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

been. It seemed more likely that the cremains contained filler of some sort—concrete, powdered limestone, or even just plain sand.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t right. The cremains that came back from Tri-State should have passed three tests, not unlike the three-part oath every courtroom witness has to swear to: that brass box the Hardens got back should have contained Chigger, the whole Chigger, and nothing but Chigger.

What had really happened to Chigger, and to all those other bodies, down in Georgia? On June 20, 2002, I would get another chance to try to figure it out—by way of a firsthand look.

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee, lies a hundred miles southwest of Knoxville; about twenty miles southeast of Chattanooga, but a world away culturally, lies the unincorporated Georgia community of Noble. It’s a name that now seems mighty ironic.

It doesn’t take long for U.S. Highway 27 to make its run through Noble. The four lanes are interrupted by one traffic light, two or three gas stations, and a sprinkling of other establishments offering a few essential goods and services: gas and groceries, hardware and hairdos, several varieties of salvation.

If you weren’t looking for it, you’d probably never notice Center Point Road, an unstriped ribbon of asphalt turning off Highway 27 to the east. A sign directs the faithful to Center Point Baptist Church (“Where Jesus Is King”), a few hundred yards down the road on the right. To the left is Roy Marsh Lane, followed by Clara Marsh Lane. Just beyond, across the road, is the long, curving driveway leading to Ray Brent Marsh’s home and, beyond and slightly downhill, the Tri-State complex.

The house is a small frame structure, maybe a three-bedroom rancher; out front stands an antique Esso gas pump. Just beyond the house is a wooden privacy fence. In this respect, as in many others, it turns out, the Tri-State grounds bear a striking resemblance to the Body Farm. The chief difference is intent: At the Body Farm, we let bodies decompose only because there’s no other way to advance this particular frontier of science. It may sound contradictory, but we hold those decomposing bodies in the highest respect for their unique contribution to forensic research and the quest for killers.

Tri-State’s fence encloses two large, barnlike buildings, a tiny hut of an office, and a garagelike building with a rusty metal stack jutting up from one end, where the crematorium is located. The larger buildings contain concrete and metal burial vaults; four months before my visit, those vaults had been stuffed with decaying bodies. Now they were empty.

Off to one side of the buildings, at the edge of the woods, I noticed a broken-down hearse resting on flat tires, rusting in the shade. Opening the door, I caught a foul whiff of decomposition; I later learned that a body had been riding in the back for many months, until the property was raided in February. Nearby stood a mobile home, with another junky hearse parked in front; beside the trailer was a commercial-size barbecue grill, which raised some interesting questions—or simply underscored the irony of the crematorium’s nonperformance.

The crematorium building contained virtually nothing but the cremation furnace itself, a massive, industrial-looking oven built mainly of blackened firebrick. At the rear of the furnace, the secondary combustion chamber, which burned any organic material not consumed in the main chamber, looked rusted through in several places, as did the flue above it.

Sliding up the furnace door, I peered inside the main chamber with a flashlight. There wasn’t a body inside, I was relieved to see, just walls, a ceiling, and a floor of heat-resistant firebrick and concrete, much of it cracking and crumbling. The floor at the base of the furnace was blackened, greasy, and littered with dirt, gravel, and at least one small, unburned human vertebra—a child’s—missed by the GBI and the D-MORT team in their sweep of the property.

I was not the only one who came to inspect Tri-State on this hot summer day. Today was designated a “discovery day” for all the plaintiffs filing suit against Tri-State, the Marsh family, and various funeral homes. All the lawyers involved, for both the plaintiffs and the various defendants, brought in their expert witnesses to inspect the facility. Several former students of mine came over to say hello. One of them, Tom Bodkin, works for the Chattanooga medical examiner; another, Tony Falsetti, teaches anthropology at the University of Florida. I also spotted Michael Baden, a prominent forensic pathologist from New York City, accompanied by a New York forensic dentist. The concentration of forensic firepower in Noble was remarkable.

My visit was cut short when Tom Bodkin, from Chattanooga, stooped down in the driveway area and began to point out human bones—unburned human bones—lying in the dirt. A local sheriff’s deputy, standing watch over all the lawyers and scientists, radioed headquarters for instructions. Seal off the site, the reply came crackling back. He herded us all off the property, and within minutes a caravan of sheriff’s cruisers and black GBI sedans arrived, looking appropriately like some forensic funeral procession. I’d already seen enough of Tri-State and its cremation furnace by this point anyway. I could see what kind of shape the equipment was in, and it sure didn’t look like it had been regularly serviced by its manufacturer.

THE GENERAL MOTORS of the cremation industry is a Florida company with the particularly uninformative name Industrial Equipment and Engineering Company, or IEE. In the summer of 2001, some nine months before the Noble story first came to light, I visited IEE’s factory in Apopka, a small town outside Orlando.

The IEE Power-Pak is the company’s workhorse cremation furnace. Unlike a funeral-home coffin, which is mainly about elegance and show, a cremation furnace is clearly a product of heavy industry, not built for public viewing. With its drop-front door open, the Powerpack looks like a triple-deep, heavy-duty version of the oven in which Hansel and Gretel nearly became gingerbread. The floor is flat, the top is arched, and the entire