The Furnace | Chapter 4

Summary

Noble: The Furnace | Chapter 4 – Detailed Summary

Episode Release Date: August 14, 2024

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1. Episode Overview

In "The Furnace," Chapter 4 of the Noble podcast series by Waveland, host Sean Raviv delves deeper into the unsettling case of Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Georgia. This episode focuses on the legal battle surrounding Brent Marsh, the enigmatic operator of the crematory found responsible for mishandling over 300 bodies. Through interviews and investigative narratives, the episode explores the intricate relationship between law, community outrage, and the primal question: What do the living owe the dead?

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2. McCracken Poston's Background and Motivation

The episode begins by introducing McCracken Poston, a prominent attorney from Northwest Georgia with deep roots in the community. Growing up in Graysville during the 1960s, Poston's early experiences in a segregated southern town and his family's values shaped his worldview.

• Childhood Experiences: [02:31] McCracken shares, "When we were kids, we would lay down on the graves... One tombstone was shaped like a lectern. So we would play, you know, politician or preacher there..."

These formative years instilled in him a sense of equality and community responsibility, largely influenced by his grandmother's teachings that "all were equal in the eyes of God."

• Political Aspirations: [06:04] McCracken discusses his foray into politics, stating, "This is Americana... With the Brown brothers' permission, I started bringing candidates by."

His political career saw early successes, becoming one of Georgia's youngest legislators at 28 and later attempting a congressional run, which ended in defeat amid shifting regional political landscapes.

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3. The Brent Marsh and Tri-State Crematory Case

In February 2002, Poston is approached to represent Brent Marsh of Tri-State Crematory, a case that immediately positions him at odds with his community. Tri-State had come under scrutiny for its handling of deceased individuals, leading to widespread anger among families and the local populace.

• Initial Decision to Represent: [06:27] The narrative explains Poston's connection to the case, recalling his interaction with Ray Marsh, Brent's father, during his youth, which influenced his decision to take on the case despite public sentiment.

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4. Community Reaction and Challenges

Poston's decision to defend Marsh ignites intense backlash. Families of the deceased express profound grief and rage over the crematory's practices, feeling a deep sense of disrespect and violation.

• Expressions of Anger:
  • [10:21] Chuck Crawford, a local funeral director, exclaims, "And I am so angry about it all. I don't know what to do."
  • [10:32] McCracken condemns the actions, stating, "They need to just do whatever the worst is to do to this man. He knew what he was doing. It was wrong."

The community's hostility extends beyond emotional responses, manifesting in aggressive actions towards Marsh and, by association, Poston. Incidents include threats during court appearances and attempts to intimidate both Marsh and his defense team.

• Public Distress: Families like Sheila Manus grapple with their loss, as one narrator poignantly asks listeners to empathize by imagining their own grief ([10:39]-[11:00]).

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5. Cremation Process and Chuck Crawford's Investigation

To mount a robust defense, Poston engages Chuck Crawford, an expert in the cremation industry, to scrutinize the operations of Tri-State Crematory.

• Inspection Findings: [25:24] Chuck reveals, "The Tri State furnace bricks have more than cracks. Some of the bricks are broken... It might be dangerous to even turn it on."

Crawford identifies several flaws in the crematory's machinery, including a compromised furnace and an improvised bone pulverizer—a wood chipper—that deviates from industry standards.

• Expert Analysis:
  • [26:53] Chuck notes, "I found a wood chipper that had bone fragments in it... It was probably bone dust."
  • [29:14] He elaborates on the improprieties: "Number one, the machinery that we use is made just for that specific purpose... There’s going to be some remnants of the prior case."

These findings suggest that Tri-State was not adhering to proper cremation protocols, potentially contributing to the mishandling of bodies. However, Crawford emphasizes that while the equipment was substandard, it wasn't necessarily the sole factor in the mismanagement.

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6. Defense Strategies and Legal Tactics

Poston's defense approach is multifaceted, aiming to shift the narrative from criminal malfeasance to systemic failures and procedural mishaps.

• Questioning Cremation Practices: He raises critical questions about the meticulousness of the cremation process, challenging the community's perception of it as an impeccable and sacred procedure.

• Change of Venue Attempt: [34:31] Poston attempts to highlight the danger he and Marsh face, seeking a change of venue to ensure a fair trial. His strategy includes orchestrating threats, though efforts like reaching out to the Ku Klux Klan's leadership prove unsuccessful.

• Financial Implications: [35:05] Recognizing the trial's potential costs, Poston leverages the economic burden on Walker County as part of his strategy, emphasizing the inefficiency and financial strain the trial imposes.

• Public Statements: [36:44] In a controversial move, Poston states, "It's not like anybody died here," aiming to reframe the narrative around the nature of the crimes, though this garners backlash and further isolates him from the community.

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7. Insights into the Emotional Landscape

The episode delves into the psychological toll on both the victims' families and the legal representatives involved.

• Empathy and Conflict: Poston grapples with the community's animosity, striving to balance his professional duty with the emotional weight of representing someone accused of disrespecting the dead.

• Theatrical Elements: [32:52] Poston muses, "This is all theater... If the politicians and the families and the prosecutor want theater, I'll give it to them," indicating his awareness of the performative aspects of the trial and his willingness to leverage them to his advantage.

• Cultural Tensions: The episode highlights the clash between traditional Southern values surrounding death and the unsettling revelations about the crematory's practices, creating a volatile environment for all parties involved.

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8. Concluding Observations

"The Furnace" masterfully intertwines legal drama with deep-seated community emotions, painting a vivid picture of the complexities inherent in the Noble case. By focusing on McCracken Poston's strategic maneuvers and the investigative insights provided by Chuck Crawford, the episode underscores the broader themes of justice, empathy, and the societal obligations towards the deceased.

As the investigation progresses, the episode sets the stage for further exploration into the identities of the victims and the unraveling of Tri-State Crematory's operations, promising even more revelations in subsequent chapters of the Noble series.

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Note: Timestamps correspond to key moments within the episode's transcript, providing context for the included quotes.

Transcript

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[McCracken Poston]

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[Narrator]

This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care campsite media 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. There were graves there for Confederate soldiers and for old friends of McCracken's family.

[McCracken Poston]

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, and one tombstone was shaped like a lectern. So we would play, you know, politician or preacher there and have everybody else sit out and listen to the preaching.

[Narrator]

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

[McCracken Poston]

And Graysville, you have to understand there was not a lot going on. An event like a funeral that was big in the town, that in the Easter sunrise service. And my job became. 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. 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 some. While you're trying to eulogize somebody.

[Narrator]

Graysville was in the segregated south, sitting just below the Tennessee border. It was a small and isolated place. 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. 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. 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. And So, so did McCracken. 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.

[McCracken Poston]

In those days, a lot of the graves were hand dug. It's an old, old cemetery. I got to know a black man who dug graves. He would hand dig what seemed like a perfectly square, six foot deep rectangle.

[Narrator]

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

[McCracken Poston]

And it would be especially exciting if he hit a lot of rock because he brought some dynamite with him. And that was, you know, 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 it was exciting.

[Narrator]

When he was around 10 years old, McCracken was watching the men close up a grave. The funeral home had already packed their tents up and left. But they'd forgotten a wooden folding chair and McCracken pointed it out. The gravedigger gave McCracken the chair and said, why don't you hang onto it, kid? And McCracken kept the chair. As he grew up, he kept the chair when, as a teenager, he started volunteering in Democratic politics. Statewide campaigns often didn't have anyone living in northwest Georgia, so McCracken could step in and be their guy there. 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.

[McCracken Poston]

Wooden floor, screen door. I used them as a prop, and I really started realizing this is kind of a rare thing. This is Americana. This is what reminds everybody of 40, 50 years ago. So with the Brown brothers permission, I started bringing candidates by.

[Narrator]

He worked on a lot of campaigns, even Jimmy Carter's presidential run in 1976. 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. So in 1988, McCracken got on the front steps of Pete and Bud's store and announced his candidacy for the Georgia House of representatives. 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.

[McCracken Poston]

I ran for Congress in 1996 and was whipped pretty badly and soundly in that race. This whole region turned red that election. I was the first Democrat to lose that congressional seat since the Civil War.

[Narrator]

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. 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. The police and national tabloids accused Ridley of holding his wife captive for decades and then murdering her. 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. 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. He wrote a book about the Alvin Ridley case. It's called Zenith Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom. The case gave McCracken a ton of press and boosted his reputation as someone who was willing to take on unusual clients. 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 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. But then he remembers the chair and the nice man who let him watch as he dug perfectly rectangle graves by hand. And as he blew up rocks with dynamite, he remembers the name of the gravedigger, Ray Marsh, Brent's father. So McCracken takes the case, and he's a good fit 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. But McCracken sees holes in the case and in people's impression of his client. And it's not long before he publicly challenges deeply held traditions about death and how we treat the dead by raising a controversial question. Is what happened at Tri State Crematory really as bad as it seems? From Waveland and Campside Media, this is noble. I'm Sean Ravief. Episode 4 the Furnace When McCracken, Poston attorney at law, takes on Brent Marsh as a client, it's not some carefree decision. 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 he sees them on TV very clearly describing their feelings.

[McCracken Poston]

I think someone definitely dropped the ball.

[Chuck Crawford]

And I am so angry about it all. I don't know what to do.

[Narrator]

A callous disregard and disrespect to families loved ones.

[T-Mobile Representative]

The people that are running this thing are animals.

[McCracken Poston]

They need to just do whatever the worst is to do to this man. He knew what he was doing. It was wrong.

[Narrator]

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. But I still find it difficult to channel that grief and anger today, to present in full now exactly how people felt then. Maybe the best way to try to comprehend the anger of all these families is to imagine it was you. 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. Imagine A person who is so important in your life that it feels like they're a physical part of you. Now imagine that person dies and you never get to see them again. Never get to share those jokes and memories again. Never get to laugh and cry with them again. 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. How would you feel about the person or the people who did it and about anyone who takes their side? 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. 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. On another occasion, when Brent is being escorted to a patrol car, deputies have to restrain a woman screaming bloody murder at him. On the news before a court hearing, he's seen holding a piece of paper in his cuffed hands. Here's McCracken.

[McCracken Poston]

Unbeknownst to each other, both Brent and I wrote letters to our wives that we had on us. And I think I just told her this is an important part of being American, is making sure that the Constitution applies to all Americans. And, you know, if this is something that takes me out, I'm very sorry. And I'm very, very sorry.

[Narrator]

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.

[McCracken Poston]

She was caught trying to smuggle a sword into the courtroom disguised in a cane 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. He pulls out a long sword out of it. So I may have been the first lawyer since the 1700s to get run.

[Narrator]

Through 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. 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.

[McCracken Poston]

The way they charged him, the potential sentencing was over 8,000 years. Now, my reaction was four times the time since Jesus walked the earth is excessive. 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. We should have just charged him with one times the time since Jesus walked the earth. I mean, what's the difference you get past 100 years, there is no difference. It's. It's crazy.

[Narrator]

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. Clara's position as a drug free schools resource teacher is eliminated. 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. 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. To many, including the authorities, they don't seem innocent 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.

[McCracken Poston]

And she said, I told everybody you wouldn't represent that. And I said, well, I don't think we can work together anymore. And she agreed and hung up. And so I thought, this is interesting. This is a guy who without a doubt needs a lawyer. And there was a huge potential for injustice in this thing.

[Narrator]

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

[McCracken Poston]

I was still kind of pissed off at the world say the truth from, you know, the total rejection of me by the voters. 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 I actually remember thinking that, you know, that I'll help him and that'll show them not to jump to conclusions.

[Narrator]

If it's unpopularity McCracken wants, he's gonna get it. In defending Brent Marsh, it will become his job, to put it crudely, 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, he'll have to somehow argue that what Brent Marsh did to hundreds of bodies was not as bad as it looks. 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. He'll have to get people asking is cremation an immaculate process performed by reverential purists on hallowed ground, or is it just another job?

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[McCracken Poston]

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[Narrator]

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. That's what he told Brent Marsh. And that's what Brent has done ever since. With just a few exceptions. 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. He told them he'd been having trouble with it for months, 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. 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. 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, 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.

[Chuck Crawford]

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

[Narrator]

Chuck was right that cremation was coming. In 1973, cremation rates hit 5% for the first time in the U.S. by 1998, it was closer to 25%. And it's gone up about a percent each year since, to the point where it's more common now than burial. 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've limited options. 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.

[Chuck Crawford]

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, the grounds themselves. There was an old hearse parked in a building. Their residence was there, and it was a nice house and big lake and all these things, it was just an interesting property because when you think about. Contrast that with funeral homes, 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. I mean, you think about any funeral home you can think of, the grass is manicured, the sign is perfect. Everything is great. If you see a funeral home with a broken shutter and the car has got a flat tire, isn't it going to give you an indication something's wrong over here?

[Narrator]

Chuck's point is about how funeral homes tend to present themselves 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, they seem to grieve with you. But what about the funeral homes and Funeral directors that work with Tri State, they sent their clients bodies to Noble for a nice profit, a really nice profit. Brent Marsh was charging just 2 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. He did all the work or again he said he did. And some of the funeral homes would turn around and charge $1,000, sometimes more for the cremation that they didn't even perform that it turned out nobody performed in a lot of cases. 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. If they did visit and saw bodies lying around in piles of junk, would they still have used the place? In my opinion, it was their duty, if not the law, to inspect the place. They were sending bodies, but they didn't. As Chuck looks around the Marsh family's property, assessing things and taking it all in, he spends a moment enjoying the breeze.

[Chuck Crawford]

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. It was, it was a contrast how peaceful and serene it could be if you thought about the carnage that had happened there. Right.

[Narrator]

You considered the sort of displacement of dead bodies against the wishes of the family to be carnage.

[Chuck Crawford]

Yeah. When you do this for living, you realize that, you know, you put somebody in the ground that's permanent. This is the final chapter of their life. And without getting carried away, you realize how important it is.

[Narrator]

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. There's an office, a small anteroom and the room that holds the furnace, which is also called a retort in the industry. 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. Chuck goes straight 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. It was purchased in 1982 by Brent's father. The power pack is about 6ft wide and 8ft tall. 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. Behind the stainless steel door is A coffin shaped chamber lined with fire bricks, which are made to withstand high temperatures. 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. 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. Thirty minutes later, after some preheating, the ignition burner lights the heat the main chamber to 1650 degrees. Two and a half hours later, the burner turns off and the cremation is done. So three hours total from start to finish, give or take. When you open up the door after all that remains of the corpse is brittle bone. That's if you're doing it right. But there's a lot that can go wrong.

[Chuck Crawford]

The big fear with the crematory is burning one out. And if you get a body burning too fast, that steel will melt eventually. If the brick is damaged and the heat can get through to the steel, it could melt it. And then you got an introduction of all kinds of air coming in there. And it's like opening the window in a house fire.

[Narrator]

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. 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. 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. After the retort has done its job reducing the body to just bone, the remains are pulled out of the furnace and sorted. 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. 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, or at least not the kind you'd find in his crematory. He does find something else. He finds a wood chipper.

[Amica Insurance Representative]

At Amica Insurance. We know it's more than just a house. It's your home. The place that filled with memories. The early days of figuring it out to the later years of still figuring.

[McCracken Poston]

It out.

[Amica Insurance Representative]

For the place you've put down roots Trust Amica Home insurance Amathy is our best policy.

[T-Mobile Representative]

T mobile 5G Internet keeps getting better. Boost your connection to harder to reach places with Home Internet plus and get Internet right where you want it with.

[Home Office User]

Wi fi that reaches the attic. I finally have have a home office.

[T-Mobile Representative]

Get a free upgrade to T Mobile Home Internet plus while supplies last. Home Internet plus starts at 50 bucks a month with autopay and any voice line. Check availability@t mobile.com home Internet during congestion.

[T-Mobile Customer]

Customers on this plan may notice speeds lower than other customers and further reduction fusing greater than 1.2 terabytes per month due to data prioritization. After $20 bill credit plus $5 per month without auto pay debit bank account required regulatory fees included for qualifying accounts. 35 connection charge applies.

[Chuck Crawford]

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, I think he was using this as a processor.

[Narrator]

Chuck Crawford worked for a tree company when he was young, so he spent a lot of time around wood chippers. This one at Tri State Crematory is small, the size of a lawnmower. There's a square intake chute which then narrows like a gramophone. So whatever is dropped into it goes straight to the spinning blades. 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. It seems that Brent or someone has turned the wood chipper into an ad hoc bone pulverizer.

[Chuck Crawford]

I could just tell without even have 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. It's like snow. You know, when you have snow and it's drifting, you know, it's kind of.

[Narrator]

Weird that Chuck has experience with both pulverizers and wood chippers, but it gives him a unique perspective on all this.

[Chuck Crawford]

I thought, hey, this would work. Would this reduce the bone fragments into the powder that you need? Yeah, but is it right?

[Narrator]

No.

[Chuck Crawford]

Right.

[Narrator]

What's wrong about it?

[Chuck Crawford]

Number one, the machinery that we use is, is 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. Out of stack. Right. The dust was going out the stack. 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. 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.

[Narrator]

Chuck shocks me when he says this. I visited his crematory in Nashville. It's impeccable. 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. He vacuums out the furnace after every cremation. But even chuck doesn't get 100% of your ashes in the urn. 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. There's always going to be someone lost in between the cracks, and chances are that some tiny amount of the previous cremation will end up in your urn. Commingling of ashes, as he calls it. The same exact word that investigators use when they talk about bodies that are found commingled on the marsh property. Commingling is a part of the cremation process that nobody talks about. 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. But it's not. It never is. I asked Chuck if the retort the furnace at Tri State is sort of like the wood chipper. It isn't up to his standards, and it seems wrong. But would it have worked?

[Chuck Crawford]

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

[Narrator]

But your impression was it hadn't been used in a while?

[Chuck Crawford]

Correct.

[Narrator]

Do you recall on a scale of 1 to 10, how you would have rated the state of this retort?

[Chuck Crawford]

Probably at least on the low end of 3. This is not to be completely inoperable. There'd be big chunks of ceiling missing and everything else. I would not run this machine. But there's worse conditions. Machines that are broken are broken.

[Narrator]

Have you seen worse than this before?

[Chuck Crawford]

No, I haven't.

[Narrator]

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. Brent's defense won't be about practical things like was the furnace working? 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. McCracken Poston has watched families yelling and screaming as Brent walked to and from the courthouse. He's watched elected officials, in his opinion, pretending to be sympathetic and concern for the families. He's watched packs of cameras recording it all. And something begins to dawn on him.

[McCracken Poston]

I had the creeping sensation this is all theater. These people are only showing their emotions when the cameras show up.

[Narrator]

And McCracken licks his lips because if this is theater, few are better at it than him. He's been doing theater since he was a teenager on the front steps of the general store in Graysville. If the politicians and the families and the prosecutor want theater, he'll give it to them.

[McCracken Poston]

When you kind of set this tone of, you know, we are being so solemn and that lawyer is, you know, making us mad and those kind of things, I think you're just kind of setting yourself up for the short end of the stick. As the theater plays out, highlighting the.

[Narrator]

Drama can benefit Brent's case in very real ways. 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, 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. A sure fire way for McCracken to do that is to show that he and Brent are in danger. 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. He gets a few angry calls at his office, too, but they aren't menacing enough to sway a judge. 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.

[McCracken Poston]

The reason I know is every election I ever ran, they would call in and denounce me on the air and I would smile and, you know, it was just kind of an understanding we had, you know, 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.

[Narrator]

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.

[McCracken Poston]

And so I kind of taunted the brother, saying, well, I don't guess the clan is what it used to be. 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. There's nothing anymore, are they? And I get a phone message at my office from the Imperial wizard of the North Georgia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And he said, I. I'm sorry, I got cancer and I can't get involved in this. And he later died. And 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. I mean, they. It was just hardly. I was too embarrassed to lead with them because they just weren't that threatening.

[Narrator]

McCracken's KKK ploy fails, and he doesn't get his change of venue in the end, 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. McCracken calls the county's attorney constantly to remind him how expensive this is going to be for them eventually. The attorney estimates that in order to finance the trial, property taxes in Walker county will have to go up 25%. 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 minds.

[McCracken Poston]

One of the first things I said was, it's not like anybody died here. Well, it was just this universal kind of reaction to me saying that to where people were going. You just don't understand our culture. And you're wrong.

[Narrator]

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. 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. Brent's not a serial killer. He didn't kill anybody. Not a single one of those bodies is dead. Because of him saying all of this, though, it's not something that makes McCracken or the marshes any more popular. McCracken has to be very careful how he talks about these issues in public and when expressing his opinions about death.

[McCracken Poston]

You know, this is the Bible Belt, and there's some deep feeling that bodies are going to pop up out of the ground in the final days. But, you know, 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.

[Narrator]

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. But because it involves dead bodies, you can't just treat it like a bunch of stolen laptops. 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. And figuring out who exactly all these bodies are or were is a monumental task. 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 or co mingled with other bodies. 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.

[McCracken Poston]

I think we ended up with maybe a total of six or seven from 1997. And then in 98, the number kind of jumped up to 20ish or so. But then you hit 99 and, boy, the numbers really jumped forward.

[Narrator]

That's on the next episode of Noble. 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. Sierra Franco is our associate producer. Editing by Jason Hoke, Johnny Kaufman and Matt Scherr. Fact checking by Kailyn Lynch. Sound design, mixing, scoring and original music by Garrett Tiedemann. Our theme music is La Lucha es una sola by the band Esmerine Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywin, David Eichler, Ashley Warren, Destiny Dingle and Sabina Mara. Jason Hoke is the executive producer at Waveland. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff and Matt Sch.

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