Noble - The Gas Man | Chapter 1

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

A gas man out on a routine delivery discovers a corpse on a rural property in the tiny town of Noble, Georgia.

This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care. It takes 28 gallons of fuel and a spark to burn a human body. The body lays flat for hours, engulfed in flames, as the crematory furnace reaches 1,600 degrees, as hot as molten rock. Our skin, fat, muscles, and organs vaporize at that temperature, but not our bones. When the furnace is turned off, only a skeleton remains,

laying prone, like it decided to take a nap. If you want to fit those bones into an urn, you have to pulverize them in a machine that looks like a large blender. Two heavy blades grind them down into pebble-sized pieces of bone. The ashes are only ashes in name. They're not soft or powdery to the touch, but coarse like dry sand. It's an imperfect process. If perfect means every last bit of us ends up in an urn. Inevitably, some small percentage of our remains falls into literal cracks in the furnace,

the cracks formed over time by the intense heat. Some of us, of our remains, is even mixed with remains of previous cremations. But when all is said and done, most of our bones end up in an urn. And of course, that's if everything goes right. From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble. I'm Sean Raviv.

Episode 1, The Gas Man. It's October 2000, and Gerald Cook is driving to a crematory. He's in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where he grew up, like his parents and their parents. Like a lot of people from rural northwest Georgia, his family goes back generations in the area. Gerald knows it as a place where if one person does something, somebody else knows about it. Gerald works for a propane company, and there's a 3,000-gallon gas tank in the back of his truck. This isn't normally part of his route, but Gerald has agreed to make the delivery today because the other driver is too scared of going to the crematory.

He just said it made him feel creepy, but he never gave anybody any details. Did he see what I seen? I have no idea. The crematory is on a 16-acre property in Noble, Georgia. Noble is a quiet place, not even a real town. No school, no mayor, maybe 300 people live there. It's just a few dozen one-story houses on sprawling tracts of land, some small farms, man-made fishing ponds, the remnants of a shuttered hotel.

The crematory property used to be the most bustling in all of Noble, but now it's a quieter place, and strangers are not welcome. But Gerald is there on business. He's driving to the crematory to refill a propane tank that's used to power the furnace, where the bodies are burned.

He turns past an engraved headstone that says Tri-State Crematory. He takes the truck down a long driveway, past a stone-trim ranch-style house. Gerald comes to a dead end at a cul-de-sac. In front of him are a couple storage buildings, and a smaller brown building that houses the crematory. It seemed like it was a block building. Very ragged.

It was not maintained at all. There was you know, just weeds and junk everywhere and equipment that had broke and just left in its place. There was horses there. There was caskets

setting out on the ground everywhere. Just a just a very rough-looking place. Gerald gets out of his truck, leaving the big diesel engine running, and gets to work. It's normal for Gerald to not bother customers when he makes deliveries.

Just connect his tank to the customers, deliver the gas, and get out of there. Nobody greets him, so that's exactly what he plans to do, as quickly as possible. He isn't sure where the propane tank is, so he walks around a bit, goes behind one of the storage buildings. There was a little small tractor there with a front-end loader, not far from debris that you might find around buildings and stuff, such as just wood and limbs and whatever. And that little tractor, I could tell that it had pushed it all up into a pile.

And that's when I looked down and seen that there was bones and bodies just pushed up in a pile of debris. And the tank was not back there. But I looked at that long enough to see that there was human body parts and feet and skin. I just remember a foot with, you know, skin and stuff still on it. Just the foot? Just the foot.

Gerald stands in place, not quite believing what he sees. Nausea starts to kick in. Before his mind can fully process that he's looking at human body parts, Gerald hears a voice. Gasman! Gasman! Someone is saying. He looks up and sees a very large person standing next to his truck, calling for him.

Gasman! Gasman! He's a young guy, clean cut. He's tall, well over six feet, and broad, like the linebacker he used to be. His name is Brent Marsh. Well, I had enough sense to know that I didn't want him to see me staring at this stuff there. So I ran back to the back of the truck. I literally ran and then stopped and walked so he could see me walking

and just ask him where the propane tank was. Basically acted very dumb, like I was just simply a driver that didn't have any sense. Talked very country, and he just looked at me and said, the tank is over there. Gerald goes to where Brent is pointing, behind the crematory building, to where the propane tank is located. Brent follows him. Gerald is only 5'6", and Brent probably has 80 pounds on him. I don't know if I was directly scared of him or just scared of

what I had seen not knowing how he would feel about the fact that I'd seen it. I did all I could to act like I had not seen anything. It takes a few minutes to fill up the propane tank. The two men

stand there, silent. Gerald watching his gas meter, pretending he didn't see those body parts, wondering if Brent Marsh saw him see them. Brent's been running the crematory for about five years, since he took it over from his father. He also rents out tents and chairs for funerals and weddings. He's got a little white truck that says Brent's Tent Rental.

Finally, the tank is full after what feels like a month. Gerald pulls his gas hose back, gets in his truck, and leaves Tri-State Crematory. Instead of returning to the office, he drives around for 30 minutes, aimlessly. I didn't make any deliveries. Just simply driving and thinking thinking and, you know,

just come to the conclusion that this can't be right. I had no idea what the magnitude was. Gerald Cook's delivery was the beginning of a saga that would bring incredible scrutiny to a place so small you have to strain to find a sign for it. What happened next would affect thousands of lives, become one of the biggest, most expensive investigations in Georgia history, lead to new laws, and ultimately change the way Americans think

about one of the most primal and vexing questions we face as human beings. What do the living owe the dead? When I die, I'd like to be cremated, in the ashes placed in a stream somewhere pretty by a person who loves me. I can picture my cremains being carried away, navigating rocks and leaves until they eventually become one with the moving water. I think people, we, usually try to avoid thinking about death and what we want to happen after we die. But my job sometimes forces me to think about it and talk to people about it. I write about dead people all the time. I've been a journalist for eight years. I live in Atlanta, write long magazine stories and podcasts on all sorts of complex topics. CIA spies, war

criminals, police chases, serial killers, those kind of things. I once interviewed a man whose wife had been murdered. Her body was never identified, and the man was tormented. He thought his wife's spirit was still suffering because she wasn't properly buried. I didn't know if I agreed with his theory, but I never doubted that his suffering over her was very real. His wife was gone, but she lived on in his memory. Even after her death, he saw her in his dreams and spoke to her while awake. This is just one of the many contradictions scattered throughout our philosophies about death.

We know it's coming for all of us, but we don't know what it is. We treat dead bodies like they're precious, sacred even, but we're also revolted by them, the way they smell, the way they look. We do everything we can to not see the truly ugly thing that is a rotting corpse. In October of 2000, as Gerald Cook drove away from Tri-State Crematory, after seeing human remains there, he was dealing with that contradiction.

He almost vomited when he saw the body parts, but he was also concerned they weren't being treated properly. Aside from wondering, how did they get there? Gerald drove around and around to gather himself, and then he went to the office and spoke to his boss, who said he talked to the sheriff about it. I've been to many places, and I always love coming back home. This is Sheriff Steve Wilson. He was born in northwest Georgia, in Walker County, where he's been the sheriff for 27 years. You have the mountains here, you have the valleys,

you have a decent climate. So as far as those things go, it makes life easy. You know, 7,000 people in Lafayette. That's the seat of Walker County, where the courthouse is, and a sheriff's office. Noble, the site of the crematory, is six miles north of downtown Lafayette. You know, it's just the way of life. I think we're still somewhat, not a Mayberry, but we're certainly not that big. Even though we do border Chattanooga, that's a city of about 180,000, we still have somewhat that rural feel here.

And it makes for an easy life, not a fast-paced life. Sheriff Wilson grew up spending a lot of time at the gas station that his dad owned. He was elected sheriff in 1996 with 73% of the vote. And nobody has come close to beating him since. We have four cities in the county, then a lot of rural lands. So one day you may be talking with a farmer, next day you're talking with a banker. And Wilson told me that part of what makes him a popular sheriff is that he has an open-door policy for citizens who want to come and talk about any issues or problems. Well, I mean, I have people come in, not every day, but

you know, it's not uncommon for someone to come to the front office and say, I'd like to speak to Sheriff Wilson. If I'm here, I try my best to meet with him. And that's what Gerald Cook's boss did. He stopped by the Walker County Sheriff's Office to meet with Wilson. He told him that Gerald had seen body parts piled up at Tri-State Crematory. I think I thought, you know, oh shoot, this is just, he's got behind a day or so and he'll get caught up. I mean, it's a crematorium. I think that was pretty much my thoughts. Unfortunately, it turned out that wasn't the case, but that's what I thought at the time.

Wilson figured this wasn't a crime. What else would you expect to find at a crematory but a dead body? He thought it was a regulatory issue. He pulled out a binder with all the Georgia state agencies you could call for assistance, but he couldn't find one that regulated funeral services. And after he sent a few deputies to the crematory property, and they apparently didn't see anything, he didn't pursue it any further. Like most people in Lafayette, Sheriff Wilson knew the Marshes, the family that owned the crematory. You know, they had a good reputation in the community.

It was a crematorium. You take both of those and add them together, certainly you wouldn't expect to find what we found. I mean, I didn't, who would have ever thought of that? Not me, not you, not anyone, I don't guess. We just didn't have the luxury of knowing the entire picture, I think. And, you know, yeah, could we have done something better? Looking back, we probably could have.

Sheriff Wilson knew of Brent Marsh, the man who called for Gerald at the crematory after he found the human body parts. He'd been a football player at Lafayette High and then at UT Chattanooga. He was a deacon in training at his church. Brent's father, Ray Marsh, was a well-known businessman.

The Marsh family was black and had been in the area since slavery times. And Sheriff Wilson certainly knew Brent Marsh's mother, but that wasn't particular to him. Because everyone in the area knew Clara Marsh, one of the most prominent citizens of Walker County. Ray and Clara lived just a couple hundred feet from the crematory, where Gerald had seen the body parts. I've looked back on it a million times and said, could we have stopped it sooner? If we'd have done this, if we'd done A, B, C, or D, and we probably could have, but we didn't. I knew it was there, but I'd never been down to the crematorium. I didn't know what a crematorium

looked like. I mean, it was just one of those things that people in this community, yeah, we knew it was there, but nobody ever asked any questions. Nobody ever, I never met anyone that said they had been to it. But Gerald Cook had been there in October 2000. He'd seen body parts that didn't seem to be where they should be, even at a crematory run by a family with a stellar reputation. Gerald told his boss, and his boss told Sheriff Wilson personally. But nothing really came of it.

And then, a year after his trip to the crematory, Gerald Cook had the gas man, ever visited Tri-State Crematory, he learned everything he ever cared to know about the Marsh family. Whenever I was a preteen, Ray Marsh, Brent's father, came to my house. It was 1983, and Gerald was 12 years old. Ray Marsh stopped by the cookhouse to speak to Gerald's father. And asked my father for a forklift that would drive outside, not just on concrete,

to pick someone up and take them into the crematory facility, because they were so large that he couldn't pick them up. Ray Marsh was an industrious and forward-thinking man, the kind of guy who always had the next big idea brewing. And that ran in the family. His grandfather, Brent Marsh's great-grandfather, started a sawmill that employed a lot of people in Walker County until it closed in the 1960s.

In 1982, Ray saw a need for cremations in the area. At that time, anyone from northwest Georgia who wanted a body cremated had to travel two hours down to Atlanta. So Ray spent thousands of dollars on a furnace and opened the crematory that his son would later take over. He named it Tri-State because Noble is in the corner of Georgia where it meets Alabama and Tennessee. Ray Marsh's brand new crematory would burn bodies from all three states.

So try state. He was probably the first black man in Georgia, maybe even the country, to open a crematory. And soon after he did so, that's when Ray Marsh ran into a problem with a large body. So he came to Gerald Cook's house to try and borrow his dad's forklift. But Gerald's dad told Ray that his forklift couldn't drive on gravel or dirt, so it wouldn't work for Ray like he had hoped.

And he said, I'll probably just have to cut him up in pieces and burn him a piece at a time. Very straight-faced, because his fear was just too much fat would catch his crematorium on fire. You heard this firsthand, wasn't it? Yes. I was a small child standing next to my father, standing next to him. When Gerald told me these stories, he did his best to remember the details

and to get them all right. But memory can be tricky. It was October 2000 when Gerald, now an adult, first saw body parts with his own eyes outside the crematory building, piled up. It was almost like the story from his childhood had come to life. And all of that is on his mind a year later, when Gerald is once again assigned to make a gas delivery to the property.

Gerald doesn't usually tell his customers when exactly he's going to arrive. But on this day, his colleague keeps radioing him, asking what time he's going to get to the crematory. And they simply asked me what time I was going to be there, and I was like, I'm not sure yet, in the order of how I was running my route. And then they called me back again, basically saying that Brent wants to know what time I'm going to be there, so he can meet me.

Well, that made me very, very uncomfortable. But Gerald's the kind of guy who does what he's told, who respects the chain of command. He told his boss about what he saw at the property. His boss told the sheriff. He figured it must have been taken care of, handled, not a big deal, just a stupid mistake or something. So again, Gerald goes to Tri-State. Again, he passes the Tri-State headstone.

Again, he turns his truck down the driveway that goes deeper into the Marsh family's property. Again, he pulls up in front of the crematory building, next to the storage buildings that almost look like barns. Across the driveway from the stone house where Brent's parents, Clara and Ray Marsh, live. Gerald sees an old basketball hoop, a two-foot decorative snowman, a porch swing hanging from a wooden beam. When he doesn't see anyone around, he backs his truck up to the rustic crematory building, grabs the hose, and pulls it with him as he walks the 25 feet to the propane tank. I started filling the tank, and then over to the left, to my left side, there was a decomposing

body laying on the ground on a bodyboard. The body is leaning on a pile of debris. He walked over to it to get a better view. So it was this thing that looked like it was a, if you could think of a wax figure, melting. Basically, facial features were gone. The shape of the body is there, but it's basically, I guess, deteriorating. Right then, Gerald sees Brent Marsh come out of another building.

He walks up to Gerald, who turns his head, and walks back to the gas tank, which is still filling up. He's standing next to me, and I looked over, seen it, looked back, and he never said a word, I never said a word. But you were both standing right next to this body. We were within 10 feet of it. Gerald keeps his eyes on the gauge. He tries to ignore what he saw and just appear normal to Brent,

like it's just two guys shooting the shit. But then Gerald looks up again, and he sees a large blue tarp stretched out in the ground in a wooded area. Gerald quickly looks back down at the gas tank. And that's when Brent proceeded to tell me. He basically stuttered at that point and said, uh-uh-uh-uh, we're having septic problems out there, and we've got it all dug up.

Well, I've had construction equipment and knew that when you dig up for a septic tank, you usually have dirt piles everywhere. There was no dirt at all. It was simply a blue tarp stretched out. Gerald suddenly has a premonition. All he can think is he's probably looking at a mass grave. When he's done transferring the gas, Gerald gets out of there, making sure not to look back at where he'd seen the body. He goes to see his boss again and tells him, look, I don't get paid enough for this. He can't shake the idea that something is just wrong at the Marsh property.

But if that's the case, he doesn't understand why the police haven't done anything about it. I was never a person in this community that was a cry wolf. Or you can't trust that guy or believe that guy. I've always been very honest. And some of the stuff, when you tell me there was nothing going on, it actually attacked me personally. I felt very... It was confusing because I'm pretty simple. If I say this happened, then this happened.

And if you don't believe me, go look. It's there. It's been there every time I went. Gerald doesn't want to reach out to the sheriff again, so he does the next best thing. He calls his Aunt Faye. She's an assistant at an FBI office in Walker

County, and Aunt Faye believes her nephew when he tells her that he saw bodies at Tri-State. The deliveries at Tri-State changed Gerald. They were seminal moments in his life. Before then, he hadn't seen what happened to bodies once you brought them to a funeral home. The steps that are taken behind closed doors so that families don't have to see the ugly part of death.

But now Gerald had seen death up close. Closer than he ever wanted to. And he didn't think it was how it was supposed to be. Not this graphic. Not this in-your-face. Not lying around like discarded trash. Tell me, can you tell me, like, how it's changed you? You know, what has changed about you?

Nerves. Tend to be nervous a lot. Anxiety. A lot of bad dreams. You know, the scary movies and stuff that people can laugh and watch. I'm the person that's going to shut their eyes. Just can't tolerate that stuff. You know, I don't wake up every day thinking about it at all.

Tried to put it in its place. But I think the scarring that was done was, I guess, just impregnated into my being. And there were so many people that would try to come up to me and thank me. I'd try to thank you for something that you did, because they went through a lot of pain. And I can't imagine what they went through on that side of it. Gerald's part of the story ends here.

But that thought he had, that he'd seen a mass grave without really seeing one, was prescient. And telling Aunt Faye was the best decision he made. Because someone with authority eventually believed Aunt Faye the way they never believed Gerald. And what those authorities would ultimately find

would be much worse than anything Gerald saw. There was a hole that had been dug out in the woods that was partially filled with water. There were skeletons in that. I mean, guys, this is like a horror movie. That's the first thing I thought. I was like, my God, there's skeletons everywhere. 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 Raviv. Thank you. Sound design, mixing, scoring, and original music by Garrett Tiedemann. Our theme music is La Lucha Es Una Sola by the band Esmerine. Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywin, 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 Gregoriotis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.