Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

shot him (accidentally, the family says) a quarter-century before had been. His sister Suzy asked a nearby funeral home to arrange it, and she bought a fancy brass container to hold his ashes. Chigger’s girlfriend was pregnant, and Suzy wanted Chigger’s child to have the ashes someday.

The family mourned Chigger’s passing at a memorial service; afterward his body was taken to a waiting hearse and driven to a crematorium. The funeral service and cremation cost $3,110.59, including almost $800 for a combustible, cloth-covered coffin. A few weeks later a plastic bag of ashy, cremated remains—“cremains,” they’re called in the funeral industry—was sent back, and a funeral-home employee transferred them to the brass box. Suzy kept them on her mantel for a while, then gave them to Chigger’s girlfriend.

Twenty-two months later, his family watched with horror as a macabre story unfolded on national television. Bodies—unburned, decaying human bodies—were being discovered in Noble, Georgia, on the grounds of Tri-State Crematory. Tri-State was where Chigger’s body had been sent to be cremated nearly two years before.

The troubles at Tri-State first became public on February 15, 2002. Inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency, tipped off by a phone call, inspected the Tri-State property and spotted a human skull on the grounds. The EPA inspector called in the cavalry, and soon dozens of sheriff’s deputies and Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) agents were swarming over the grounds. Within hours they found dozens of bodies; in the gruesome days that followed, they found hundreds more: 339 in all, buried in shallow pits, stuffed into metal burial vaults, stacked in the surrounding forest like cordwood, even rotting inside broken-down hearses.

The tip to authorities had come, by a roundabout path, from the truck driver who kept Tri-State’s propane tanks filled. During the course of a routine delivery, the driver spotted human bodies on the property. But apparently he couldn’t conceal his curiosity (or his shock), because the next time he made a delivery, he was told to get off the property and mind his own business.

Tri-State was a family business. Ray and Clara Marsh opened the crematorium in 1982, and it quickly began drawing business from Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, the three states whose borders converge about twenty miles to the northwest of Noble. Tri-State consistently charged less than other crematoriums, and its services—unlike that of most competitors—included picking up bodies from the funeral homes it contracted with, then returning to deliver the cremains a day or two later.

In 1996, Ray and Clara turned the business over to their son, Ray Brent. Business remained brisk; by early 2002, Tri-State had cremated some 3,200 bodies. At least, that’s what everyone assumed. Then, on February 15, the awful truth began to emerge.

Within hours after their arrival, the EPA inspectors found several dozen bodies in varying stages of decay. The following day, Georgia’s governor declared a state of emergency in Walker County, and authorities grimly predicted that the body count could reach the hundreds. In the first of a long series of legal proceedings, Ray Brent Marsh was arrested and charged with five felony counts of “theft by deception,” for accepting payment for cremation services he didn’t actually perform. By the following Sunday, the body count was approaching one hundred, and Marsh faced additional criminal charges. Hundreds of investigators were converging on Tri-State, ranging from EPA and Georgia Health Department inspectors to county sheriffs, agents from the GBI and FBI, and disaster-management specialists from federal and state agencies.

One little-known emergency response program that falls under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service is a grim organization called D-MORT (pronounced “DEE-mort”): Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Staffed by a wide range of volunteer specialists—medical examiners, forensic dentists, search-dog handlers, forensic anthropologists, morticians, and other professionals who deal in one way or another with death—D-MORT teams are summoned to scenes of mass death such as airliner crashes. (My Knoxville Police Department friend Art Bohanan did a research study at the Body Farm for D-MORT several years ago, as part of an effort to develop leakproof body bags. So far that effort still hasn’t fully succeeded.)

One of D-MORT’s toughest jobs came in April of 1995, when the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a truck bomb. Three of my graduate students went out to help D-MORT volunteers identify bodies pulled from the building’s rubble. A far greater, sadder challenge for D-MORT, though, came in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Hundreds of volunteers risked injury to comb the wreckage of New York’s World Trade Towers at Ground Zero; other D-MORT members helped locate and identify the dead at the Pentagon.

Five months after 9/11, as they scoured the pine woods behind Tri-State, members of the southeastern regional D-MORT team were stunned by what they were finding. On Sunday, February 17, one of my graduate students, Rick Snow, got a phone call from a D-MORT officer asking him to come to Georgia immediately. Rick, who had signed on as a D-MORT volunteer some months before, possessed some particularly relevant experience: He had recently returned from a stint overseas, working for the United Nations war-crimes tribunal in Bosnia. For eight months in Bosnia, Rick excavated mass graves and helped identify the thousands of civilians murdered in the name of “ethnic cleansing.” The politics and the motives weren’t the same in Georgia—the only plausible explanations seemed to be some combination of laziness, sloppiness, and penny-pinching on propane costs—but the bodies and the scope of the task were similar to what Rick had experienced in the Balkans.

Rick arrived on Monday, February 18, to help recover and identify bodies. When he set foot behind the fence at Noble, he must have felt himself transported into a scene somewhere between the Balkans and the Twilight Zone. Bodies were scattered throughout the wooded property. Some were buried; some were stuffed into rusting vehicles and steel burial vaults; some were simply tossed beneath the trees and beside junked appliances, their decaying flesh covered only by