22 And figuring out who exactly all these bodies are, or were, is a monumental task.

Speaker 22 After they get past the easy ones, the ones who are wearing a hospital band with their name written right on it, or the ones who were embalmed and looked not much different from the day they died, they have to deal with the bodies that are decayed, or mummified, or half-burnt.

Speaker 22 or commingled with other bodies.

Speaker 22 They can't afford to mess up the identifications, not only because they need to return remains to the right families so they can have some closure, but also because identifying the bodies can help explain what exactly happened at Tri-State Crematory and whether Brent was working alone.

Speaker 12 I think we ended up with

Speaker 12 maybe a total of six or seven from 1997.

Speaker 12 And then in 98, the number kind of jumped up to 20-ish or so.

Speaker 12 But then you hit 99, and boy, the numbers really jumped forward.

Speaker 22 That's on the next episode of Noble.

Speaker 22 Noble is the production of Waveland and Campside Media. Noble was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me, Sean Ravive.

Speaker 22 Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sierra Franco is our associate producer.
Editing by Jason Hoke, Johnny Kaufman, and Matt Scher.

Speaker 22 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 22 Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slavin, David Eichler, Ashley Warren, Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Mara.

Speaker 22 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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Speaker 9 Make brain health a priority.

Speaker 10 Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment.

Speaker 11 Learn more at brainhealthmatters.com.

Speaker 13 Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia Diambra.

Speaker 15 And every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.

Speaker 20 From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets.

Speaker 13 Listen to Park Predators Now, wherever you listen to podcasts.