Dead And Forsaken

By Amanda Ripley

There is a time to weep, a season to mourn. But there is not supposed to be a second time to do it again from the beginning. Last Tuesday night, about 100 alumni of grief filed into the Oakwood Baptist Church in Walker County, Ga. Clutching candles and tissues, they were forced to revisit the rituals of death. This time they prayed not for the souls of the dead but for the bodies--the 298 (and counting) men, women and at least one infant strewn about the landscape of a remote northwest Georgia crematory.

Instead of being cremated, as promised and paid for, these families' relatives had been stacked like firewood in piles of a dozen or more, jammed into sheds and buried haphazardly in the backyard of the crematory owners. For the rest of the week the families took the urns they thought contained their loved ones' ashes to the Walker County Civic Center in hopes of putting them to rest--again. "One woman had her mama in her lap. The next one had her uncle. The next one had her brother," recalls Gary Guy, 50, who had come from Ringgold, Ga., to track down his mother-in-law's body. "How in the world could this have happened?"

While the scene at the Noble, Ga., crematory is a uniquely grisly spectacle--more than 500 forensic experts, anthropologists and other investigators expect to spend the next eight months and many millions of dollars extracting bodies in every stage of decomposition--it did not come as a complete surprise to those who study the death industry. For years critics have been calling for better state and federal oversight of such businesses. While the vast majority of funeral directors and crematory operators do their job honorably, there is plenty of room for abuse, and every so often a scandal spurs a flurry of proposed regulations. But in most cases they don't go anywhere or, if they do, they don't get enforced. Although cremation has been growing in use at a rate of about 5% a year, few states have laws or bureaucracies to keep an eye on the process. Most people don't want to deal with death until it happens, and not even then.

On Feb. 15, an anonymous caller told the local office of the Environmental Protection Agency to check out the Tri-State Crematory in Noble. Authorities spoke to Ray Brent Marsh, 28, who had taken over the operation from his father in 1996. He told them the incinerator had broken a while back. Each day thereafter brought new appalling discoveries of bodies, some dating back 15 years or more. Fifty-seven corpses were found crammed into six burial vaults. (Each vault is designed to hold just one adult-size coffin.) So far, a skull and torso have been found in the Marshes' pond, where locals used to fish.

Nobody is more at a loss to explain the horrific trove than the people who live in Noble and have known the Marsh family all their lives. On Thursday, the tally of bodies unearthed surpassed the total population of the rural, unincorporated town. It was impossible to reconcile the news reports with the family's reputation. Like most people who spoke to TIME, a bewildered Judy Davis said of the Marshes, "They are good people, churchgoing people."

Brent's father Ray had opened the crematory in 1982, expanding on his grave-digging business. The Marsh family was among the most prominent of the few African-American families in the area. Ray's wife Clara--known as "Preacher Clara"--taught in public schools for more than 30 years. In 1995 she was selected as Walker County's Citizen of the Year. Incredibly, Ray even ran for county coroner in 1992. (He lost.) When he became ill with heart disease in the mid-1990s, Brent returned home from the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, where he played football and was close to graduating with a business degree. A cousin, Bobby Clemmons, 47, claims Brent's parents pushed him into the family business, even though he had wanted to go to law school.

But once he returned, Brent settled into the community. He married and moved into a house adjacent to his parents' and the crematory. Two weeks ago, his wife had a baby girl. Friends say he liked to buy Tommy Hilfiger clothes and new cars. He politely chatted with neighbors when he took his car to Test & Tune and ate at Wanda's Restaurant. Over the past four years, he brought three bodies to a nearby crematory, telling co-owner Glenda Wilson his equipment was down and he needed a favor, she says. She always complied, free of charge. The Marsh clan went about the business of living, all the while surrounded by rotting corpses.

It might be easier to process this tale if there had never been any other like it, if this were just an inexplicable aberration. But in California, which has some of the tightest controls in the country, a Lake Elsinore funeral-home and crematory owner was arrested two weeks ago for allegedly dismembering dozens of bodies he was supposed to have cremated or buried and selling them to unwitting science labs. (His lawyer denies any wrongdoing.) Last December in Florida, several cemeteries were sued for allegedly crushing vaults to make room for others and for stashing bodies in nearby woods. The facilities are owned by Service Corporation International, the largest cemetery concern in the world. The company is cooperating with authorities.

About half the states have some regulations governing crematories--though often not enough inspectors to enforce them. In nine states there are no regulations at all--aside from some limits on emissions. In Maryland the legislature has shot down crematory regulation two years in a row. Steve Sklar, director of the state office of cemetery oversight, hopes it will reconsider now. Solid legislation, he says, for a case like the Marshes' "may not stop the first 10 bodies. But you certainly will stop the next 250."

Back in Georgia, Representative Mike Snow has introduced a bill to require all crematories to be licensed. The irony is acute, since in 1992, Snow had introduced an amendment to exempt the Marsh place from inspection for two years--at Ray Marsh's request. When the coroner complained in 1995 that Marsh wasn't licensed, Marsh's lawyers convinced the state attorney general that Marsh was exempt. The Marsh place only dealt with funeral homes and thus did not fit the state's definition of a crematory as a facility open to the public.

Beyond the bureaucratic lapses, the most baffling question is why the Marsh family went to the trouble of hiring lawyers, lobbying state representatives and allegedly hauling bodies to all corners of their property but never took the simple step of fixing the crematory. "[The repair] is not complicated at all. It's basically a gas flame with a blower," says Charles Kirkland of the Cremation Society of the South. Once the repairs were made, cremating the bodies would have cost only about $25 each. The Marshes were reportedly paid between $200 and $1,500 for each cremation.

For now, Brent Marsh is in jail, under suicide watch, charged with 16 counts of theft by deception. He could face as much as 15 years in prison on each count. Six lawsuits have already been filed by families of the deceased, a few naming some of the 30 funeral homes that sent bodies to the Marsh crematory. Georgia's Governor has asked the President for federal help, and the Federal Disaster Mortuary Response Team that worked on the scene of the World Trade Center attacks has arrived. At least 79 urns of ashes have been tested, and 17 have been found to contain concrete dust or potting soil.

--Reported by Leslie Berestein/Los Angeles, Anne Berryman/Noble, Jeanne DeQuine/West Palm Beach, Greg Land/Atlanta and Deirdre van Dyk/ New York

With reporting by Leslie Berestein/Los Angeles, Anne Berryman/Noble, Jeanne DeQuine/West Palm Beach, Greg Land/Atlanta and Deirdre van Dyk/New York