The Vaults | Chapter 3

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Speaker 2 Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia Diambra.

Speaker 6 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 10 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 14 This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care.

Speaker 14 Sheila Manus came to know death at a young age. She was born in Murray County in northwest Georgia, and she was the youngest in her family.
So she was spoiled as a kid. But she had to grow up fast.

Speaker 15 My mother died when I was 15. She had a heart attack.
Three years later, my dad drowned. I was 18.

Speaker 15 The thing of it is, I'd been raised that, you know,

Speaker 15 you don't just lay in wall or you move on, pick up, make the best of it.

Speaker 14 Sheila and her brother got jobs and bought a house together. She was 17 when she had her first daughter.

Speaker 15 I was going to raise her. I didn't need a man.
That's the way I was raised, independent.

Speaker 14 Death shapes us all. It brings families together.
or rips them apart.

Speaker 14 Death can rob you of stability or grant you new freedom. For Sheila, the deaths of her parents intensified her independence, but also made it protective, loyal.

Speaker 14 In 1979, Sheila was working in hospice care while finishing her nursing degree. One of her patients set Sheila up with her son.

Speaker 15 Oh, she kept her. Oh, I've got this good-looking son.
You're just going to have me. He's coming in.
Well, he came to see her that day, and I thought, well, he's not bad.

Speaker 15 I need some work with these clothes. I can fix that, you know.

Speaker 14 His name was Ira, and he was an Army Ranger. He had brown hair and blue eyes and a slight hint of a mustache and Sheila thought he was cute.

Speaker 14 Just like Sheila, Ira had become fiercely independent after a tough childhood. But their mutual independence added up to good chemistry and good dates.

Speaker 14 Sheila and Ira got married six weeks after they met. Sheila was 19 and Ira was 22.

Speaker 14 They had two children and raised them together with Sheila's daughter in a house in Chatsworth.

Speaker 14 Ira got a good job at the Department of Transportation and Sheila was soon able to stay home like she wanted to.

Speaker 14 In his free time, Ira liked to deer hunt. He used a 30 ought six rifle and later a muzzle loader that Sheila got him.
She actually got him a kit and he had to put the muzzle loader together himself.

Speaker 14 He told Sheila he liked it better that way because he built it.

Speaker 14 Ira was a Hershey kiss nut. He would buy a huge bag of them to eat while he was sitting up in his tree stand, watching for deer.

Speaker 15 But he didn't want to make that rattling sound. So the night before, I would sit there and unwrap each of those individual Hershey kisses and put them in a Ziploc bag for him.

Speaker 15 That is the sweetest thing I've ever heard. Literally and figuratively.
Oh my gosh, that's so amazing. Yes.

Speaker 14 To Sheila, Ira was the kind of guy worth unwrapping Hershey kisses for.

Speaker 14 They were happy together. But sometimes life comes down to a coin flip.
And one day it became apparent that Ira lost the toss.

Speaker 14 He was out hunting and traipsing through the woods, stepping over fallen sticks, crossing creeks, and he noticed that he had trouble keeping his balance.

Speaker 14 A few years later, he started having involuntary trembles in his limbs. Then they graduated to more severe tremors and slurred speech.
In 1994, Ira was diagnosed with Huntington's disease.

Speaker 14 Huntington's is caused by a faulty gene. If a parent has it, there's a 50% chance their kid gets it.

Speaker 14 Before the disease takes your life, and it always does, it takes away your balance, your strength, your speech, until you're just in bed and need help with everything.

Speaker 14 It's a nightmare, for the patient, of course, but also for the people who love them. My own father had Parkinson's disease, which is similarly progressive and unstoppable.

Speaker 14 It killed my dad, but not before it nearly broke my mother.

Speaker 14 who had to take care of him as he forgot who she was, lost his ability to clean himself, and got violent violent with the people he loved most.

Speaker 14 Which is all to say that families that deal with physical and cognitive breakdowns are often in a battle against breaking down altogether, all while they're dealing with the question of why.

Speaker 14 Why did this happen to us?

Speaker 14 Ira was put in hospice care at home, so he could die as peacefully as possible. By then he was helpless to do almost anything at all.

Speaker 15 So we made it through the 4th of July, and then

Speaker 15 that was about it. He was in bed after that.

Speaker 15 And it got to where he couldn't swallow, you know, and things like that.

Speaker 15 But I took care of him.

Speaker 14 Ira told Sheila that when the time came, he wanted his body cremated and his ashes scattered. He said there were too many cemeteries on this earth, taking up too much room.

Speaker 14 He wanted to save space for the living. Sheila promised Ira that when he died, She would do everything he asked.

Speaker 14 One night, Sheila was in Ira's room, and he motioned for her to come over next to him.

Speaker 15 And I got over there, and I squatted down, was holding his hands, and I said, what? And it took me a minute. I couldn't figure out what he was saying.

Speaker 15 And his brother said, he's telling you he loves you. And I said, are you saying you love me? And he nodded his head yes.
I said, well, I love you too. And that was the last word Dara said to me.

Speaker 15 We were just standing there. And I have prayed if God never answers another prayer for me at all, if he would just let his heart give out.

Speaker 15 He took one big deep breath and then he sighed and it was just so peaceful and then he didn't, oh my god, I've killed him yet.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 that was it. It was so peaceful and we kept our vows to let this part.

Speaker 14 Ira died on August 9th, 2000. He was 43 years old.

Speaker 14 He'd arranged his own cremation and funeral in advance with the fanciest funeral home around.

Speaker 14 They didn't have their own crematory, so like a lot of funeral homes, they used a third party to do the cremations.

Speaker 14 Sheila's understanding was that they would take Ira's body to a crematory in Atlanta and then drive the ashes back up for the funeral.

Speaker 14 Ira had also picked out the music for his memorial service and wrote his own eulogy. The man had been well prepared to die.

Speaker 14 The funeral service was packed with friends, family, people from Ira's work. The funeral director gave Sheila a black plastic container a little smaller than a shoebox.

Speaker 14 Inside was a thick plastic bag holding what was left of Ira.

Speaker 14 Sheila and the family drove to the top of Fort Mountain, where Ira had killed his first deer, to spread his cremains.

Speaker 15 You can see all the mountains. There's this rock wall, and you can stand there and just look, and it was beautiful.

Speaker 15 And the wind was blowing, so it was just, you know, there was a breeze, and it just took him off over the overlook there, and it was just so nice.

Speaker 15 And I thought, okay, I have done everything he asked me to now. The end.
You know, I've lived up and done everything.

Speaker 14 Sheila was relieved after spreading Ira's ashes. She had fulfilled his final wishes in every way.
He told her to be strong for the kids. She stayed strong.

Speaker 14 He told her he wanted to be cremated and spread on the mountain. And she did that too.

Speaker 14 It wasn't the same as crossing off items on a grocery list, though. Each step along the way, the funeral, the eulogy, the cremation, the spreading of the ashes.
Each step helped her grieve.

Speaker 14 While fulfilling Ira's wishes, Sheila also jump-started her own healing.

Speaker 14 But soon, something would interrupt her healing, and the healing of hundreds of other families in northwest Georgia and southern Tennessee.

Speaker 14 A year and a half after Ira died, Sheila learned that Ira's body wasn't taken to a crematory down in Atlanta.

Speaker 14 He was taken to tri-state crematory.

Speaker 14 From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble. I'm Sean Ravif.

Speaker 14 Episode 3: The Vaults.

Speaker 14 In February of 2002, it's been a year and a half since Sheila Manus's husband, Ira, died of Huntington's disease. Sheila is still grieving.
Ira isn't in bed next to her when she goes to sleep.

Speaker 14 He isn't around to play with their grandchildren. There are no Hershey kisses to unwrap before Ira goes deer hunting.
But Sheila has found some peace, some sense of moving on from Ira's death.

Speaker 14 One evening, Sheila is home by herself. She's got the music turned up while she vacuums.
But she hears a knock on the door. It's her neighbor.

Speaker 15 You can tell they're all serious, and she said, have you been watching the news? And I'm like, no.

Speaker 15 She said, well, you might want to turn it down. So they turned my TV on for me.

Speaker 16 A disturbing story tonight from northern Georgia.

Speaker 17 Bones and skulls scattered across the property surrounding the tri-state crematorium.

Speaker 18 Searchers will now have to go over 16 acres of woods on the crematory's property.

Speaker 16 The bodies were dumped in woods and storage sets outside the crematory. Residents of the town of Noble are in shock tonight.

Speaker 18 The local coroner said, think of the worst horror movie you've ever seen. Imagine that, he said.
Ten times worse.

Speaker 14 At first, Sheila kind of shrugs it off. Ira's body was sent down to Atlanta to be cremated, not somewhere around here.

Speaker 14 The funeral home that arranged it never mentioned a place called Tri-State Crematory. But then she pulls out Ira's death certificate and sees that it does in fact say Tri-State Crematory.

Speaker 14 right there under place of disposition.

Speaker 14 Sheila isn't sure what to think. She got Ira's ashes from the funeral home.
She spread them at the top of that beautiful mountain where he shot his first deer.

Speaker 14 All the stuff with Ira's funeral and cremation, it's all done, right?

Speaker 14 Now she isn't so sure. So Sheila and her children decide to drive to Noble.

Speaker 14 After all, it's not far. Just a couple counties over.
When she gets there, police and the media are already there in force.

Speaker 15 I didn't really know what to expect this place to look like or anything, but they had the roads blocked off and all. What were you thinking you were going to do there?

Speaker 15 I thought they would have information, you know, tell us what to do.

Speaker 14 The church is filled with families who, like Sheila, want to know what's going on at Tri-State. What happened to their loved ones' bodies? What they do to find out more.
Who they can ask.

Speaker 14 It's chaotic and feels like a circus to Sheila. People want answers now, but the bodies have only just been discovered by police.
after the EPA agents found a skull on the property.

Speaker 14 It's not like there's a playbook for this kind of thing. It's completely unprecedented for just about everyone involved.
A crematory that didn't burn the bodies?

Speaker 14 It's not something that will resolve itself overnight, or even over weeks or months. It's just not an everyday crime.

Speaker 14 It's a spectacle, sure to attract the attention of everyone in the county, the state, and beyond. And nobody knows how to handle it at first.
And it's not just the families that are confused.

Speaker 14 The investigators on the scene pretty quickly rule out necrophilia or some other disturbing way the bodies might have been used by Brent Marsh, the man who was running the crematory.

Speaker 14 But they still have plenty of questions of their own. For one, how the hell did so many bodies accumulate here without anybody noticing? They also have to figure out what laws were broken.

Speaker 14 They know a crime has been committed, but they don't know which one.

Speaker 14 So what are they going to arrest Brent Marsh for?

Speaker 14 In Georgia at the time, there is no law against desecration of a corpse, unless the body is already buried. So grave robbing is a crime, but there has to be a grave first.

Speaker 14 For the most part, the bodies sent to Tri-State have come straight from a funeral home or a hospital. So technically, Brent hasn't broken any specific law related to corpses.

Speaker 14 After much discussion, the district attorney settles on a fairly banal charge of theft by deception, a charge they might use against someone who commits insurance fraud or identity theft.

Speaker 14 They basically charge Brent with lying to his customers.

Speaker 19 The owner of a facility for cremating the remains of the dead in the rural northwestern Georgia town of of Noble is under arrest after investigators found decomposing bodies all over the property.

Speaker 20 Ray Brent Marsh has been charged with theft by deception for not performing cremations that were paid for.

Speaker 18 We do expect as further remains are identified that there will be further warrants taken.

Speaker 14 Brent Marsh, the 28-year-old Rotary Club member, is arrested on a Saturday. the day after the initial discovery on five counts of theft by deception.

Speaker 14 Five because that's how many bodies the police can can identify straight off, from a body wearing a hospital ID bracelet, or somebody unseen just recognizing them.

Speaker 14 Greg Ramey, the special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI, comes to suspect other members of the Marsh family of wrongdoing too.

Speaker 14 But at the moment, there's no clear evidence or reason to charge them. The news is on TVs all over Georgia and the country.
and abroad.

Speaker 14 Noble, this place without a single restaurant or traffic light, is suddenly a topic of conversation around the world.

Speaker 21 You're looking at the aerials now, the crematory site here, northwestern Georgia, a location about 85 miles north of Atlanta.

Speaker 22 As far as calls on the 1-800 number, it looks like we're getting over 600 calls daily. We've had people call us as far as Canada.

Speaker 21 This is such an intense case of intense public concern and interest. We're making commitments today for a long-term operation up here.
It's a very expensive operation, please gentlemen.

Speaker 21 The cost is going to be staggering, but certainly not to what it is to the families who have lost loved ones and have loved ones here in Walker County.

Speaker 14 Everyone in Walker County turns their attention to tri-state crematory.

Speaker 14 The director of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency estimates that the search and recovery of bodies will take eight months and millions of dollars.

Speaker 14 The FAA establishes a no-fly zone over the property. to keep away the media and the public.

Speaker 14 Georgia's Democratic Governor Roy Barnes visits Walker County and flies over the Marsh property in a helicopter. He declares a state of emergency in the county, and in a letter to President George W.

Speaker 14 Bush, the governor says that the tri-state incident is, quote, of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state.

Speaker 14 Basically, he says he needs some federal help down here.

Speaker 14 Before the ink has even dried on Brent's arrest warrant, Governor Barnes accuses him of, quote, depravity, and says the state will use its full power to prosecute him.

Speaker 14 Brent makes Bond after his first arrest on Saturday and then on Sunday he's arrested again, this time on 11 new counts of theft by deception and again Brent Bond's out of jail.

Speaker 14 And then Brent is arrested yet again, a third time, on 102 new counts.

Speaker 14 Special Agent Greg Raimi is there and he speaks to Brent hoping to get some information out of him.

Speaker 15 I said, I'm here to help you help me.

Speaker 15 And I said, you help me by telling me what's going on. And then I even spoke to him.
I said, let me talk to you on a personal level. Just one Walker County resident talking to another one.
I said,

Speaker 15 people are going to want answers.

Speaker 15 And I said, if you don't give them answers, if you don't talk to me, people are going to make up what they want to make up.

Speaker 15 They're going to make you out to be a monster that maybe you are, maybe you're not.

Speaker 15 But I said, without you giving them some direction to go people are going to make up some pretty horrible things about you and he looked at me said understood

Speaker 14 this time when brent is arrested he doesn't get out on bond he's kept in jail indefinitely

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Speaker 2 Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia Diambra.

Speaker 6 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 10 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 14 Over the first few days after Greg Raimi and other officers first discovered discovered bodies in the Marsh family property, even as Walker County and the world, really, are descending on Noble,

Speaker 14 Greg stays focused on one thing, a morbid and gruesome search for every body and body part on the property, whatever state they're in.

Speaker 14 They have to be thorough, because it's not like looking for a missing piece of jewelry. It's not a situation where you can afford to miss something.
If a body is there, you have to find it.

Speaker 15 We're looking around seeing 30-plus bodies here going, holy cow, we got, you know, our first concerns are

Speaker 15 we're hoping that it's contained to this.

Speaker 15 Back your mind, you're going, I know it's a lot bigger than this.

Speaker 14 The property is big. 16 acres, including a bunch of buildings, trailers, cars, hearses, a lake, piles of junk, all sorts of equipment, old and new, and acres of dense woods.

Speaker 14 It's one of those properties where there's stuff everywhere. Not quite a junkyard, but some parts of the property have lots of junk.
There are a thousand places a body could be hidden.

Speaker 14 So when Greg and dozens of other officers return to the Marsh property, they split up into teams of three.

Speaker 14 They carry radios, and after they find a body, they message a single GBI agent who's in charge of doling out the numbers.

Speaker 15 That way you don't end up with two body number 31s or two body number 25s or whatever. So one person issuing the numbers for the body.

Speaker 15 So when somebody say, hey, we've got a new body, okay, your next number is number 27. Photographs are taken.
That body is identified just as body number 27.

Speaker 14 The GBI agent giving out the numbers takes notes about where the body is discovered. Someone photographs it from all angles.

Speaker 14 Medical examiners review the remains to determine how the person died, see if there's an easy way to identify it. There's a lot going on.
They keep finding more bodies almost everywhere they look.

Speaker 14 The numbers soon reach 50, then 60, and they've barely started.

Speaker 15 So we had the little surveyor steak flags, and we're marking bodies, and one of the guys says, hey,

Speaker 15 I'm out of a steak. Can you throw me one? I'm like, yeah, sure.
So I take a thing and I pitch it to him. Well, it kind of falters out for you.

Speaker 15 And it literally lands and hits next to some bones and stuff we hadn't even seen.

Speaker 15 So, I mean, somebody made a joke, dang, all you got to do is just throw them up in there and they're going to land next to a body.

Speaker 15 You know, I mean, it was that, it was that crazy, you know, just finding that many.

Speaker 14 And those are just the ones sitting out for anyone to see. In muddier parts of the property, they find what appear to be dug graves, maybe mass graves.

Speaker 15 We're seeing large areas, an area

Speaker 15 seven or eight feet, ten feet wide by seven or eight, ten feet long, circular maybe.

Speaker 15 You know,

Speaker 15 the ground's caving in around it. It's crusted, got the broke crust.
edge. So we know that's a burial.
You know, that ground's been disturbed. And so

Speaker 15 we mark that as that's a spot to dig at.

Speaker 14 They find at least eight graves like that, like the one that Gerald Cook, the gas man, saw in his delivery. The graves appear to have been dug with a backhoe.

Speaker 14 One of the pits is less than 90 feet from Brent's house. It will take days to meticulously dig them up and recover the remains.
They find caskets in random places on the property containing bodies.

Speaker 14 They sometimes find individual long bones, like femurs, and they get their own numbers too. Some of these loose bones will be paired with the rest of their remains later.

Speaker 14 They name the different recovery sites for ease, and some of them get charming nicknames like Sunday Surprise and Granny.

Speaker 14 On top of an around an upside-down pool table that has been turned into a makeshift basket with a plastic tarp, they find the remains of what would turn out to be 23 people, most of them in advanced stages of decomposition.

Speaker 14 Some of the bodies are wrapped in sheets or still wearing durable clothing, allowing them to at least be separated.

Speaker 14 But most are loose, only rendered distinct by collections of seasonal pine needles and leaves. A few yards away, they find a pile of bones mixed with trash, rotten food, appliances, fencing, tires.

Speaker 14 But the most disturbing discovery on that second day has got to be the one inside the butler building.

Speaker 14 Greg is photographing 20-plus bodies on the floor of the building, along with a veteran crime scene guy named David. They start to smell something.
Something really bad.

Speaker 15 I mean there was just this,

Speaker 15 just this

Speaker 15 sickening odor. I mean just one that makes you step back and go, whoa,

Speaker 15 I'm glad I stepped away and I'm about to throw up.

Speaker 14 Greg walks around the building, but he can tell the odor isn't coming from any of the bodies he can see.

Speaker 15 But then you keep hitting or smelling that odor and it just keeps hitting you. I'm like, David, what in the world? Where is that coming from? And he said,

Speaker 15 I don't know. And so we had noticed the night before and in that day, there were about six or seven vaults, metal vaults in there.

Speaker 14 In addition to the crematory, the Marsh family also had a grave digging and vault business. The vaults are shaped like oversized caskets, but much heavier and made of concrete.

Speaker 14 They're put in the ground at a cemetery to protect a casket from rainwater, insects, and the weight of the earth.

Speaker 14 Greg sees half a dozen of these in the Butler building, sitting upside down on their rounded tops.

Speaker 15 So we're sitting there and I kind of leaned over next to it. Oh, when I got close to it, I mean, the odor was just, like I said, just sickening.
And I said, David, lean over next to this.

Speaker 15 And he leaned over and he's like, oh, my gosh.

Speaker 15 And we kind of looked at each other and he said, you know what that means.

Speaker 15 And for a second, it didn't hit me. I said, oh, gosh.
I said, there's bodies in there. He said, exactly.

Speaker 15 So we unscrewed a couple of the screws and popped that thing open.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 good Lord, we cleared that building i mean it was just immediate just i mean they were

Speaker 15 the vault is maybe

Speaker 15 well say seven feet long and it's maybe 36 inches deep

Speaker 15 that was full of human bodies that were rotting decomposing piled on top of each other yes just piled on top of each other and

Speaker 15 there was

Speaker 15 I think maybe five or six of them in there that was like that. And we're just, oh no.

Speaker 15 I mean, literally such a strong

Speaker 15 smell. It almost invokes

Speaker 15 your natural reaction to vomit and throw up. It is that strong.
Just,

Speaker 15 I mean, I grew up on a farm and we had dead animals.

Speaker 15 They smell, but, okay. you kind of you know it's not that bad this was just overwhelming

Speaker 15 I mean, to the point where, and if it got on anything that you had on, I mean, we were having to suit up. We had Tyvek suits on and, you know, rubber boots and all this stuff.

Speaker 15 You almost had to throw those things away. You couldn't even put them back into your vehicle.

Speaker 15 You know, if you go to, if you had those boots on, you went and got in your vehicle, it was like, it's going to be there.

Speaker 14 The numbers are a bit fuzzy because some of those found are just partial remains. But by the end of day two, they've got at least 90 bodies, plus a smattering of loose bones.

Speaker 14 But Greg still has no idea how many more bodies there are, or for how long they've been there. Some are clearly fresh, but a lot of them are skeletonized.

Speaker 14 Greg has to eventually figure out how long these bodies have, literally in some cases, been piling up. That isn't something that can be determined by searching on its own.

Speaker 14 To try and get some answers, he needs to speak to the funeral homes.

Speaker 14 Tri-State Crematory is mostly a third-party cremation business, which means that funeral homes in the tri-state area charge their clients for cremations and then contract the actual work of burning bodies to Brent Marsh.

Speaker 14 He usually picks up the bodies from the funeral homes or hospitals himself, takes them back to Noble and burns them in his furnace, and then brings the cremains to the funeral home.

Speaker 14 So Greg has his people start calling up nearby funeral homes to get lists of people who they sent to the crematory.

Speaker 15 and find out just how many were sent there, and to try to figure out if the funeral directors know what's been going on at tri-state because you don't know what the involvement is you don't know if those funeral homes are in cahoots with him are they working alongside of him knowing this is going on or are they totally blindsided by this the answer comes back pretty quickly the funeral homes are blindsided or at least that's what they say

Speaker 14 greg discovers that tri-state is the cheapest and most convenient crematory around Tri-State was serving dozens of funeral homes all across northwest Georgia, southern Tennessee, and even a few in Alabama.

Speaker 14 Brent would drive 100 miles to get some of these bodies, and then 100 miles back, just for a couple hundred bucks. He wasn't getting rich off this.

Speaker 14 The crematory was founded by Brent Marsh's father in 1982, and some of the bodies looked like they could go back that far. They're skeletons.

Speaker 14 Brent only took over the business from his dad in 1996, 14 years later. And so this thing at Tri-State, that truly seems like it can't get even worse, somehow gets even worse.

Speaker 14 What if Brent Marsh isn't the only one to blame for what happened? What if the whole Marsh family is involved?

Speaker 14 And what if the bodies have been buried and piled on the property not for years, but for decades?

Speaker 2 Hi everyone, I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia Diambra.

Speaker 6 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 10 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 15 A BetterHelp ad.

Speaker 23 This November, BetterHelp is encouraging people to reach out, grab lunch with an an old friend, call your parents, or even find support in therapy.

Speaker 23 BetterHelp makes it easy with its therapist match commitment and over 12 years of online therapy experience, matching members with qualified professionals.

Speaker 23 And just like that lunch with an old friend, once you do reach out, you'll wonder, why didn't I do this sooner? Start now at BetterHelp.com for 10% off your first month.

Speaker 14 Sheila Manus drives to Noble and the church near the Marsh property where families are gathering, hoping to learn if Iros is among the many bodies found at Tri-State.

Speaker 14 But she leaves without learning much, except that everyone around her at the church is as confused and angry about this as she is. At least on that day, the police just don't have much to tell them.

Speaker 14 But the little information that has gotten out is already doing a lot of damage. Everyone in the area who's had a loved one cremated, a wife, a husband, a parent, a brother or sister, or even a child.

Speaker 14 Every one of them suddenly has to check if their body was sent to tri-state crematory.

Speaker 14 The crematory has had thousands of customers since it opened almost 20 years ago in 1982.

Speaker 14 And those who find on their relatives' death certificates that they were sent to tri-state, like Sheila, now they have no idea if they've actually fulfilled their obligations to the ones they loved.

Speaker 14 They have no idea if the bodies were, rather than burned as requested, and treated with dignity and respect, instead buried in a pit, dropped in a trash pile, or shoved in a vault with half a dozen others.

Speaker 14 On top of that, there is the issue of the ashes. Some of these bodies have been there for years.
They were supposed to have been cremated. The families had funerals.
Some of them spread the ashes.

Speaker 14 Some kept the ashes displayed in their homes in decorative urns.

Speaker 15 So what was in their urns?

Speaker 14 All of them were given something by the funeral homes, and now they have no idea what.

Speaker 14 All the pain that came with these deaths in the first place, sometimes many years ago, for a lot of people, it's coming back.

Speaker 18 Families are in shock that loved ones sent to tri-state for cremation were dumped like garbage.

Speaker 24 It's his justice body.

Speaker 24 But it was my obligation to do what was right. And I thought I was doing what was right, but these people were.

Speaker 21 We never anticipated or dreamed that there was a thought that her body would not be taken and disposed of respectfully

Speaker 21 and brought down here to uh

Speaker 25 lord knows what happened all i can think about is seeing his body laying in a shed with a bunch of other dead people

Speaker 25 for four months rotting in a way and no respect to him at all

Speaker 14 police find out that brent had been giving some people real human cremains but not everyone got the cremains of their loved one some got a different person's cremains and others got, in place of ashes, cement dust or lime dust.

Speaker 14 Sheila is stuck in this in-between place where she doesn't know if the cremains she received from the funeral home were her husband's.

Speaker 14 She can't know because she spread his ashes on that beautiful mountaintop. And she'd even visit that mountain once a week.

Speaker 15 I would take me a cup of coffee and a rose and I'd throw the rose in the woods and stuff and I'd drink coffee with him. And to think that I was doing that over

Speaker 15 cement, you know, and

Speaker 15 just, I don't know,

Speaker 15 just the biggest betrayal I've ever felt in my life, not just for me, but for my husband. My biggest problem was that I had promised Ira that I would do exactly as he stated, okay?

Speaker 15 And then I would scatter his ashes. I thought I had done everything I was supposed to do, and then come to find out, you know, I hadn't.

Speaker 14 When someone close to you dies, it can be one of the most significant events in your life. Something that changes you forever.

Speaker 14 And you get one chance to honor them, bury them, or cremate them the way they'd imagined. Or in Ira's case, planned himself.
If you mess it up, there's no second chance.

Speaker 14 For Sheila, the whole situation just feels so dramatically different from what Ira meant to her. Someone who always did what he said he was going to do.

Speaker 15 I was angry. If you're given a job, you do that job.
You don't have to do it. You do it.

Speaker 15 And I was just thinking, oh my god, I can't believe you didn't this hour. You know, yeah, I was upset.
There was, you know,

Speaker 15 I

Speaker 15 guess I led the posse on the forum, the website, you know.

Speaker 14 These are the early days of the internet, way before Twitter and Facebook. But victims of tri-state post on an online message forum called Easy Board, Sheila among them.

Speaker 14 Under the username Sick and Upset2, she vents her anger and calls Brent Monster Marsh. She writes, He broke the laws of man and God, and he will pay.
And it's not just Sheila.

Speaker 14 The message board lights up with anger towards Brent. A poster named Tricky Vicki writes, Clara and the Marsh family have hurt too many people, and nobody will ever forget it, no matter what they do.

Speaker 14 Another poster says, I think he deserved to rot in hell for what this man has done to everyone.

Speaker 14 But the message board is also a place where victims like Sheila band together and exchange messages of support, give each other updates on the the investigations into their loved ones' bodies.

Speaker 14 When Sheila posts about all the stress she's feeling, a user called It's Too Crazy writes, I know this month will be very difficult for your entire family.

Speaker 14 You need your strength, so please take care of yourself. Another day, a poster writes, there are days I come here because I have nowhere else to turn.

Speaker 14 We'll come back to Sheila and Ira later. Like a lot of the other family members, she would have to be patient to somehow sit around and wait until investigators like Greg Raimi do their job.

Speaker 14 Greg grew up in Walker County and lives there. He's raising his kids there.
So he's not just dealing with people he can remain cold and detached from.

Speaker 14 He already knows a lot of the families, the ones waiting to find out if their parents or sisters or brothers are lying in the dirt at Tri-State.

Speaker 15 There was so much emotion about this thing. Some folks had gone through a good healing process.
Some folks had dealt with it.

Speaker 15 You know, their loved one had died of cancer, old age, car crashes, whatever.

Speaker 15 Some, it was very new, very fresh. Some hadn't dealt with it at all.

Speaker 15 You know, even though it was two, maybe three years, it was still just like ripping a, you know, a big scab off your arm and just tearing your heart back open.

Speaker 14 There's something like a mob who want to come after Brent, even as prosecutors for the state target him. Others Others plan to sue the Marsh family for everything they've got.

Speaker 14 As the police continue to search for bodies, Brent will soon face hundreds of lawsuits and hundreds more criminal charges that could have him in prison for the rest of his life.

Speaker 14 But some sliver of hope for Brent comes in finding a lawyer, and not just any lawyer, the best damn lawyer in Northwest Georgia, a guy who has no problem taking hits for his client.

Speaker 15 She was caught trying to smuggle a sword into the courtroom, disguised in a cane. So I may have been the first lawyer since the 1700s to get run through.

Speaker 14 That's on the next episode of Noble.

Speaker 14 Noble is the production of Waveland and Campside Media. Noble was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me, Sean Ravive.

Speaker 14 Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sierra Franco is our associate producer.
Editing by Jason Hoke, Johnny Kaufman, and Matt Scher.

Speaker 14 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 14 Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slavin, David Eichler, Ashley Warren, Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Mara.

Speaker 14 Jason Hoke is the executive producer at Waveland. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone. I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia Diambra.

Speaker 6 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 10 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.