Disturbing History - The Corpsewood Manor Murders

Episode Date: May 31, 2026

This week we step away from the corridors of presidential power and head into the North Georgia mountains, to a hand-built stone castle on Taylor's Ridge and one of the most misunderstood crimes in the state's history. On December 12, 1982, Dr. Charles Scudder, a brilliant former Loyola University pharmacology professor, and his partner Joseph "Joey" Odom were robbed and shot to death inside Corpsewood Manor, the off-grid medieval-style home they had built brick by brick after leaving Chicago behind.Their killers, 17-year-old Kenneth Avery Brock and 30-year-old Samuel Tony West, had convinced themselves the eccentric couple was hiding a fortune, and that two openly gay men, one of them a documented member of the atheistic Church of Satan, were the kind of victims nobody would mourn. They were wrong about the money, and history has proven them wrong about the men.This episode hits especially close to home, Brian grew up just a few miles away and was only eight years old the winter the murders happened, and who has spent a career learning to tell the difference between rumor and evidence. We trace the whole arc, from Scudder and Odom's search for a simpler life and the truth about what the Church of Satan actually believed, through the rumors and the Satanic Panic that turned two kind hosts into the county's boogeymen, to the night of the killings, the murder of Navy Lieutenant Kirby Key Phelps during the fugitives' flight through Mississippi, the manhunt, the confessions, and a trial where a defense attorney argued in open court that a murdered man had bewitched his killer with a glowing golden harp.Brock remains incarcerated to this day; West died in prison. Listener discretion is strongly advised, as this episode contains descriptions of violence, murder, and the bigotry of the era.More than a true crime story, this is a study in how a frightened culture decides who deserves to be called a victim, and how easily fear becomes permission.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. We've spent a lot of time lately in the backrooms of presidential politics, in the deals and the cover-ups and the kind of darkness that wears a nice suit

and shakes your hand on the way out the door. And we'll get back to all of that. But not today. Today we're going somewhere else. We're going up a mountain, down a logging road into the woods of North Georgia, to a place a lot of people around here still won't say out loud after dark. And I'll be honest with you. In some ways, where we're going today is a whole lot darker than anything we've covered out of Washington.

I need to tell you, this one is personal for me, in a way most of these stories aren't. I grew up just a few miles from where this happened. I was eight years old, the winter it all came down. I remember the way the grown-ups talked about it, the way their voices would drop when kids walked into the room. The way it became the thing you dared each other to drive up and look at, once you got old enough to have a car and a head full of bad ideas. This story is part of the landscape where I'm from.

It's woven into the back roads and the ridgelines and the local legend the same way the rivers are. So when I tell you it hits close to home, I mean that literally. I also need to give you a warning here. This is a horrific story. There's violence in it. There's cruelty. There are two men who were murdered in their own home, along with their dogs, by people they had welcomed in and fed and trusted.

There's a third killing on a roadside hundreds of miles away. And wrapped around all of it is a kind of ugliness that has nothing to do with knives or guns. The ugliness of a community that decided two of its own deserved what they got. If you've got little ones in the car, this might be one to come back to later. Listener discretion is strongly advised. So why does this belong on disturbing history?

Why not just a true crime show? Why this show? The one where we dig into the moments where the past goes wrong and stays wrong. Because the murders are only half of it. That's the part I want you to hold on to as we go. Two men were robbed and shot to death for money that didn't exist. That's a crime, a terrible one. And we'll walk through every step of it.

But the reason this story still echoes 40-some years later isn't just what two killers did on one December night. It's what an entire era did afterward. It's how the newspapers wrote about the dead. It's how the law talked about them. It's how a whole region decided that the victims were the real monsters, and that the men who tortured and executed them, had, in some twisted way, done the Lord's work.

That's the disturbing history. The murder was committed by two men. The verdict on the victims was handed down by a culture. And to understand that culture, you have to understand the panic that was running through this country in 1982, like a fever. Because by the time those killers climbed that ladder, half of America was convinced the devil was hiding in the suburbs.

Let me set the stage for you. In the late 1970s and into the early 80s, this nation worked itself into what historians now call the satanic panic. It wasn't a fringe thing. It was mainstream. It was on the evening news and in the church pews and at the kitchen table. People genuinely believed there were secret networks of Satanists out there, in the next town over, maybe on the next street, abducting children, sacrificing animals,

hiding messages and rock records, and worshipping the devil in basements and barns. You have to remember the run-up to it. In 1973, the Exorcist hit movie theaters and scared the living daylights out of an entire generation. People fainted in the aisles. Then came the rumors about dungeons and dragons, that the role-playing game was a doorway to the occult that would lead kids straight into devil worship. In 1978, there was a rumor so widespread that McDonald's, the hamburger company,

had to publicly deny that it was funneling money to the Church of Satan. The founder of McDonald's actually had to go on the record and reassure people that he was a God-fearing man. That's how strange the air had gotten. Then, in 1980, a book came out called Michelle Remembers. It told the story of a woman who claimed that under hypnosis, She had recovered memories of being tortured and abused by a satanic cult as a child. The book was a sensation.

It was also, we now know, almost certainly false. The whole thing eventually picked apart and discredited. But at the time it lit a fire. It convinced a lot of professionals, therapists, and police officers and prosecutors that satanic ritual abuse was real and widespread and happening right under everyone's noses. And here in 1982, the panic was at full. Boyle. Poultergeist was in theaters. Down in Atlanta, the city had just lived through the nightmare of the Atlanta child murders. And one of the dark rumors swirling around that case was that some

ring of predators was behind it. There was a brand new disease showing up in the news. Something doctors didn't understand yet. Something the papers were starting to call a gay disease. Fear of the occult and fear of homosexuality were getting tangled up together in the public mind, braided into one big knot of dread. And here's what made the panic so dangerous. The thing that separates it from just spooky fun at the movies. It didn't stay at the movies. It walked right into serious institutions and put on a suit.

Police departments held seminars on how to spot satanic crime. Therapists came to believe they were uncovering buried memories of ritual abuse in their patients. In the years right around this, and in the years that followed, ordinary people, Daycare workers, parents, neighbors, would be accused and even convicted of monstrous satanic crimes that, when the dust finally settled, turned out never to have happened at all. The whole thing eventually collapsed under the weight of its own lack of evidence. But in 1982, it didn't feel like a hysteria. It felt like the truth.

It felt like common sense. And when something false feels like common sense to enough people, it stops mattering whether it's real. It does real damage anyway. So picture all of that pressure, all of that fear, looking for a target, looking for somebody to point at. And now picture two men who had moved down from Chicago to live off the grid in a hand-built stone castle in the Georgia mountains. Two men who were openly a couple, one of whom was, in fact, a card-carrying member of the Church of Satan, with a goat-headed demon worked into his stained glass windows. You can already feel it, can't you?

You can feel how this is going to go. The panic had been looking for its monster, and from a distance, these two men looked exactly like the thing everybody was afraid of. But here's the first thing I want you to understand, and it's the kind of thing that matters when you've spent your career trying to tell the difference between what people believe and what's actually true. From up close, the picture was completely different. So let's start where every honest investigation starts.

Let's start with the people. Let's find out who actually lived in that castle. His name was Charles Lee Scudder, Dr. Charles Scudder. And before he was the devil worshipper on the mountain, before he was a headline, he was one of the more brilliant men in his field. Scudder was a scientist. He'd studied zoology and languages as a young man, and then he earned a doctorate in pharmacology. That's the science of drugs, how they work, what they do to the body and the brain. He was good at it.

Loyola University in Chicago hired him as a professor, and for more than a decade he taught and he researched, and the people who worked alongside him used one word over and over to describe him. Brilliant. But brilliant doesn't always mean happy. By the early 1970s, Scudder was worn down to the nub. He was tired of students who didn't want to learn. He was tired of the politics inside the university, the backbiding, the committees, the endless small wars between people. who were supposed to be colleagues. His second marriage had fallen apart. His three children were grown and gone. And he was rattling around a big old aging mansion on the west side of Chicago, with almost nobody left in it. I say almost nobody,

because there was one other person in that house, a man named Joseph Odom, or as Charles called him, Joey. Now the official story for years was that Odom was Scudder's housekeeper and companion, and he was those things. things. But he was also the love of Scudder's life, his partner, the person he wanted to spend

the rest of his days with. Odom was about 12 years younger than Scudder. He had a fifth grade education, where Scudder had a string of degrees longer than your arm. And yet Scudder wrote about him with a kind of tenderness that tells you everything. He once wrote that Joey had learned more about the world than he had with all his fancy education, and that somewhere along the way Joey had become a cook who could whip up a meal fit for a king. Think about that for a second. A scientist with a doctorate, telling the world that the man he loved was the wiser of the two of them.

That's not a footnote. That's a whole relationship in one sentence. And I don't want Joey Odom to get lost in this story the way he tends to, because the legend always makes it the Scudder show. Scudder was the professor, the Satanist, the eccentric with the harp, and so he soaks up all the attention, even in death. But Odom was the one who made that castle a home. He was the cook, and not a casual one.

People who ate at his table talked about five-course meals, real craftsmanship, the kind of food you remember years later. He'd had next to no formal schooling, a fifth grade education in a world that measures people by their diplomas, and he'd still built a life of competence and warmth and care. He was younger than Scudder by a dozen years, and he had stuck with him through the divorce of an old life, and the building of a new one, sleeping in a car in a blizzard, digging a foundation by hand,

all of it. When you read what Scudder wrote about him, you don't read about a housekeeper, you read about a partner who'd earned every bit of that man's respect. Whatever else corpsewood was, it was the place these two had chosen each other and built something to prove it. And on the night this all came apart, Joey Odom was killed in the kitchen, doing the dishes, after cooking a meal for the people who shot him. Remember him as more than a name besides Scudders. He was half of why that place existed at all. In 1976, Scudder's mother passed away, and he came into a modest inheritance. Not a fortune, but enough, enough to be a door. And Scudder looked at that money and he saw a way out of the life that was grinding him down. He started dreaming about a different way to live.

He wrote about it later in a magazine called Mother Earth News, which back then was the Bible for back to the land folks. People who wanted to grow their own food and chop their own wood and get out from under the modern world. Scudder wrote that he wanted someplace in hilly country with four real seasons but without the brutal cold of a Chicago winter. He wanted good clean water. He wanted wood to heat and cook with. And most of all he wrote, he wanted isolation. He wanted to be left alone. And I want to linger on what he was actually reaching for, because it's the kind of thing a lot of us feel and never do anything about. Scudder wasn't running off to start a cult. He was a man in his late 40s who had looked at the

rest of his life and decided he didn't want to spend it the way he'd spent the first half. In that Mother Earth news piece, he wrote about older people being free in a way the young aren't, free because of everything they've already lived through and learned. He believed that if a person wanted a fuller, stranger, more alive kind of existence. Closer to the ground and the seasons, they could simply choose it. The only thing stopping most folks, he figured, was the fear in their own heads. He wrote that our only chains are the ones in our minds. Hold on to that sentence as we go.

It's going to come back around in a way he never could have imagined. His search brought him south, down into the foothills of the Appalachians, into Chituga County, Georgia. That's my part of the world, where I was born and raised. He found 40 acres for sale up on a long forested spine of a mountain called Taylor's Ridge, outside the little mill town of Triand. He drove ten hours to go look at it, and he fell in love. He wrote about finding hummingbirds and whippoorwills, butterflies and bobcats, great oak trees and rolling mountain woods.

After all those years of fluorescent lights and faculty meetings, you can practically hear him exhale. On October the 6th, 1976, Charles Scudder turned 50 years old, and as a birthday present to himself, he handed in his resignation to Loyola University. He was done. He went home and started taking his old life apart piece by piece. He auctioned off the fancy antique furniture in the Chicago mansion. He gave away anything that needed to be plugged into a wall, because where they were going, there'd be no electricity. He kept only what mattered, and one of the things that mattered most to him. The thing he wouldn't part with was a golden harp. Remember that harp.

It's going to matter before we're done. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. By January of 1977, the Chicago life was gone. And Charles Scudder and Joey Odom, along with their two big mastiff dogs, pointed themselves south toward Georgia and a piece of empty mountain land and a dream of building something with their own hands. I want you to be a little. I want to really sit with how hard the next part was, because this is the part the legend always skips. The legend wants to jump straight to the demons and the sex parties. But before any of that, there were two middle-aged men and two dogs sleeping in a car in a blizzard. They drove down through one of the worst winter storms in years.

The first few nights on their own land, they slept in the car. Then they graduated to a tent, and as the snow finally started to melt, they got to work, and not with a crew of builders, with their own two backs, a chainsaw, a little concrete mixer, a garden tiller. They cleared the land themselves.

They dug a well by hand. They dug out the foundation of the house, by hand. Two guys, one of them 50 years old, the other pushing 40, building a castle out of a mountainside with hand tools. And it really was a castle.

Not a cabin, not a farmhouse. A castle. They built it out of brick, room by room, in a medieval style. Years later, one of the investigators who worked the case told the Atlanta Constitution that the place had been put up using old medieval building techniques, and that there wasn't a single square corner in the whole building. Think about that image. A handmade stone fortress. Every angle a little bit off, rising up out of the Georgia woods where

there was nothing but trees and quiet. And it didn't go up overnight. This was years of labor. By that first summer they had the ground floor livable, but the work never really stopped. They were always adding, always building, hauling brick up a mountain with no road crew and no power tools to speak of. Scudder, the man with the doctorate, the man who'd spent his whole adult life in lecture halls and laboratories, learned to lay brick and mix concrete and frame a roof. There's something almost touching about that. A man who'd made his living with his mind, late in life, finally making something with his hands and making it strange and beautiful and entirely his own. They named it Corpsewood Manor.

And right there is where the legend likes to start whispering. Because corpse, you know, corpse, that sounds like death. That sounds like something dark. But the truth is simpler and sadder than that. There were a lot of dead and dying trees on the property when they got there. Standing dead timber, gray and bear. Scudder had a dark sense of humor and. and a love of the macab.

And he looked at all that dead wood and he named his home after it. Corpsewood. It was a joke. A spooky one, sure. But a joke. Now, the house. Let's talk about the house. Because the house is where the rumors found their fuel.

Over the arched main door, Scudder set a pink concrete gargoyle. He made stained glass windows by hand, and they weren't your church basement scenes. One showed a human skull. another showed Baphimant, the goat-headed figure that serves as the symbol of the Church of Satan. He kept human skulls inside, real ones, which he'd apparently taken from his old laboratory at Loyola. He also, by several accounts, walked off from that same university lab with a staggering quantity of LSD, thousands of doses, which he brought south with him. He named one of his dogs Bielzebub after the old devil himself.

Reports say the other was named Azathoth, after a monster out of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. And down at the entrance to the property, he posted a wooden sign that read, Beware of the Thing. Now here's where the investigator in me wants to slow everything down, because this is exactly the kind of moment where a story goes off the rails. To a frightened neighbor in 1982, every single one of those details was proof. Proof of devil worship. proof of evil. The skulls, the goat, the demon named dog, the warning sign, the strange men,

all of it added up to one terrifying conclusion. But when you look closer, when you do the actual work, most of it falls apart as evidence of anything sinister at all. That sign, beware of the thing that's almost certainly a reference to the Adams family, to the disembodied hand named thing. It's a gag. It's the kind of thing a guy with a dark, theatrical sense of humor puts up to mess with people. The skulls were teaching specimens from a medical school. The macabre decorating was the taste of a man who liked the macab and the Satanism. Let's deal with that head on, because it's the load-bearing wall of this whole tragedy. Yes, Charles Scudder was a real documented member of the Church of Satan. That part is true, and I'm not

going to soften it or hide it. But you need to understand what that actually meant, because it almost certainly does not mean what you're picturing. The Church of Satan was founded in San Francisco by a man named Anton LeVay, who wrote a book called the Satanic Bible. And here's the part that gets lost in the screaming. LeVay's Church of Satan did not believe in an actual devil. They were atheists. They didn't think there was a literal Satan sitting on a throne in hell. What they did was take the figure of Satan, the rebel, the outsider, the one who said no. to the rules and use him as a symbol. A symbol for the idea that human beings should embrace life and pleasure and freedom in the here and now, instead of denying themselves everything in

hope of a reward after death. So when people pictured Scudder summoning demons and sacrificing animals on a stone altar, the reality was a retired professor who joined a philosophical society of atheists, who liked spooky symbolism and believed in enjoying your one life on this earth. He never, by any account we have, preached his beliefs to anybody. He never tried to convert the locals. He decorated his home with the imagery he found beautiful and provocative, and he kept his actual convictions to himself. He was underneath all the theater, a hard atheist who didn't believe in any God or any devil at all.

I'm not telling you that to make him a saint. I'm telling you that because the truth matters, and because the gap between what Scudder actually believed and what is neighbors thought he believed is the whole engine of this story. That gap is where two men died. Now the off-the-grid hermit thing didn't fully stick either, and I want to be fair about that too. Scudder and Odom may have moved up that mountain looking for isolation, but they were sociable men. They came down into Tryon regularly. After they bumped down that winding dirt logging road, they could be on the main highway in a few minutes and walking the aisles of the local grocery

store. And they made an impression. Two men, dressing like aging hippies, driving a black Jeep with a pinagram painted on the side. In a small southern mill town in 1982, that Jeep alone was enough to set tongues wagging from one end of the county to the other. And folks got curious. People drove up Mountain View Road just to gawk at the strange castle and its stranger owners. Some claimed they saw robed figures holding sances out in the trees. Some said Scudder had conjured a demon to guard the place, pointing to that, beware of the thing sign like it was a confession. But here's the thing. The people who actually went up there, the ones who got invited in, came back telling a completely different story. They came back talking about hospitality, about kindness. Scudder and Odom loved

having people over. Odom was a genuinely gifted cook, and Scudor was a warm, almost most theatrical host who would play that golden harp for his guests. There's an account of a candlelit dinner party at corpse wood with a five-course meal and wine served in real silver goblets. One tri-on woman who became close with Scudder described it to a newspaper as a fantasy, a kind of enchantment. These weren't men luring victims into a den. By the accounts of the people who broke bread with them, These were two guys who'd built their dream house in the woods and wanted to fill it with friends and food and music. And the life they'd built up there really was something. They were close to self-sufficient.

They kept chickens. They grew a garden. They cut their own wood and hauled their own water. Because remember, there was no power line running up that mountain. No switch on the wall to flip. They lit the place with gas lamps and candles. They'd rigged up a little wooden drawbridge that connected the house to a sun deck on top of a brick gazebo, and on a good afternoon the two of them would sit up there,

looking out over the garden and drink tea. Think about the distance between that picture and the one the legend painted. Two aging men on a homemade castle deck in the Georgia Mountains drinking tea over their vegetable garden. That's not a horror movie. That's a couple of guys who finally got the quiet life they'd been chasing. But here's the thing. I'd be doing you a disservice if I painted them as nothing but a couple of gentle accent,

with a harp because there was another side to life at corpsewood, and it's a side that, fairly or not, ended up at the center of everything. So let's talk about it plainly. And again, if you've got little ones within earshot, you may want to finish this later. Right next to the manor, the two men had built a tall three-story wooden building. The lower floors were practical. Chickens lived in it. They stored food in it. People called it the chicken house. But up on the third floor, reachable only by climbing a ladder up through a narrow opening. There was a single room. And that room was painted pink.

They called it the pink room. And it was, to put it directly, a private adult playroom. There were mattresses up there, and gas lamps, and a kerosene heater for warmth, and a collection of pornography. There was reportedly even a journal that guests could write in, recording their experiences and their preferences. On a lot of nights, after the wine and the wine, the dinner and the harp music, the evening would end with guests climbing that ladder up into

the pink room. And by every account we have, what happened up there was consensual. These were adults. The encounters were fueled by a lot of homemade wine, and they were, by the descriptions of the people who took part, free of judgment. Nobody who actually went up that ladder seems to have come back claiming they'd been forced. But you can see it now, can't you? You can see exactly how this looked from down in town. The Satanism, the pentagram on the Jeep, the skulls, the two men living together as a couple, and now stories trickling down off the mountain about a secret pink room where wild parties ended. In a community already half convinced the devil himself had moved in up on Taylor's Ridge, those stories spread like a grease fire. The

whispers got louder, the legend got darker. And eventually, the stories reached the ears of exactly the wrong person. This is where two new people walk into our story, and I want to introduce them carefully, because the rest of everything turns on who they were. In 1982, a 17-year-old kid named Kenneth Avery Brock wandered onto the corpsewood property. He mostly went by Avery. He was a hunter, a young man from nearby Walker County, and he'd already had a hard road. By the account in Amy Patula's book on the case, which is the most careful work anybody's done on the whole thing. Brock's own father had thrown him out of the house when he was still young. So here was a boy with no real home, running the woods with a rifle. He came across Scudder's land while he was out hunting,

and Scudder, true to form, was welcoming. He gave the kid permission to hunt on the property, and over time, Avery Brock kept coming back, and he became friendly with the two men. He ate their food, he drank their wine. And by his own later statements to investigators, he eventually went up the ladder into the pink room himself. Now this is one of the most contested and ugliest parts of the case. Brock would later claim that Scudder performed a sex act on him, and he framed it different ways at different times. Some of his statements suggest it was something he came back for more than once. Other statements paint himself as a victim taken advantage of. The truth of what actually passed between a 17-year-old and the men on that mountain is something we genuinely cannot

know for certain, and I'm not going to pretend I can settle it for you from a microphone 40 years on. What I can tell you is that this question, what really happened in the pink room, became the thing the killers and their lawyers would later use to try to justify the unjustifiable. After Brock had been going up there for a while, he started talking, and the person he talked to was his older friend and roommate, a man named, named Samuel Tony West. People called him Tony. Tony West was 30 years old, which made him nearly twice Brock's age. And where Brock was a troubled kid, West was a troubled man with a long, hard history behind him. Throughout his teens and into his 20s, West had bounced in and out of

jails and mental institutions. The testimony that would later come out of the trial described him as wild, as prone to cruelty, as a man marked by violence long before he ever heard the name. corpse would. So picture the two of them in the trailer they shared, the 17-year-old telling stories about the rich, strange men up on the mountain, the castle full of antiques and odd treasures, the Satanism. And somewhere in those conversations, a very simple, very deadly idea took root. They convinced themselves that Scudder and Odom were secretly wealthy, that all those antiques and that fine living meant there had to be cash stashed somewhere in the castle, money hidden in the walls, treasure waiting to be taken,

and they convinced themselves of something even uglier on top of it. They told themselves that nobody would care, because after all, weren't these two just devil-worshipping sinners? Weren't they exactly the kind of people the whole county had been muttering about for years? In their minds, the satanic panic had done half the work for them. It had already declared these men worthless. All Brock and West had to do was finish the job and move into the castle themselves. That's the calculation. They didn't just plan a robbery.

They planned a robbery they believed they could get away with precisely because of who their victims were. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The prejudice in the air wasn't just background noise. It was part of the motive. There's one more cruel detail folded into Brock's thinking, and it goes back to the pink room. West, the older man, seems to have worked on Brock, convincing him that Scudder had used him, taken advantage of him, made him into something he didn't want to be. Whether West actually believed that or just used it as a tool to wind the younger man up, we can't say for sure. But it became part of the poison. Revenge braided together with greed. The story they told themselves was that they were owed this, and that the men they

were going to rob had it coming. In the weeks before that December, in the privacy of their shared trailer, they planned it out. And so we come to it. December the 12th, 1982. Brock and West needed to get up to Corpsewood without raising any alarms. And so they brought a long cover. Two more teenagers, friends of Brock's, a young couple named Joey Wells and Teresa Hudgens. The way it's been told, these two kids were just out on a date that night, a riding around date, the kind you have in the country when you're young and there's nowhere to go but the back roads. They're only, car was out of commission, so when the offer came to ride along up the mountain for the evening, they took it. They had no idea what the older two were planning. They were camouflage,

and they didn't know it. The four of them loaded into West's car and started up Mountain View Road, winding their way up toward the castle in the dark. When they got there, Scudder welcomed them, the way he welcomed everybody. And before long, all four of the visitors were climbing that ladder up into the pink room, where a lantern was lit and the kerosene heater was going, and there were mattresses on the floor. Only Scudder came up with them. Odom stayed back in the main house, cleaning up after dinner, just doing the dishes. Just an ordinary chore on what he thought was an ordinary night. Brock had brought something with him up that ladder, a can of what the locals called Tudaloo. It was a homemade huffing mixture, a cheap and brutal high made of things like

alcohol and paint thinner and glue, the kind of thing you huff to get your brain swimming. There was wine, too. So the night started the way a lot of nights at Corpsewood started, with intoxicants and small talk in a candlelit room. And then, after a while, Avery Brock said he needed to go back down and get more Tudaloo. He climbed down the ladder and out into the dark. He did not go get more to huff. He went to the car, and out of the car, he pulled a rifle. There's a detail in the testimony from that room that I've never been able to shake, and it tells you everything about how fast and how strange the line is between an ordinary evening in a massacre.

When Brock came back up that ladder holding the rifle, Charles Scudder didn't panic. He chuckled. He thought it was a joke. He looked at this kid he'd let hunt on his land. This kid he'd fed and welcomed, standing there with a gun. And Scudder laughed and made a joke right back. Witnesses said he said something like, bang, bang.

Like it was play. Like nobody could possibly mean it. And then it stopped being play. Brock lunged at him. He grabbed the older man by the hair, put a knife to his throat, and started demanding to know where the money was. Where's the money?

Where's the fortune? Where's it hidden? And Scudder, with a knife at his neck, told him the truth. The truth that was about to get everybody killed. There was no fortune. They didn't keep cash up at Corpsewood. What little money they had was sitting in a bank down in town. The treasure these two had built their whole murderous fantasy around did not exist.

It had never existed. They'd poured every dime they had into the bricks of that castle. But Brock wasn't ready to believe it. He climbed back down the ladder and went looking for Odom in the main house. And that's when the shooting started. Joey Odom was in the kitchen. He'd been cleaning up after the meal he'd cooked for the very people who were about to murder him. Brock opened fire.

He shot Odom, and he shot the two big Mastiff dogs that were there in the house. The dogs named after devils. The dogs that were, in the end, just dogs. By the accounts, the animals were killed at point-blank range. Odom went down in the kitchen, shot multiple times. Up in the pink room, they heard it. The gunshots cracking out across the dark ridge. And now, Wes moved.

He forced Scudder and those two terrified teenagers down the ladder and into the castle. They marched Scudder into his own home, and there on the floor was Joey Odom. The man Scudder had loved and built a whole life with, dead in the kitchen where he cooked. They made Scudder look at it. They made him stand over the body of his partner of many years, while they screamed at him again about money that wasn't there. They beat him. They ransacked. And at some point in that horror, overcome at the sight of Joey, Scudder pulled away from them.

And a shot rang out, and Charles Scudder fell. I want to be precise about the next part, because the exact mechanics of Scudder's death became the central fight of the trial. And I owe you accuracy over drama. Here's what we can say. Scudder was killed by gunshots to the head. Avery Brock would always claim that it was Tony West who pulled the trigger on Scudder. West would tell his own version. But when it all went to court,

the law landed on West as the one responsible for Scudder's killing, while Brock answered for Odom's. So when you hear it laid out cleanly, Brock killed Joey Odom and the dogs, and Scudder died at West's hand. The two men would spend the rest of their lives in part, pointing at each other. There's one more detail from that day that haunts me,

and it has nothing to do with the killers. Earlier, before any of them arrived, Scudder had spent part of his last afternoon on Earth playing that golden harp, and he'd used a little battery-powered tape recorder to capture himself playing and reciting a poem. The poem was William Blake's The Tiger, the one that asks how something so terrible and so beautiful could be made by the same hand that made the lamb. A man playing a harp and reading poetry into a tape recorder, hours before two people he'd been kind to climbed his ladder and ended him. There's no moral I can put on that. It just is.

With both men dead, Brock and West tore the castle apart looking for the riches they were so sure were there. And they found nothing. No hidden cash. No treasure in the walls. In the end, they grabbed a few items of almost no value and threw them into Scudder's Jeep. They even hauled out the golden harp, the one beautiful thing, and tried to load it into the vehicle, before they realized it wouldn't even fit. So they left it. They killed two men over a fortune that didn't exist, and they drove away with junk. Then they took the two teenagers back to the trailer, where West threatened to kill them both if they ever breed the word about what they'd seen. And Brock and West, with a half-formed plan to run for Mexico, climbed into Scudder's Jeep and drove off

into the night. Now the story leaves the mountain and turns into a fugitive run across the south, and it gets one more victim before it's done. Brock and West drove through the night and on into the next days, putting Georgia behind them, heading west. The Jeep was a problem, though. It was distinctive, the kind of vehicle people remembered, and they knew it. Somewhere around Vicksburg, Mississippi, they pulled into a dimly lit rest stop,

and they decided they needed a different car, something plain, something nobody would be looking for. And at that rest stop, they found a young man, asleep behind the wheel of a Toyota. His name was Kirby Key Phelps. He was 26 years old. He was a lieutenant in the United States Navy, and he'd graduated from Georgia Tech just a few years before. He had nothing to do with any of this. He was just a young man, asleep in his car at a rest stop, with his whole life still ahead of him. They forced him out of his car at gunpoint and marched him off into a grove of trees. And when Kirby Phelps tried to run, to make a break for his life,

West shot him and killed him. Three murders now. Two on a mountain over imaginary gold and one at a roadside over a set of car keys. They took Phelps's Toyota and kept running. But you can already see the thing falling apart, can't you? They'd killed three people now, and they had almost nothing to show for it. No fortune. No clean escape. Just a stolen dead man's car and the two of them broke and exhausted and starting to turn on each other. Somewhere out west, The partnership cracked. After a falling out, the story goes. An altercation. The two of them split up. And here's the thing about people who do something this terrible, expecting it to set them free. It almost never does. It just chains them tighter.

They told themselves that killing the men in the castle would hand them a new life. Easy money, a place to live, a fresh start where nobody would care. Instead, they got days of hard, frightened travel. no money, no plan, and the slow dawning realization that there was nowhere on earth far enough to run. By the time they peeled off in different directions, the great escape to Mexico had become two desperate men trying to outrun the same thing, and failing. Meanwhile, back in Georgia, the castle on the ridge sat silent. And here's a detail that tells you just how isolated those two men really were. How alone. Four days went by. Four days, with the bodies and the bodies and the bodies.

inside, and nobody knew. Nobody came. Nobody noticed. It wasn't until around the 16th of December that a friend of theirs came up the mountain for a visit. The accounts differ a little on the small details, but the gist is the same. A friend arrived, saw something terribly wrong, bullet holes, signs of violence, and raced back down into town to get the law. Deputies from the Chituga County Sheriff's Office were up there within the hour, and when they walked into Corpsewood Manor. They walked into a nightmare. Blood on the walls. Furniture overturned. Spent shell casings on the floor. Two men dead, and there are two dogs with them. Sheriff Gary McConnell took one look at what he was dealing with and called in the Georgia

Bureau of Investigation and the State Crime Lab. The quiet castle that had been built for privacy was suddenly crawling with investigators. It's difficult, I know. But try and put yourself in those investigators' boots for a second. Because as a guy who spent a career working scenes, I think about this part a lot. They've come up a mountain to a hand-built medieval castle with no electricity, lit by gas lamps and whatever daylight makes it through the windows. There are two men dead inside, and two dogs, and all around the bodies is the strangest collection of objects most of them have ever stood next to. Goat-headed imagery in the glass, statues, real human skulls, vials of LSD, whips and chains, a woman's wig, pornography and an occult library. Now, a good investigator is supposed to look at all of that and ask one question.

What does this tell me about who killed these men? And the honest answer is, almost none of it tells you anything about the killers at all. The skulls didn't shoot anybody. The Baphomet window didn't pull a trigger. All that strangeness was the victim's private life, and it had next to nothing to do with the crime. But it's hard. It is genuinely hard.

To stand in a room like that and keep your focus on the evidence that actually matters, the shell casings and the blood spatter and the tire tracks, instead of getting swept up in the theater of the place. And the record suggests that's exactly what happened. The strangeness took over the story. Even the sheriff, talking to the press, kept circling back to the devil worship angle before he'd say much of anything about the men as victims. The set dressing hijacked the investigation's public face before the bodies were even in the ground. And this is where the second crime starts.

Because of what those investigators found inside, alongside the bodies, the story of corpsewood stopped being a story about two murder victims and became a story about devil worshippers. They found the satanic statues and paintings. They found the whips and chains from the pink room, brought down to the main house. They found pornography, and a woman's wig, and the human skulls, and the vials of LSD. To the men working that scene, and to the reporters who were about to descend, all of that wasn't evidence of two private men with unconventional tastes. It was evidence of monsters. The Atlanta Constitution ran the story on December the 18th.

And look at the headline they chose. Slain devil worshippers were ex-college teacher and companion. Slain devil-worshippers. That's how the dead were introduced to the world, not as victims, as devil-worshippers who happened to get killed. The sheriff himself quoted in that coverage, called it a bizarre murder, and noted, almost as an aside, that the men who lived in the house were devil-worshippers,

that the town had known about it, and then added, almost grudging. that it was, after all, freedom of religion. The next day, the paper leaned in harder, writing about the bizarre killing of two reclusive devil worshippers, their homosexual activity, the discovery of unusual sexual devices. The story went national.

Papers from Sacramento to Tucson to Chicago picked it up and reprinted the gory details. Some of them ran the crime scene photos. Read those old headlines now, and you can feel which crime the press was actually interested in. It wasn't the murder. It was the lifestyle of the murdered. The men who'd been shot to death in their own home were on trial in the papers before either killer was even caught. And the killers, by the way, were not exactly criminal masterminds. With the two of them now split up

and going their separate ways, the trail they'd left behind started catching up to them fast. Brock started hitchhiking his way back east, back toward home. The Jeep they'd abandoned turned up, and a license plate check tied it back to Chituga County. And that gave Sheriff McConnell his first thread to pull. Then one of those teenage witnesses, the kids who'd been threatened into silence, finally broke and told the sheriff what they'd seen that night on the mountain. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. McConnell issued arrest warrants for both men. Brock made his way as far south as Marietta, just north of Atlanta, where he stopped and called his mother. and his mother told him the news. There's a warrant out for you. They know.

Brock hung up the phone. He walked over to a gas station, and he told the attendant there what he'd done. He just told a stranger. Within moments, the police swarmed in and took him into custody. West got farther, all the way up into Missouri, before something turned him around, and he started heading back east.

On Christmas Eve, passing through Chattanooga, just over the state line from where it all started, his car ran out of gas. He was broke. He was worn out. And he walked through the rain to a highway lounge, and inside he found a police officer. And he confessed. On Christmas Eve, in the rain,

Tony West gave himself up. So now we move to the courtroom, and to the part of this story that I think about the most, the part where the system that's supposed to weigh facts coldly, instead got swept up in the same panic as everybody else. The legal proceedings got rolling by early 1990. Avery Brock took the more straightforward path. He admitted to killing Joey Odom. He pleaded guilty, and he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison. Tony West fought it. He pleaded not

guilty to murdering Charles Scudder, and his defense is where this case shows you exactly what the satanic panic could do inside a court of law. West's lawyers reached for the air everybody was already breathing. They argued at various points, several things. They put forward the idea that the killings were a kind of revenge. Payback for the embarrassment Brock supposedly suffered over what had happened in the pink room. They argued that West wasn't really responsible because Scudder had drugged them, that the doctor had spiked the homemade wine with LSD, sending them into a hallucinating frenzy where they didn't know what they were doing.

Now here's where the facts matter, because this is exactly the kind of claim that sounds plausible if you've already decided the victim was a sinister character. The wine bottles were tested. Forensic analysis found no LSD in them. None. The story that Scudder had drugged his own killers into a psychotic rage was not supported by the evidence.

It was a defense built on the reputation, not on the chemistry. And they went further than that. West's attorneys actually argued that Scudder had bewitched their client, that West had seen the golden harp glowing with, an evil light. They leaned openly and repeatedly on homophobic insinuation, working the jury's fears about who these two dead men had been. The whole defense strategy at bottom was to put the victim on trial. To say, in so many words, this man was a gay Satanist who drugged us and bewitched us, and so whatever happened up there isn't really our fault. There are a couple of

eerie details that have attached themselves to the courtroom story over the years, and I want to handle them the way I'd handle any piece of second-hand information, which is carefully. It's been said that in describing Scudder's final moments, the killers claimed the doctor murmured something like, I asked for this, right before he died. And there's a story that floats around this case that Scudder had painted a self-portrait some months earlier, showing himself gagged and shot in the head, as if he'd somehow foreseen his own end. I'll be straight with you. I can't verify either of those to the standard I'd want before I'd swear to them. They may be true.

They may be the kind of detail that grows on a case like moss, the longer it sits in the dark. I'm telling you they're out there, and I'm telling you I'd want a lot more than a retailing before I'd build anything on them. That's the discipline this kind of story demands, especially this kind of story, where the spooky version always travels faster than the true one. What's not in doubt is how it ended in that courtroom. The jury didn't buy the supernatural version. They found Tony West guilty on all counts, and they sentenced him to death. But the story doesn't quite end on that death sentence, and I want to be accurate about how it actually shook out,

because the popular versions garble it. West's death sentence didn't hold. On appeal, the case shifted, and West ended up with life in prison instead of execution. The capital sentence eventually set aside in favor of life behind bars. So in the end, both men, the 17-year-old and the 30-year-old, were sentenced to spend the rest of their natural lives in a Georgia prison. And that's exactly what's happened. Avery Brock has spent more than four decades incarcerated. He's an old man now, still behind bars, still serving those life terms.

Tony West also spent the rest of his days in prison, and West has since died there. Neither of them ever walked free again. Whatever fortune they thought was waiting in the walls of that castle, the only thing they ever really got out of corpsewood was a cell. Now let me take you back up the mountain one last time, because the place itself has its own sad ending. The castle didn't survive its owners by long. In the months after the murders, arsonists set fire to both corpsewood Manor and the chicken house. The dream home that two men had built brick by brick with their own hands, in a blizzard with hand tools, was burned down by. people who'd never lived a day inside it. Over the years that followed, souvenir hunters picked

at the bones of the place. Somebody made off with the pink gargoyle. The stained glass, the strange and beautiful things, vanished one by one. Today, if you go up Taylor's Ridge, what you find is mostly ruin. Piles of brick reclaimed by the Georgia woods. The arched gazebo where Scudder and Odom used to sit on a deck and drink tea, now strangled in ivy. And the The legend, of course, never burned down. If anything, the fire fed it. The place became a destination for thrill seekers and curiosity hunters, kids daring each other to drive up after dark,

people coming back with stories of Ouija boards and candles and Satanists hiding in the trees. The locals gave the mountain new names, devil-worshippers mountain, DW for short. The actual man, the scientist and the cook who loved him, got erased almost completely, replaced by ghosts that were more fun and more frightening to talk about than the truth ever was. It took decades for anybody to really go back and dig the truth out from under the legend. A Chattanooga writer named Amy Patula eventually wrote a careful, well-researched book on

the case, the one I keep coming back to, and her work did something the original newspaper coverage never bothered to do. It treated Scudder and Odom as human beings. It went looking for for who they actually were, not just how they died. And more than 40 years later, other writers and filmmakers have come back to it too, slowly, finally telling a version where the men in the castle are the victims of the story instead of the villains of it. That's a kind of justice, I suppose, a small and very late one. It doesn't bring anybody back. But it does set the record a little straighter, and in a story this badly distorted, straightening the record is worth something. I told you at the start that this one hits close to home,

and now you know why I keep coming back to that gap between the legend and the truth. I was eight years old when this happened, just down the road. And for most of my life, the version I knew was the legend. The devil worshippers on the mountain. The spooky castle. The thing you scared yourself with. It took me getting older, and frankly, it took me spending a career on the other side of crimes like this one, learning how to separate the evidence from the rumor,

to really see what this story actually was. Because here's what it was, when you stripped the legend off of it. Two men moved away from a life that was crushing them and built something beautiful and strange and entirely their own, out in the woods, with their own hands. They were by the accounts of nearly everyone who actually knew them, kind and generous and welcoming.

They fed people. They opened their home. And one of the people they fed and welcomed and trusted decided they were sitting on a fortune and brought a friend and a rifle. And they took everything those two men had, which turned out to be their lives and not much else. That's the murder. And it's a terrible one. But you and I both know that murders happen, that greed and cruelty are old as the hills.

If that were all this was, it'd be a sad crime in a small county and not much more. What makes it disturbing history is what came after the trigger was pulled. It's the headlines that called the dead men devil-worshippers before they called them victims. It's a defense lawyer standing in a courtroom arguing that a murdered man had bewitched his killer with a glowing harp and not getting laughed out of the room, because half the country in 1982 was primed to believe exactly that kind of thing. It's a whole community that found it easier and maybe more comfortable to imagine that the men in the castle had it coming than to grieve two neighbors who were robbed and shot in their own kitchen. The satanic panic didn't pull the trigger up on Taylor's Ridge. Avery Brock and Tony West did that,

and they answered for it, and they should have. But the panic loaded the gun in a different way. It told two desperate young men that these particular victims were less than human, that nobody would care, that the world might even thank them for it. And then, when it was over, the same Panic made sure the dead would be remembered as monsters, and the place they built would become a haunted house instead of a home. That's the part that ought to sit with you. Not the skulls or the goat-headed window or the pink room. Those are just set dressing. The real horror is how easy it is for a frightened society to decide who deserves protection and who doesn't, and how that decision can turn ordinary fear into a kind of permission. Charles Scudder once

wrote in that little magazine for Back to the Land Dreamers, that our only chains are the ones in our minds. He was writing about freedom. He was inviting people to imagine living in their own kind of castle in the country, the way he and Joey did. He had no idea when he wrote those words that it would be the chains in other people's minds, the fear and the prejudice, and the certainty that he was something evil that would end up costing him everything. Two men built a castle in the woods to be left alone. The world wouldn't let them be. And then, when they were gone, it couldn't even let them rest as what they actually were. I think about the kids who still drive up that ridge in the dark, looking for ghosts. And I understand the pull. I do. I was one of those kids

once. But here's what I'd tell them if they'd listen. The scariest thing on that mountain was never a demon, and it was never the man with the harp. The scariest thing was how ready everybody was to believe the worst about two people they'd never bothered to know, and how that readiness made a couple of killers feel like they had the whole county's blessing. Ghosts don't do that kind of damage. People do. Fear does. And the saddest part is that the men who built that place understood something the people who feared them never did.

They understood that you only get the one life, and that you'd better spend it building the thing you actually want, on the ground you actually love, with the person you actually choose. That's not a dark message. That's about as bright a one as there is. It's just that the darkness and other people came up the mountain and put it out. That's the corpsewood Manor Murders. Thanks for staying with me on this one.

It wasn't an easy story to tell, and I know it wasn't an easy one to hear. Take care of each other out there. And the next time somebody points up a dark road and tells you a story about the monsters who used to live up there, do me a favor. Ask who's really telling the story. and ask what they're afraid of. We'll see you next time.