Noble - BONUS: Behind the scenes of Noble

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Matt Schaer, one of the Executive Producers of Noble and host of hit podcasts such as Suspect, sits down with the host and writer of Noble, Shaun Raviv for a deeper look into how the series was made.

Campside Media. Hey everyone, this is Matt Scherr, one of the co-founders of Campside Media and a longtime journalist myself, as well as the host of the podcast Suspect. I'm here because I want to play you a clip from Inside the Tent, a new behind-the-scenes show from Campside Media. The basic idea is this, every week we explore how some of your favorite podcasts are made through interviews with the producers and hosts.

It's a great way to learn more about the process and to get a sense of what actually happens in the studio. Today I'm gonna be playing you an interview with Sean Reveve, who you'll recognize as the writer and host of Noble, the show that brought you here and has been a number one hit for Waveland Media and Campside. Take a listen, and I'll get you some more details afterwards. Meantime, you can subscribe to Inside the Tent at joincampside.com. That's joincampside.com. So Sean, let's start from the beginning here and So, Sean, let's start from the beginning here and have you tell us exactly how this story first crossed your radar.

Sometime around the time I moved to Atlanta about 10 years ago, I saw a snippet of a news story that mentioned 300 bodies found in a property in Northwest Georgia. And it's just one of those stories that I think every journalist who lives in or around Atlanta has on their radar. And it was just one of those ones I kept in my pile of stories, because it's so unbelievable. But it also seemed like one of those stories that's kind of too hard to do, which is why nobody's done it until now.

What made you think it was hard to do? It involves a lot of people and it involved a person who was very reluctant to give interviews and it just seemed like too complicated. It also was quite a while ago. It was 22 years ago when it happened, but at the time it seemed worth the shot. Anyway, But at the time, it seemed worth the shot anyway. Did you have a sense of where you wanted to start when you got this assignment and it became a real thing? How did you sit down and approach it?

Who did you want to go to first to start unraveling this? First, I wanted to get a lot of records, so I put in a bunch of Freedom of Information Act requests to any agency I could think of that was involved. And then I started making lists of names. But the first name that came to mind was the most spectacular name of all, McCracken Poston. And he was one of the primary lawyer involved in the case on the defense side of the case. So you go out to meet McCracken, I'm assuming, not so long after that? We did a couple calls first.

I didn't know if this was a story I was for sure going to do, but I think after our first call I was pretty sure I was going to keep going. And yeah, we met soon after, I'm going to say within a few weeks or months of our first phone call. Was he sick of the story? Was he like, oh my God, there's more people digging around in this story again? No, not at all. I wouldn't put it that way.

I wouldn't be surprised if he's sick of working on the case, even though he still is. But he loves his clients. He loves the family that are represented in these cases. And I think he's really proud of his work on the case as well. And he's just, he's got a few spectacular cases that are, you know, that would make most lawyers careers. And he's got a few of them. And I think this is one of them. I think he's really proud of it. And, you know, he's interested in talking about it. Did he care that you weren't from the south yourself? He didn't seem to. I don't know internally if that's the case, but, uh, you know, he's

from the area where this took place. And so, yeah, I don't know. I don't know, but I don't think so. Describe this part of Georgia to us. If someone is happens to be familiar just with Atlanta or the suburbs of Atlanta, this is a really different area. Yeah, it's not like Atlanta or the suburbs of Atlanta at all. It's Northwest Georgia.

It's quite rural, not a lot of people, not a lot of density. There's beautiful state parks around. There's large properties around. You can have acres and acres out there. And then the few towns around there are very small, typical, like southern downtown with a courthouse in the middle. Everybody knows everybody, that kind of place. This is gonna be a little bit of an exercise in creative thinking, but I want you to try to describe

without giving too much away, what happened in Noble all those years ago. Just give us a sense of the magnitude of this occurrence. What was this story all about? magnitude of this occurrence. What was this story all about? Sure. So it, um, it started with the discovery of one body, a gas delivery man goes on his normal route. And when he's, uh, uh, trying to put some gas in a crematory's tank, which is in this personal property, his family's property, he notices what he thinks is a, it looks like a skeleton, but it's, you know, the site of a crematory. He's not really sure what to think about it.

And nothing really becomes of it, even though he reports it to the police because he's one of those people who just, you know, wants to follow the rules. Nothing really comes of it for a long time. But then he sees something again when he returns the property, like he sort of can't believe it. And from there, it just explodes and the police do eventually come to the property and what they found is just astounding, like a really just unbelievable, like literally unbelievable thing, which is, you know, hundreds and hundreds of bodies eventually and becomes, I think

at the time, the most expensive investigation in the history of Georgia. So that on one level, the mystery is what happened here, right? What, why did, why were all these bodies not disposed of in the correct way? That's sort of the one level of it and who was responsible. But there's another level here too, isn't there? There's this human story behind the operator of the crematorium. This guy Brent, right? This is where the investigation starts to focus. Yeah, I think the mystery, it all sort of comes down to this guy, Brent Marsh, really young man who took over the crematory business from his father. And his family had been in the area for many years, has a really incredible, very positive history in the area.

You know, everybody knew them, everybody respected them. And even today, everybody knows them and respects them. And it was just no one could understand how this could happen, especially, you know, with them having all these friends and contacts through the work and businesses. And the mystery sort of all radiates from there. Yeah. What is the question for you, Sean? It's like, you know, we're used to as journalists thinking about approaching a topic with a question or sometimes a thesis or sometimes it's a journey or a quest.

What was the animating thing for you with this story? What did you want to understand? What did you set out to understand? I wanted to understand that question that we just talked about a second ago, why this could happen. But I also wanted to understand why people care so much about the dead.

I can understand why people love their loved ones, why they love their parents and their sisters and their brothers and their friends. It's a little bit less clear to me why we, by people, are so enamored of people after they die. You know, why we respect dead bodies so much, why we have these ceremonies and traditions involving burial, caskets open and closed, whatever your religion may be or whatever your traditions are. I'm curious why people are so particular about them.

And this story just involved so many different people with so many different loved ones whose bodies were mistreated, and everybody had a different reaction to it. And I wanted to know why the reactions were so different. Do you feel like you know the answer to that now? I think I know a lot of the answer. I think I know a lot of individuals answers to it. And some of them, some of their answers changed over time because I was Reconnecting with people 20 years after it happened after they first discovered that their loved ones bodies had been mistreated and a lot of people's Answer had changed over time and I think the podcast really goes deeply into that The writing here in this podcast is beautiful and it's clear that there is such a meditation

and interest in the deeper themes there. Was it hard for you to write those sections? Did that come easily or was that tricky? It was tricky for sure. I didn't know how hard full to make it or if we should just sort of get into the plot and characters and move really fast. Me and my editor, producer Johnny Kaufman just went back and forth a lot and we had lots of great notes from you as well and the other producers.

Yeah, it was a process, but it was a really fun process and it felt really, really creative, even though we're dealing with a true story that had some darkness to it. I want to talk about some of the reporting challenges here because they're numerous and you managed to surmount somehow so many of them. Let's talk about the chronology first, the fact that you're reporting this so many years after it happened. I think that probably has some benefits in terms of people having a more nuanced or thoughtful way of thinking about what happened, they've had time to process it, but it also carries with it its own challenges. And I wonder if you'll talk about that a little bit. What are the big hurdles?

Well, there's always trouble with memory, trying to get people to go back to sort of go back emotionally to the way they were feeling 22 years ago. I think it's tough for anyone to accurately put themselves back in that place. And we had plenty of documentation, you know, news clips, police reports, transcripts from court cases. We had a lot of sort of like fact checking ability, but to get someone to sort of say, well, I felt like this on this day, the day that I found out, and or like I did this that moment when I first found out

can be a challenge. But we also had a lot of people with great memories. And we also had a lot of people who were very, very emotionally stable and able to talk about an emotionally unstable time in their lives. And it was pretty amazing to hear that. It's pretty amazing to hear them in their calm stage talk about a stage when they were like, just going nuts because of how pissed off, angry and sad they were. They were trying to reflect on a time when just after this person they loved so much had died, and then finding out that this one thing that they could do for this dead loved one didn't even happen.

That it went wrong and they messed up. And that's a pretty tough thing to talk about. I want to be really careful here because I don't want to give too much away. But when it comes to Brent Marsh, you knew going in that he had not spoken publicly outside of a courtroom about this case. I guess I have two interrelated questions. One is how important was it for you to get his perspective? And then, you know, just from a reporting journalistic standpoint, what did you do to try to get him to talk take us through some of that?

Sure. Yeah. Talking to Brent Marsh was one of our top priorities for sure. Because we knew he was so elusive, but he was at the center of the case. He was the most mysterious person in the whole case. And so we went through a lot of routes. We talked to lawyers, his lawyers and others, reached out to family, we visited the area many, many times. We went to other places where we thought he might be. I don't want to get too specific at the moment and wrote letters. We did a lot we did we sort of did everything you could think of a reporter possibly doing without being disrespectful. I'm sort of censoring myself

here because I want people to hear for themselves what happened because it is sort of miraculous and fascinating and almost beautiful how it does happen. I wanted to ask you to change directions a little bit about true crime this is a sort of selfish question because I think about it all the time, you know, what's the purpose of true crime and What does it do for listeners, but I'll start with the first part of this question Do you consider noble to be a true crime podcast in any way? Yeah in the most literal sense and that it's true and involves a crime. There are some things about it that are very different than what you think of as true crime. There's no murder in it.

I think it's okay to say that. And there's not necessarily any bad people, any bad guys. I think it's very much up for interpretation. I think a lot of people who listen will disagree with that, but it's not necessarily you're searching for this person who did this horrendous inhuman thing. And then once you've caught them, it's over. It's different than that.

And another thing that makes it different is how many people are affected by this crime. I think a lot of the True Crime Podcasts that I've heard and that you listen to tend to involve, you know, a small number of people, but this involves thousands. Do you think you got the answers to the questions that you were asking at the beginning of the show? I think for the most part, yes. I think for the most part, yes. Are there things you still want to know? Yes. And I think those answers may come eventually, but I'm always curious to hear more, to learn more. I want to go back a little bit. I really want you to talk about the sense of place that this podcast has and the different ways it gets manifested. This is a very specific setting, a very specific world.

And I'm hoping you can talk about how you made that world come alive in the podcast. I think we brought the world together mostly through the characters. The more episodes you hear, the more you realize how connected everybody is. And it's because this place is small, not geographically, but there are just not that many people in Northwest Georgia, particularly in the area near Noble. And so eventually everybody connects in some way. And so there's no real way to be involved in it,

even if you're an investigator, a lawyer, there's no way to really be involved in the case without making it personal in some way, without it being personal. an investigator, a lawyer, there's no way to really be involved in the case without making it personal in some way, without it being personal. There were so many people who had very official roles in this who also had very personal connections to it. So many people who had to exclude themselves for official reasons because of personal reasons. And I think it's very unusual to see that many people personally involved in the case

that they're working on Talk to me a little bit about the difference between print The world that you come from and podcasting which is sort of an adopted art for you What was the difference? With this as a podcast or another way to ask this is let's see sat down and decided okay I'm gonna write this as a magazine article. How would that have been different than this podcast? For the writing, I think it would have been different just because you want to sound like

yourself. You want to sound like a human being when you're narrating. And this is something that I've learned, I think, over time and maybe the hard way. And I think during Noble, I got much better at sounding, well, just being me, not sounding like me, being like me. And that was with the help of our producers, just being so good, like keeping me calm and not nervous when recording. And with the reporting, it's different because you're shoving a microphone near someone's face or in someone's face. And it's not like we were just surprising people with microphones. We were setting up these interviews in advance, but there's still something very different about someone having a microphone and not having a microphone.

And I think in some ways it makes it more personal and I think they enjoy that. But also I think they can become a little bit more nervous about what they're going to say because they know it's going to be their actual voice saying it. And so I think as a journalist, you want to be just like much, much more welcoming and human than you might otherwise be even more, more so than usual. Are you proud of how this one turned out? I'm really proud. I can't wait for people to hear the last episode and I can't wait to hear people's thoughts, critiques, concerns.

I'm super excited about it, yeah. Sean, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. I appreciate it. Thanks Matt. Thanks so much for listening to this special episode of Inside the Tent. If you like what you've heard, want to catch up on other Campside projects, click on over to joincampside.com. That's joincampside.com.

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