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 rotting cardboard, leaves, and pine needles. On the day Rick got there, the body count reached 139; already 29 of those had been identified by distraught relatives. As the only person on-site with mass-burial expertise, Rick assumed a key role in guiding the search-and-recovery work. The task was greatly hindered by the trees and underbrush covering most of the property, so at Rick’s suggestion, a crew with chain saws and bulldozers began cutting the trees and clearing the land, all the way down to the red Georgia clay.
The day after Rick joined the effort, the GBI searched Brent Marsh’s house, located at the entrance to the crematorium complex, seeking records that could help shed light on the number of bodies that might be hidden on the property, as well as their identities. While searching the house, they spotted still more bodies in the backyard.
Meanwhile, calls from worried people were pouring into funeral homes across the Southeast. Had their loved one been sent to Tri-State? If so, were these the genuine cremains on the mantel or in the cemetery, or was the dearly departed actually festering on the Tri-State grounds?
By Wednesday, just five days after the story broke, the cost of the investigation had soared to $5 million, and the body count had reached 242. Aided by the chain saws and bulldozers, searchers found nearly 100 more bodies during the next six days. On the twelfth day, the grisly finds ceased.
The final toll was 339 bodies at Tri-State, and immeasurable heartache among the families who knew, or feared, that one of those bodies belonged to a father, a mother, a sibling, a child. About 75 of the 339 bodies were identified within the first two weeks. Most of those were recent, relatively fresh bodies: easy to recognize, hard to look at. But painful as it must have been to identify a loved one among the bodies retrieved from Tri-State, at least those families got swift closure, or the chance to begin seeking it. For hundreds more people, the uncertainty and pain would drag on and on.
Within days after the EPA inspector’s discovery of a skull, the lawsuits began—some against Tri-State, others against the funeral homes that had contracted with the crematorium. That’s when I started to hear from lawyers.
On February 21, I got an E-mail from William Brown, an attorney from Cleveland, Tennessee, asking me to analyze the cremains that Tri-State had sent back to Chigger Harden’s family. Understandably, the family feared that the cremains might not be Chigger’s.
Three weeks later, Bill Brown brought me the cremains. Double-bagged in plastic were a few handfuls of dark gray, ashy material. Including the plastic bags, the entire sample weighed 1,650 grams, or 3.6 pounds. That seemed skimpy: the most recent published study on cremation weights gave the average weight of cremains as 2,895 grams for males, 1,840 for females. (Curious about this subject, I began a research study of my own. Several times a week over the next five months, I went to a cooperative crematorium nearby and weighed cremains before they were sent back to families or funeral homes. After weighing fifty sets of cremains from males and fifty from females, I found the males averaged 3,452 grams, or 7.6 pounds, and the females 2,770 grams, or 6.1 pounds.)
As Brown watched, I carefully emptied the bags onto a clean metal tray, then sifted the material through a 4-millimeter wire screen, which would catch all but the smallest pieces. The bags clearly contained fragments of burned human bones: Even though the pieces were small, I could tell from the smooth, curved surface of some of the fragments that they’d come from the head of a femur (thighbone) or a humerus (upper arm bone). There was also a piece of a bone from the hand; a piece from a foot; and small bits of a metatarsal (foot bone), ribs, a femur, and a tibia (lower leg bone).
Much of what the screen caught, though, was nonhuman material. There was one metal staple—not the kind used for stapling papers together but a big, heavy-duty fastener that might have held together a corrugated cardboard carton, of the sort funeral homes use to ship bodies to crematoriums. (Normally when a body is cremated, it’s left in the shipping carton and the entire carton is simply slid into the oven; that makes it easier to handle, and it solves the problem of disposing of the carton as biohazardous waste. Afterward a powerful magnet is used to remove steel objects such as the staples.) The screen had also caught some pieces of what appeared to be burned wood and some fragments of black fabric. The fabric surprised me, since cloth burns at just a few hundred degrees Fahrenheit, while a cremation furnace normally runs far hotter, around 1,600 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Most puzzling of all, though, were numerous marble-size spheres of a fluffy white substance. Fuzz balls was the best term I could come up with to describe them. The fuzz balls weighed practically nothing, but they represented a considerable percentage of the sample’s volume. Were they accidental contaminants or deliberately added filler? I’d never seen anything like them, and I told Brown so. I offered to get some laboratory tests made at UT; he agreed that might be a good idea, then he thanked me and left.
I got on the phone and called a textile scientist I knew, who offered to look at the fuzz balls. A professor at UT’s Forest Products Center agreed to analyze the fragments that appeared to be wood. I arranged to get samples to them.
These tests would pinpoint the nature of the nonhuman fragments that the 4-millimeter wire screen had sifted out. But that left the bulk of the sample, not quite three pounds of powder and fine particles, which had sifted through the mesh. Visually, the material looked darker than the human cremains I’d seen occasionally over the past forty years, but in a court of law, I knew, I’d have to be more precise than that about what this was—or what it wasn’t.
When Brown had first contacted me, he’d mentioned that there were indications the cremains from Tri-State might include cement powder, because the authorities’ search of the facility turned up numerous bags of cement. Cement looks very similar to the ash that results from incinerating and pulverizing human bones, so it seemed possible that the crematorium might resort to sending families bags of cement powder if they didn’t have genuine cremains to send. I searched the scientific literature to find if there was an easy test I could do for the presence of cement.
Cement is mostly powdered limestone, or calcium carbonate. One quick test geologists use to tell if a rock is limestone is to squirt a drop or two of hydrochloric acid on the rock. If the liquid fizzes when it hits the rock, they know it’s limestone.
I’d obtained a small quantity of dilute hydrochloric acid, which was sealed in a medicine bottle with an eyedropper. Carefully, I sucked up a few drops into the dropper’s rubber bulb and squeezed them onto a small mound of powder I’d put on a metal tray. As soon as the drops hit the powder, they fizzed and bubbled. It looks like this might be cement, I thought, or powdered limestone, anyhow.
I made one last phone call, to Dr. Al Hazari, a UT chemistry professor I’d known and respected for years. Al agreed to obtain a more detailed chemical analysis of the powdery material; at his direction, I rescreened the cremains another five times to be sure it was free of larger pieces and to mix it uniformly. Then I scooped out 42 grams—about an ounce and a half—sealed it in a small vial, and took it over to the chemistry department.
With any luck, we’d be able to tell the Harden family more soon.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to hear back from my colleague in the Forest Products Center. The sample I’d taken him was burned plywood, he said. That was neither surprising nor disturbing: The cardboard cartons in which bodies are generally shipped and cremated have a thin plywood floor, so they can support the weight of the corpse when the carton is picked up. Without it, the carton might buckle or tear, especially if fluids have seeped from the body.
My textile expert’s report on the fuzz balls told me they were a synthetic material—probably polypropylene, he said. Polypropylene is an incredibly versatile plastic. Molded or cast as a solid material, it’s used to make things ranging from dishwasher-safe food-storage containers to automobile bumpers. Spun into fibers, it’s made into outdoor carpeting, floating marine ropes, and tearproof FedEx envelopes.
Polypropylene is light, strong, tough, and versatile, but it’s not heat-resistant. Its melting point isn’t much above 300 degrees Fahrenheit—less than the temperature at which chocolate-chip cookies bake, let alone the fierce heat required to burn a body. Accidentally or intentionally, the fuzz balls had clearly been added after Chigger Harden’s body was cremated.
If, that is, Chigger’s body had been cremated. Clearly the sample contained fragments of burned human bones. But were they Lloyd Harden’s bones or someone else’s? If DNA could survive the cremation process, we could answer that question definitively. Unfortunately, cremation, if done right, burns all the organic material in bone. In a process called calcining, bone is reduced to its primary mineral building block, calcium. The carbon-based DNA molecules—like the carbon in a cardboard coffin or a cotton shirt—burn up completely. Chemically, all traces of human life and identity go up in smoke. So the bulk of our sample—that 2.9 pounds of ashy material remaining after the rusted staple and charred fabric and fuzz balls were sifted out—couldn’t tell us whether this was Chigger Harden. All it could tell us was whether most of it was, or had been, a human being.
On April 30, I received the results of the chemical analysis. My chemist colleague Hazari had hit upon an ingeniously simple test to suggest whether the material was human. The human body has a fairly consistent chemical composition. At some point during our school years, most of us learn that the body is mostly water—roughly 60 percent by weight. The other 40 percent is divided among a host of other elements, mainly calcium and carbon. (If humans had ingredient labels, like prepackaged foods in the grocery store, our list of ingredients might start out as follows: water, calcium, carbon . . .)
One ingredient that’s practically last on the body’s list is silicon. On average, the human body contains just 18 grams of it, or about two-thirds of an ounce. If you evaporate all the body’s water and burn off all its carbon in a cremation furnace, you’re likely to end up with 5 or 6 pounds of cremains, of which silicon represents less than 1 percent by weight.
Hazari had sent my 42-gram sample to a certified commercial lab in Knoxville called Galbraith Laboratories (“Accuracy with Speed—Since 1950”). He could have tested it himself in a chemistry lab at the university, but a certified lab’s precision is frequently tested and well documented, and we wanted to be sure the analysis would hold up in court. A Galbraith technician ran the sample through a spectrographic test called “ICP-OES,” short for “inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy.” The ICP part of the procedure burns an unknown material in argon gas, glowing brightly at 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Then the OES instrument “fingerprints” the sample, essentially, by reading the wavelengths of the light given off as the sample burns. The final step is to compare the sample’s optical fingerprint with those of known elements. It’s an analytical chemist’s version of the way an FBI fingerprint analyst compares a crime scene print with a database of prints from known criminals.
According to Galbraith Laboratories’ ana
lysis, the cremains identified by Tri-State as Chigger’s were more than 15 percent silicon. Unless he’d been eating a lot of dirt just before he died, that reading was a lot higher than it should have 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.
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