A Long Day at the End of the World Read online

  Yet Brent Marsh’s immediate predecessors did much to soften racial prejudice in the area. His mother, Clara Chestnut Marsh, taught school in Walker County for over thirty years. She also served as chairwoman of the local Democratic Committee and in 1995 received the Walker County Woman of the Year Award from the Chamber of Commerce. Her greatest devotion, however, she reserved for the New Home Missionary Baptist Church, located down the road from the crematory property. Intimately involved with the congregation’s functions, she sang in the choir each Sunday morning.

  Her husband, Ray Marsh, started and ran two successful businesses: the Tri-State Crematory and Marsh Vault and Grave Service. Well liked and respected, he managed to acquire customers across racial lines, a strong achievement in this rural corner of the state. “Nobody, white or black, said anything negative against them,” stated William J. Willis Jr., proprietor of a funeral home in Dalton, Georgia. And when Ray Marsh became bedridden due to a stroke, his son, Brent, took over the family business in 1996. The elder Marshes remained owners.

  Brent was a big guy, six two and 265 pounds, a local high school football star who “was everybody’s friend,” according to Christy Anderson, a former classmate. “You couldn’t ask for a nicer fellow.” In 1992, he received a scholarship to nearby University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he played middle linebacker and majored in business. When his father fell ill, he left school and never completed his degree.

  Some people speculated that Brent Marsh didn’t want to step into his father’s shoes, that his mother had pressured him, one of five children, to take over operation of the crematory. Eddie Upshaw, a longtime family friend, recalled that Brent “talked about teaching and coaching. But this was laid in his hand after his dad got sick. And he wasn’t going to turn his back on his family.” He did his duty. And within a year, at the age of twenty-four, he had abandoned and desecrated his first body.

  During the next five years, Brent Marsh appeared remarkably normal in his everyday activities—including hosting his own wedding party on his family’s private lake, the very lake on whose hidden shores lay scattered and decomposing bodies. He coached youth football and basketball, acted as deacon at the New Home Church, and even took his father’s place on the board of the Walker County Division of Family and Children Services.

  “He was just an ordinary guy,” said Ray Newton, who delivered a load of dirt to the crematory during the desecration period. “Just the nicest guy you’d ever want to know.”

  To Mike Worthington, the co-owner of Smokey’s B-B-Q, Marsh appeared to have it all: a successful business; a beautiful young wife; a new baby daughter, miraculously born on Super Bowl Sunday. Like any doting father, a regular guy, he carried photographs of the new arrival around in his wallet, which he’d recently shown off while dining at the restaurant.

  “He loved hot wings,” added Terri Worthington, Mike’s wife and co-owner of the barbecue joint. “He was well-schooled, very articulate, well-spoken.”

  Yes, Marsh seemed to have done a real Jekyll and Hyde on his hometown and, after his arrest, performed a personal disappearing act. At every hearing he looked stone-faced and blank. He didn’t react. He didn’t smile. He appeared neither confused nor bewildered—only absent, vanished, more dead than alive. It was an expression that never changed during the long and very public ordeal of the Tri-State Crematory Incident.

  * * *

  On the Mr. Hyde side of things, back at the crematory, Marsh concocted an elaborate scheme of deception.

  Typically, when a bereaved family chooses cremation through a local funeral home, the family expects to receive in exchange for a fee (and a corpse) the incinerated remains of the deceased person. This bodily residue—the cremains—consists entirely of bone fragments, which the crematory operator machine-grinds into a fine dust. Brent Marsh, however, had a big problem. He hadn’t incinerated those 339 corpses in the first place. Yet he clearly needed something to return to the funeral home and ultimately the family—some substance that would pass as human cremains.

  Marsh’s solution to this problem was ingenious and bizarre. Having grown up assisting his father in the family business, he was familiar with the appearance and texture of proper cremains. He knew what he was looking for. After experimenting with various combinations and proportions, he settled on a special blend of ground bone and concrete dust that possessed the consistency of talcum powder. During the years of desecration, he gradually used less bone and more concrete dust in his mixture, finally substituting only the fake powder. Though slightly more fine than pulverized bone, the powder evidently offered a reasonable resemblance to true cremains. In fact, as a crude chemist—or in this case an alchemist attempting to transmute base materials into a sacred substance—he encountered no detractors. The family members who came across the hundreds of faked cremains, and every funeral home worker for that matter, fell for his strange sleight of hand.

  Nevertheless, the time necessary to discover and perfect his process of transmutation, as well as the care he took to reproduce the results hundreds of times over, could simply have been used to cremate the corpses properly. Why not just incinerate all 999 bodies received from 1997 to 2002, rather than create this elaborate deception for 339 of them? Wasn’t it actually more trouble to further this deceit than simply do the job as expected?

  And with a fuel cost savings of only $175 per body, Marsh’s legerdemain grossed about $10,000 a year on average—hardly worth the risk given the extremely high chance of eventual discovery. Even if he needed the money, one could stash only so many rotting bodies on the crematory grounds without the stench drifting too far on a hot summer day, or the bones glowing too clearly through the bare trees of winter.

  So why? Why did he do it?

  From the beginning, the vacant Brent Marsh offered no clues. That reality—coupled with a lack of strong motive—left only the evidence. What was clear was this: Chaos held dominion at the Tri-State Crematory.

  When the authorities first entered the large storage shed, bodies lay scattered among refuse and, incredibly, Christmas decorations. Other corpses floated together in five metal burial vaults, their bones and fluids commingled in a horrid stew.

  Next door a greasy liquid layered the concrete floor of the main crematory building, and a hole had been hand-cut into the baseboard to allow for drainage. (A normal crematory requires no special drainage, as the extreme temperatures of incineration leave only a solid residue as described earlier.) Six bodies in various stages of decomposition waited near the retort, or kiln, which itself held a single corpse in a cardboard cremation box. Important paperwork littered the premises.

  The smaller shed contained two more mummified bodies discovered beneath more trash, and outside stood a hearse carrying another corpse. This solitary individual had lain in the vehicle since 1998, dressed in his funeral clothes inside a casket. For some reason, after making one last pickup, Brent Marsh had abandoned both the man and his carriage.

  The wider circle of woods featured other rusted automobiles and a house trailer, along with randomly dispersed body bags and coffins, exposed bodies and limbs, isolated bones. Dirt paths wound through the grounds, and along one such path a single body lay embedded, like a speed bump for the backhoe, packed tight. And beneath more trash moldered eight mass graves, dug to an average depth of five feet.

  In one pit, where twenty-three bodies were eventually recovered, the identification process proved difficult. As Dr. Kris Sperry, the chief medical examiner for the state of Georgia, explained, “The bodies that went into that particular pit may well have been put in one of the vaults for a period of time, where they decomposed down to a horrendous mess, and then the vault was upended and poured into the pit.”

  Twenty-three individuals were also recovered from the immediate area surrounding an old pool table. The felt board lay upside down, and rotting tarpaulins and rope suggested an attempt to create a nest, or basket, from the table’s legs. Most of these bodies were unclothed, and
the bones and flesh were severely commingled, with animal scavenging separating limbs and helping to cause the heavier bones to drift to the bottom. Here the seasonal deposit of pine needles and oak leaves helped to delineate individuals, providing an identifying layer, a stratum, for the dumped bodies.

  A few yards from the pool table site, debris—including food, logs, clothing, large appliances, fencing, and tires—combined with bones in an intricate tangle. Shallow trenches stretched below that trash, housing more corpses. Nearly all these pits lay fairly close to the crematory buildings. One, however, was found fewer than ninety feet from Brent Marsh’s residence, in the dense brush next to the lake.

  Given these details, a broad divergence of opinion emerged concerning the cause of Brent Marsh’s actions during his alchemical period. Several former and current FBI profilers contended that he was simply “disorganized” and “lazy,” and that he internally rationalized his actions by focusing on the fact that the bodies only “belonged to dead people.”

  Some analyses were less psychological, more pragmatic. “The whole situation reminds me of an office worker who gets behind on his paperwork so he chucks it in a drawer,” commented State Representative Doug Teper upon officially touring the Tri-State property. “After a while, he’s spending more time finding new places to hide his papers than on doing any actual work.”

  In contrast, as I learned from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—my source of much information regarding the incident—a psychology professor specializing in anxiety disorders at the University of Georgia, Nader Amir, suggested that Brent Marsh may have suffered from the obsessive-compulsive disorder known as “hoarding.” As Professor Amir stated, “People with this problem keep things they don’t need … It’s not that they’re really lazy, they just can’t make a decision [about what to discard]. It gets harder and harder and the hoarding continues.” Indeed, the vast disorganization at the site—combined with Marsh’s actual cremation of two-thirds of the bodies during the period—made the analysis sound compelling to me. And yet a couple of things ran counter to this argument. Beyond the evident chaos, Brent Marsh acted with premeditation in his meticulous development and deployment of fake cremains, and, quite clearly and inexcusably, he exhibited a real cold-bloodedness in his disregard of hundreds of bodies. And yet again, in support of the hoarding hypothesis, why bother cremating only a percentage of available bodies when the math made no rational sense in the first place?

  I kept going back to the emptiness—to the gaze—to the eyes that appeared so vacant. Whatever the primary impetus for his actions (and unlike the early alchemists), Brent Marsh apparently did not include the attainment of higher consciousness in his calculus. Instead, as the numbers piled up, he may have been attempting to impose a kind of order in his life, however strange and unsettling. I mean, the guy wasn’t a psycho-killer—he hadn’t murdered anyone—but for a long time he’d looked past the sanctity of flesh toward something else. Some deeper focus. The key lay at the end of that stare.

  6

  MY MOTHER RANG the West Coast and said I needed to get back fast—he might not last the weekend.

  From thirty thousand miles up I watched the land turn from brown to green, worrying obsessively that he might not recognize me.

  Outside the door was one world: a place I knew—the hospital where I’d come with my cracked wrist after falling drunk from a moving car in tenth grade and where I’d received a few stitches for a knife wound to a finger sustained by my own hand, the other hand, while doing a stupid Huckleberry Finn diorama in eleventh grade.

  Inside there was another world: the place where I’d see my father for the last time. When I’d left a few weeks before, he still looked pretty good—a too-thin man on the verge, a goner—but he was still Ron Hendricks; he was still my father. Now his body was not his body—not my father—but a shriveled-up thing on white sheets, his bones curled like a child’s. In that quicker light only his face looked familiar, stretched and smeared across a gray skull with blotches.

  Without opening his eyes, he somehow found my hand and held on to it.

  “Brent,” he whispered in a far-off voice.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  I waited as he cleared layers of sediment from his throat.

  “You’ve been a good boy.” Then he let go of my hand and curled up tighter, falling back into his death dream.

  After my mother and sister went home to rest, I looked out from the fourth floor at the highway’s edge—the same highway, I-400, where I’d sat in the backseat of a drag-racing Dodge Charger as it flew across the empty pavement at 120 mph—the lanes now stacked with rush-hour traffic creeping north. As it grew dark, I watched the feathery seeds of cottonwoods rise over and over against the high glass.

  He was only fifty-nine: a skeleton and not a man. And though I knew it was self-centered, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d look like him when I died—when I died too young.

  Now his breathing seemed a little worse but it didn’t matter. A levee of morphine held back the pain. All life support had been taken off so it was up to him—up to his heart and maybe his brain. Maybe Jesus. My father, it seemed, had gotten a touch of religion over these last few years: not much, not the churchgoing kind, but he’d started reading Scripture again and talking about it. Every now and then I’d see his arm twitch, his legs move a little. He made no sounds except for the breathing.

  If I said goodbye, I don’t remember. We thought we still had a couple days to go. So when some friends took over the night shift, I got on that highway and tried to forget—crawling past my old exit, Northridge Road, past the lights of my school, Crestwood High School, past the dead ends lying out there in the clustered bands of suburban and now exurban development, until the traffic finally broke and I revved along back roads to my parents’ new house in the mountains.

  A gated community, Big Canoe was actually a seven-mountain resort whose name strove to recall the more natural and rustic days of Cherokee habitation, but not so natural as to exclude golf, tennis (indoor and outdoor), swimming (pool and lake), a general store, a chapel, and a cemetery. I tried to distract myself from my father by thinking of the other things living and dying out there—of the terrible drought that had squeezed Georgia for several years now, that had subsided with some rain in late spring, but in October 1990 reappeared with a vengeance. To save themselves, many of the shadowy oaks I passed had probably changed color early: green to rust-red, green to orange.

  At the five-bedroom cabin, a house built on stilts, we communicated like people do in these situations—mostly gestures and eyes—and after a while I poured another glass of my father’s top-shelf Evan Williams whiskey and stepped out onto the back porch.

  It was glorious out there: In daylight you could see all the way to North Carolina and Tennessee; you could see the water plummet over Amicalola Falls twenty miles away. Turkey vultures zoomed by at eye level. Bears rustled through mountain laurel below. And now at night it was an impossible firmament of stars in which the Milky Way, in its particular brightness, looked very much like the real road to heaven.

  When we got the call, however, I left that scene and marched straight through the front door and started screaming. A howl and then a moan and then a wail. Not a grief-stricken letting-go—not a release born from love—but a voice that tore out of me like an animal. Like a body. Like a thing that was not me, vanishing where it rose into the dry trees.

  * * *

  There was another story about my father and a drought—and then the opposite of a drought—that until the bizarre tales surrounding his death had long been my main story about him. It began with his birth in 1931, at the opening of the Great Depression, and described his family’s hardscrabble life on a hardscrabble farm in Oklahoma. The farm lay north of Tulsa, and every day dust clouds filled the sky like Old Testament locusts, bringing plague and hunger and bankruptcy. Eventually my grandparents gave up the farm, and my grandfather, a Church of God choir member with a b
ooming voice, took a series of oil field jobs in Oklahoma: Nowata, Cleveland, and ultimately Sapulpa. And after the war, the Army Corps of Engineers, in its great midcentury zeal for altering the American terrain, flooded the old farm and the surrounding region. The corps built an earthen dam on the Verdigris River that buried the land underwater, erasing that place from the map forever.

  My bones dropped when I heard this story as a kid. Secretly, I played out its apocalyptic details.

  From my treeless suburban backyard in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (where my father worked as branch manager of IBM), I imagined dust clouds building on the horizon and pictured my grandmother sweeping the thick dust from a dirt floor, dust that blew through every crevice and hole in the tiny farmhouse. Then, when the clouds passed over—a decadal shift that occurred instantaneously in my child’s brain—the dust turned suddenly to water and I walked under it; the sky shifted to lake surface and I trudged beneath it, churning my arms. After slogging up and down my underwater yard for a while, I’d race toward the back door, my lungs bursting. Surely my mother thought me a little peculiar: a small boy who kept crashing into the air-conditioned den, gulping for air.

  When I was young, I always wanted my father to return to that place and that water. I remember asking him, without success, to take us to Oologah Lake sometime so I could see it. (Strangely, the lake was named after the Cherokee word for “dark cloud”—and just as a black cloud hung over my fabled Cherokee relatives who were kicked out of Georgia and forced upon the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, so a dark cloud gathered over my father’s entrance to and exit from this world.) And then once we’d moved farther away—once I’d become more conscious of my own displacement as a teenager haunting those Atlanta dead ends—the watery scene bloomed into something of an obsession, like being buried alive.