This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care. Campsite Media. Sheila Mannis came to no death at a young age. She was born in Murray County, in Northwest Georgia, and she was the youngest in her family, so she was spoiled as a kid. But she had to grow up fast.

My mother died when I was 15. She had a heart attack. Three years later, my dad drowned. I was 18. The thing of it is I'd been raised that you don't just lay in a wall or you move on, pick up, make the best of it.

Sheila and her brother got jobs and bought a house together. She was when she had her first daughter.

I was going to raise her. I didn't need a man. That's the way I was raised, independent.

Death shapes us all. It brings families together or rips them apart. Death can rob you of stability or grant you new freedom. For Sheila, the death of her parents intensified her independence, but also made her protective, loyal. In 1979, Sheila was working in hospice care while finishing her nursing degree. One of her patients set Sheila up with her son.

She kept, Oh, I've got this good-looking son. You're just going to have to make me knew he's coming in. Well, he came to see her that day and I thought, Well, he's not bad. I need some work with these clothes. I can fix that.

His name was Ira, and he was an army ranger. He had brown hair and blue eyes and a slight hint of a mustache, and Sheila thought he was cute. Just like Sheila, Ira had become fiercely independent after a tough childhood, but their mutual independence added up to good chemistry and good dates. Sheila and Ira got married six weeks after they met. Sheila was 19, and Ira was 22. They had two children and raised them together with Sheila's daughter in a house in Chatsworth. Ira got a good job at the Department of Transportation, and Sheila was soon able to stay home like she wanted to. In his free time, Ira liked to deer hunt. He used a 30-aught 6 rifle and later a muzzel loader that Sheila got him. She actually got him a kit, and he had to put the muzzel loader together himself. He told Sheila he liked it better that way because he built it. Ira was a hersy kiss nut. He would buy a huge bag of them to eat while he was sitting up in his tree stand, watching for deer.

But he didn't want to make that rattling sound. So the night before, I would sit there and unwrap each of those individual hersy kisses and put them in a ziploc bag for him.

That is the sweetest thing I've ever heard. I literally and figuratively. Oh, my God. That's so amazing.

Yes.

To Sheila, Ira was the guy worth unwrapping hersy kiss for. They were happy together. But sometimes life comes down to a coin flip, and one day it became apparent that Ira lost the toss. He was out hunting and traipsing through the woods, stepping over fallen sticks, crossing creeks, and he noticed that he had trouble keeping his balance. A few years later, he started having involuntary trembles in his limbs. Then they graduated to more severe tremors and slurred speech. In 1994, Ira was diagnosed with Huntington's disease. Huntington's is caused by a faulty gene. If a parent has it, there's a 50% chance their kid gets it. Before the disease takes your life, and it always does, it takes away your balance, your strength, your speech, until you're just in bed and need help with everything. It's a nightmare for the patient, of course, but also for the people who love them. My own father had Parkinson's disease, which is similarly progressive and unstoppable. It killed my dad, but not before it nearly broke my mother, who had to take care of him as he forgot who she was, lost his ability to clean himself, and got violent with the people he loved most.

Which is all to say that families that deal with physical and cognitive breakdowns are often in a battle against breaking down altogether, all while they're dealing with the question of why. Why did this happen to us? Ira was put in hospice care at home, so he could die as peacefully as possible. By then, he was helpless to do almost anything at all.

So we made through the fourth of July, and then that was about it. He was in bed after that. And it got where he couldn't swallow and things like that. But I took care of him.

Ira told Sheila that when the time came, he wanted his body cremated and his ashes scattered. He said there were too many cemeteries on this Earth, taking up too much room. He wanted to save space for the living. Sheila promised Ira that when he died, she would do everything he asked. One night, Sheila was in Ira's room, and he motioned for her to come over next to him.

I got over there, and I squatted down, was holding his hands, and I said, What? It took me a minute. I couldn't figure out what he was saying. His brother said, He's telling you he He loves you. And I said, Are you saying you love me? And he nodded his head, Yes, that's why I love you, too. And that was the last word Dara said to me. We were just standing there, and I have prayed if God never answers another prayer for me at all if he would just let his heart give out. He took one big deep breath, and then he sobbed, and it was just so peaceful, and he didn't, Oh, my God, I've killed him yet. But That was it. It was so peaceful, and we kept her vows to look to his part.

Ira died on August 9, 2000. He was 43 years old. He had arranged his own cremation and funeral in advance with the fancy see his funeral home around. They didn't have their own crematory, so like a lot of funeral homes, they use a third party to do the cremations. Sheila's understanding was that they would take Ira's body to a crematory in Atlanta and then drive the ashes back up for the funeral. Ira had also picked out the music for his memorial service and wrote his own eulogy. The man had been well-prepared to die. The funeral service was packed with friends, family, people from Ira's work. The funeral director gave Sheila a black plastic container a little smaller than a shoe box. Inside was a thick plastic bag holding what was left of Ira. Sheila and the family drove to the top of Fort Mountain, where Ira had killed his first deer, to spread his cremains.

You can see all the mountains. There's this rock wall, and you can stand there and just look, and it was beautiful. And the wind was blowing, so it was just... There was a breeze, and it just took them off over the overlook there, and it was just so nice. And I thought, Okay, I have done everything he asked me to now, the end. I've lived up and done everything.

Sheila was relieved after spreading Ira's ashes. She had fulfilled his final wishes in every way. He told her to be strong for the kids. She stayed strong. He told her he wanted to be cremated and spread in the mountain, and she did that, too. It wasn't the same as crossing off items on a grocery list, though. Each step along the way, the funeral, the eulogy, the cremation, the spreading of the ashes, each step helped her grieve. While fulfilling Ira's wishes, Sheila also jumpstarted her own healing. But soon something would interrupt her healing, and the healing of hundreds of other families in Northwest Georgia and Southern Tennessee. A year and a half after Ira died, Sheila learned that Ira's body wasn't taken to a crematory down in Atlanta. He was taken to Tri-State Crematory. From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble. I'm Sean Raviv. Episode 3, The Vaults.

In February of 2002, it's been a year and a half since Sheila Mannes' husband, Ira, died of Huntington's disease.

Sheila is still grieving. Ira isn't in bed next to her when she goes to sleep. He isn't around to play with their grandchildren. There are no hersy kisses to unwrap before Ira goes deer hunting. But Sheila has found some peace, some sense of moving on from Ira's death. One evening, Sheila is home by herself. She's got the music turned up while she vacumes, but she hears a knock on the door. It's her neighbor.

You can tell they're all serious. And she said, Have you been watching the news? And I'm like, No. She said, Well, you about want to turn it down. So they turned my TV on for me. A disturbing story tonight from Northern Georgia.

Bones and skulls scattered across the property surrounding the Tri-state Crematorium. Searchers will now have to go over 16 acres of woods on the crematorium's property.

The bodies were dumped in woods and storage sheds outside the crematory.

Residents of the town of Noble are in shock tonight. The local coroner said, Think of the worst horror movie you've ever seen. Imagine that, he said, 10 times worse. At first, Sheila shrugs it off. Ira's body was sent down to Atlanta to be cremated. Estimated, not somewhere around here. The funeral home that arranged it never mentioned a place called Tri-State Crematory. But then she pulls out Ira's death certificate and sees that it does, in fact, say Tri-State Crematory, right there under place of disposition. Sheila isn't sure what to think. She got Ira's ashes from the funeral home. She spread them at the top of that beautiful mountain where he shot his first deer. All the stuff with Ira's funeral and cremation, it's all done, right? Now she isn't so sure. So Sheila and her children decide to drive to Noble. After all, it's not far. Just a couple of counties over. When she gets there, police and the media are already there in force.

I didn't really know what to expect this place to look like or anything, but they had the roads blocked off and home.

What were you thinking you were going to do there?

I thought they would have information. Tell us what to do.

The church is filled with families who, like Sheila, want to know what's going on at Tri-State, what happened to their loved ones' bodies, what they do to find out more, who they can ask. It's chaotic and feels like a circus to Sheila. People want answers now, but the bodies have only just been discovered by police after the EPA agents found a skull on the property. It's not like there's a playbook for this thing. It's completely unprecedented for just about everyone involved. A crematory that didn't burn the bodies, it's not something that will resolve itself overnight or even over weeks or months. It's just not an everyday crime. It's a spectacle. Sure to attract the attention of everyone in the county, the state, and beyond. And nobody knows how to handle it at first. And it's not just the families that are confused. The investigators on the scene pretty quickly rule out necrophilia or some other disturbing way the bodies might have been used by Brent Marsh, the man who was running the crematory. But they still have plenty of questions of their own. For one, how the hell did so many bodies accumulate here without anybody noticing?

They also have to figure out what laws were broken. They know a crime has been committed, but they don't know which one. So what are they going to arrest Brent Marsh for? In Georgia at the time, there is no law against desecration of a corpse unless the body is already buried. So grave robbing is a crime, but there has to be a grave first. For the most part, the body sent to trisate have come straight from a funeral home or a hospital. So technically, Brent hasn't broken any specific law related to corpses. After much discussion Second, the district attorney settles on a fairly banal charge of theft by deception, a charge they might use against someone who commits insurance fraud or identity theft. They basically charge Brent with lying to his customers.

The owner of a facility for cremating the remains of the dead in the rural Northwestern Georgia town of Noble is under arrest after investigators bodies all over the property.

Ray Brent Marsh has been charged with theft by deception for not performing cremations that were paid for.

We do expect as further remains are identified that there will be further warrants taken.

Brent Marsh, the 28-year-old Rotary Club member, is arrested on a Saturday, the day after the initial discovery, on five counts of theft by deception. Five, because that's how many bodies the police can identify straight off, from a body wearing a hospital ID bracelet or somebody unseen just recognizing them. Greg Ramey, the special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the GBI, comes to suspect other members of the Marsh family of wrongdoing, too. But at the moment, there's no clear evidence or reason to charge them. The news is on TVs all over Georgia and the country and abroad. Noble, this place without a single restaurant or traffic light is suddenly a topic of conversation around the world. You're looking at the aerials now, the crematory site here, Northwestern Georgia, location about 85 miles north of Atlanta. As far as calls on the 1-800 number, it looks like we're getting over 600 calls daily.

We've had people call us as far as Canada. This is such an intense case of intense public concern and interest. We're making commitments today for a long term operation up here. It's a very expensive operation, ladies and gentlemen. The cost is going to be staggering, but certainly not to what it is to the families who have lost loved ones and have loved ones here in Walker County.

Everyone in Walker County turns their attention to tristate crematory. The director of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency estimates that the search and recovery of bodies will take eight months and millions of dollars. The FAA establishes a no-fly zone over the property to keep away the media and the public. Georgia's Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, visits Walker County and flies over the Marsh property in a helicopter. He declares a state of emergency in the county. And in a letter to President George W Bush, the governor says that the tristate incident is, Of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state. Basically, he says he needs some federal help down here. Before the ink has even dried on Brent's arrest warrant, Governor Barnes accuses him of, quote, depravity, and says the state to use its full power to prosecute him. Brent makes Bond after his first arrest on Saturday, and then on Sunday, he's arrested again, this time on 11 new counts of theft by deception. And again, Brent bonds out of jail. And then, Brent is arrested yet again, a third time on 102 new counts. Special Agent Greg Ramey is there, and he speaks to Brent, hoping to get some information out of him.

I said, I'm here to help you help me. And I said, You help me by telling me what's going on. And then I even spoke to him. I said, Let me talk to you on a personal level. Just one Walker County resident talking to another one. I said, People are going to want answers. And I said, If you don't give them answers, if you don't talk to me, people are going to make up what they want to make up. They're going to make you out to be a monster that maybe you are, maybe you're not. But I said, Without you giving them some direction to go, people are going to make up some pretty horrible things about you. And he looked at me and said, Understood.

This time, when Brent is arrested, he doesn't get out on bond. He's kept in jail indefinitely. Over the first few days after Greg Ramey and other officers first discovered bodies in the Marsh family property, even as Walker County and the world, really, are descending on noble, Greg stays focused on one thing, a morbid and gruesome search for every body and body part on on the property, whatever state they're in. They have to be thorough because it's not like looking for a missing piece of jewelry. It's not a situation where you can afford to miss something. If a body is there, you have to find it.

We're looking around seeing 30 plus bodies here going, Holy cow. Our first concerns are, we're hoping that it's contained to this. Back of your mind, you're going, I know it's a lot bigger than this.

The property big, 16 acres, including a bunch of buildings, trailers, cars, herses, a lake, piles of junk, all sorts of equipment, old and new, and acres of dense woods. It's one of those properties where there's stuff everywhere. Not quite a junk backyard, but some parts of the property have lots of junk. There are a thousand places a body could be hidden. So when Greg and dozens of other officers return to the Marsh property, they split up into teams of three. They carry radios, and after they find a body, they message a single GBI agent who's in charge of dolling out the numbers.

That way, you don't end up with two body number 31s or two body number 25s or whatever. So one person issuing the numbers for the body. So when somebody say, Hey, we've got a new body. Okay, your next number is number 27. Photographs are taken. That body is identified just as body number 27.

The GBI agent giving out the numbers takes notes about where the body is discovered. Someone photographs it from all angles. Medical examiners review the remains to determine how the person died, see if there's an easy way to identify it. There's a lot going on. They keep finding more bodies almost everywhere they look. The numbers soon reach 50, then 60, and they've barely started.

So we had the little surveyor steak flags, and we're marking bodies. And one of the guys says, Hey, I'm out of a steak. Can you throw me one? I'm like, Yeah, sure. So I take a thing and pitch it to him. Well, it falters out for you. And it literally lands and hits next to some bones and stuff we hadn't even seen. So I mean, somebody made a joke, Dang, all you got to do is just throw them up there and they're going to land next to a body. It was that crazy just finding that many.

And those are just the ones sitting out for anyone to see. In muddier parts of the property, they find what appeared to be dug graves, maybe mass graves.

We're seeing large areas, an area seven or eight feet, 10 feet wide by seven or eight, 10 feet long, circular maybe. The ground's caving in around it. It's crusted, got the broke crust edge. So we know that's a burial. That ground has been disturbed. We marked that as that's a spot to dig at.

They find at least eight graves like that, like the one that Jerold Cooke, the gasman, saw in his delivery. The graves appear to have been dug with a backhoe. One of the pits is less than 90 feet from Brent's house. It will take days to meticulously dig them up and recover their remains. They find caskets in random places on the property containing bodies. They sometimes find individual long bones like femurs, and they get their own numbers, too. Some of these loose bones will be paired with the rest of their remains later. They name the different recovery sites for ease, and some of them get charming nicknames like Sunday Surprise and Granny. On top of around an upside-down pool table that has been turned into a makeshift basket with a plastic tarp, they find the remains of what would turn out to be 23 people, most of them in advanced stages of decomposition. Some of the bodies are wrapped in sheets or still wearing durable clothing, allowing them to at least be separated. But most are loose, only rendered distinct by collections of seasonal pine needles and leaves. A few yards away, they find a pile of bones mixed with trash, rotten food, appliances, fencing, tires.

But the most disturbing discovery on that second day has got to be the one inside the Butler building. Greg is photographing 20 plus bodies on the floor of the building, along with a veteran crime scene guy named David. They start to smell something, something really bad.

There was just this sickening odor. Just one that makes you step back and go, Oh, I'm about to step away about to throw up.

Greg walks around the building, but he can tell the odor isn't coming from any of the bodies he can see.

But then you keep hitting or smelling that odor, and it just keeps hitting. I'm like, David, what in the world? Where's that coming from? He said, I don't know. And so We had noticed the night before, and in that day, there were about six or seven vaults, metal vaults in there.

In addition to the crematory, the Marsh family also had a grave digging and vault business. The vaults are shaped like over sized caskets, but much heavier and made of concrete. They're put in the ground at a cemetery to protect a casket from rainwater, insects, and the weight of the Earth. Greg sees half a dozen of these in the Butler building sitting upside down on their rounded tops.

So we're sitting there and I leaned over next to it. When I got close to it, the odor was just, like I said, just sitting. And I said, David, lean over next to this. And he leaned over, he's like, Oh, my gosh. And we looked each other and he said, You know what that means? And for a second, it didn't hit me. I said, Oh, gosh. I said, There's bodies in there. He said, Exactly. So we unscrewed a couple of the screws and popped that thing open. And good Lord, we cleared that building. I mean, it was just immediate. The vault is maybe, well, say, seven feet long, and it's maybe 36 inches deep. That was full of human bodies that were rotting, decomposing.

Piled on top of each other.

Yes, just piled on top of each other. And there was, I think, maybe five or six of them in there that was like that. And we were just, Oh, no. I mean, literally such a strong smell. It almost invokes your natural reaction to vomit and throw up. It is that That strong. I grew up on a farm, and we had dead animals. They smell, but okay, it's not that bad. This was just overwhelming. I mean, to the point where... And if it got on anything that you had on, we were having a suit up. We had Tyvek suits on and rubber boots and all this stuff. You almost had to throw those things away. You couldn't even put them back into your vehicle. If you had those boots on, you went and got in your vehicle. It was like, it's going to be there.

The numbers are a bit fuzzy because some of those found are just partial remains. But by the end of day two, they've got at least 90 bodies, plus a smattering of loose bones. But Greg still has no idea how many more bodies there are or for how long they've been there. Some are clearly fresh, but a lot of them are skeletonized. Greg has to eventually figure out how long these bodies have, literally, in some cases, been piling up. That isn't something that can be determined by searching on its own. To try and get some answers, he needs to speak to the funeral homes. Tri-state Crematory is mostly a third-party cremation business, which means that funeral homes in the Tri-state area charge their clients for cremations and then contract the actual work of burning bodies to Brent Marsh. He usually picks up the bodies from the funeral homes or hospitals himself, takes them back to Noble and burns them in his furnace, and then brings the cremains to the funeral home. Greg has his people start calling up nearby funeral homes to get lists of people who they sent to the crematory and find out just how many were sent there, and to try to figure out if the funeral directors know what's been going on at Tri-State.

You don't know what the involvement is. You don't know if those funeral homes are in cajoots with him. Are they working alongside of him knowing this is going on? Or are they totally blindsided by this?

The answer comes back pretty quickly. The funeral homes are blindsided, or at least that's what they say. Greg discovers that Tri-State is the cheapest and most convenient crematory around. Tri-state was serving dozens of funeral homes all across Northwest Georgia, Southern Tennessee, and even a few in Alabama. Brent would drive 100 miles to get some of these bodies, and then 100 miles back, just for a couple of hundred bucks. He wasn't getting rich off this. The crematory was founded by Brent Marsh's father in 1982, and some of the bodies looked like they could go back that far. They're skeletons. Brent only took over the business from his dad in 1996, 14 years later. And so this thing at Tri-State that truly seems like it can't get even worse somehow gets even worse. What if Brent Marsh isn't the only one to blame for what happened? What if the whole Marsh family is involved? And what if the bodies have been buried and piled on the property not for years, but for decades? Sheila Manis drives to Noble and the church near the marsh property where families are gathering, hoping to learn if Iros is among the many bodies found at Tristate.

But she leaves without learning much, except that everyone around her at the church is as confused and angry about this as she is. At least on that day, the police just don't have much to tell them. But the little information that has gotten out is already doing a lot of damage. Everyone in the area who's had a loved one cremated, a wife, a husband, a parent, a brother, a sister, or even a child, every one of them suddenly has to check if their body was sent to Tri-state Crematory. The Crematory has had thousands of customers since it opened almost 20 years ago in 1982. And And those who find on their relative's death certificates that they were sent to Tri-state, like Sheila, now they have no idea if they've actually fulfilled their obligations to the ones they loved. They have no idea if the bodies were rather than burned as requested and treated with dignity and respect, instead buried in a pit, dropped in a trash pile, or shoved in a vault with half a dozen others. On top of that, there's the issue of the ashes. Some of these bodies have been there for years.

They were supposed to have been cremated. The families had funerals. Some of them spread the ashes. Some kept the ashes displayed in their homes in decorative urns. So what was in their urns? All of them were given something by the funeral homes, and now they have no idea what. All the pain that came with these deaths in the first place, sometimes many years ago, for a lot of people, it's coming back. Families are in shock that loved ones sent to tristate for cremation were dumped like garbage.

It's just his body. But it was my obligation to do what was right. I thought I was doing what was right, but these people weren't.

We never anticipate motivated or dreamed that there was a thought that her body would not be taken and disposed of respectfully and brought them here to... Lord knows what happened.

All I can think about is seeing his body laying in the shed with a bunch of other dead people for four months, rotting away, and no respect to them at all.

Police find out that Brent had been giving some people real human cremains, but not everyone got the cremains of their loved one. Some got a different person's cremains, and others got, in place of ashes, cement dust or lime dust. Sheila is stuck in this in between place where she doesn't know if the cremains she received from the funeral home were her husband's. She can't know because she spread his ashes on that beautiful mountaintop, and she'd even visit that mountain once a week.

I would take me a cup of coffee and a rose, and I'd throw the rose in the woods and stuff, and I'd drink coffee with him. To think that I was doing that over cement. I don't know. Just the biggest betrayal I've ever felt in my life, not just for me, but for my husband. My biggest problem was that I had promised I thought that I would do exactly as he stated, okay? And then I would scatter his ashes. I thought I had done everything I was supposed to do, and then come to find out. I hadn't.

When someone close to you dies, it can be one of the most significant events in your life, something that changes you forever. And you get one chance to honor them, bury them, or cremate them the way they'd imagined, or in Ira's case, planned himself. If you mess it up, there's no second chance. For Sheila, the whole situation just feels so dramatically different from what Ira meant to her, someone who always did what he said he was going to do.

I was angry. If you're given a job, you do that job. You don't have to do it. You do it. I was just thinking, Oh, my God, I can't believe it in this hour. Yeah, I was upset. I guess I led the posse on the forum, the website, thought.

These are the early days of the Internet, way before Twitter and Facebook. But victims of Tri-State post on an online message forum called Easy Board, Sheila Among Them. Under the username sick and upset, too, she vents her anger and calls Brent Monster Marsh. She writes, He broke the laws of man and God, and he will pay. And it's not just Sheila. The message board lights up with anger towards Brent. A poster named Tricky Vicky writes, Clara and the Marsh family have hurt too many people, and nobody will ever forget it, no matter what they do. Another poster says, I think you deserve to rot in hell for what this man has done to everyone. But the message board is also a place where victims like Sheila band together and exchange messages of support, give each other updates on the investigations into their loved ones' bodies. When Sheila posts about all the stress she's feeling, a user called It's Too Crazy writes, I know this month will be very difficult for your entire family. You need your strength to please take care of yourself. Another day, a poster writes, There are days I come here because I have nowhere else to turn.

We'll come back to Sheila and Ira later. Like a lot of the other family members, she would have to be patient to somehow sit around and wait until investigators like Greg Ramey do their job. Greg grew up in Walker County and lives there. He's raising his kids there. So he's not just dealing with people he can remain cold and detached from. He already knows a lot of the families, the ones waiting to find out if their parents or sisters or brothers are lying in the dirt at Tri-State.

There was so much emotion about this thing. Some folks had gone through a good healing process. Some folks had dealt with it. Their loved one had died of cancer, old age, car crashes, whatever. Some, it was very new, very fresh. Some hadn't dealt with it at all. Even though it was two, maybe three years, It was still just like ripping a big scab off your arm and just tearing your heart back open.

There's something like a mob who want to come after Brent, even as prosecutors for the state target him. Others plan to sue the Marsh family for everything they've got. As the police continue to search for bodies, Brent will soon face hundreds of lawsuits and hundreds more criminal charges that could have him in prison for the rest of his life. But some sliver of hope for Brent comes in finding a lawyer, and not just any lawyer, the best damn lawyer in Northwest Georgia, a guy who has no problem taking hits for his clients.

She was caught trying to smuggle a sword into the courtroom, disguised in a cane. So I may have been the first lawyer since the 1700s to get run through.

That's on the next episode of Noble. Noble is a production of Waveland and Campside Media. Noble was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me, Sean Raviefe. Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sierra Franco is our associate producer. Editing by Jason Hoke, Johnny Kaufman, and Matt Sher. Fact-checking by Kaylyn Lynch. Sound design, mixing, scoring, and original music by Garret Tiedemann. Our Our theme music is La Lucha Asuna Sola by the band Esmerine. Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slawin, David Eichler, Ashley Warren, Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Mara. Jason Hoke is the executive producer at Waveland. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriades, Adam Hoff, and Matt Sher.