Noble - The Marshes | Chapter 6

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

The family that owns the crematory—the Marshes—has been in northwest Georgia since slavery times. Their story may help explain what went wrong at Tri-State.

This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care. The founders of the state of Georgia opposed slavery, but not on principle. The Spanish were in Florida at the time and offered freedom to any enslaved person who would fight for them. So the founders believed that bringing enslaved people to Georgia put white colonists at increased risk of attack from the enemies to the south. But that stand on slavery didn't last long. The Spanish were defeated in the mid-1700s, and stolen people were soon imported from Angola, Sierra Leone,

and the Gambia. By the time the Civil War started in 1860, nearly half of Georgia's population, almost half a million people, were enslaved. People who were enslaved were forced to work under the threat of violence, rape, and family separation. Conditions were so bad that on one plantation in Georgia, 10% of the people enslaved there died every year. In 1864, a boy named Monroe was born into slavery on a plantation in northwest Georgia. Monroe was listed as mulatto in a later census,

meaning the child of one black parent and one white. It's unclear who exactly his father was, but most likely one of the white men whose family owned the plantation. The war ended a year after Monroe was born. Black people in Georgia were freed. Slavery was now illegal, but many blacks lived in devastating poverty

and still worked on white-owned plantations well into the 20th century. Monroe's mother got married and he took his new stepfather's last name, Marsh. Monroe Marsh later

had six children and one of his sons had a boy named Tommy Ray Marsh, born in 1926. He usually went by Ray. By the time Ray Marsh married Clara, and they had children of their own, including Brent,

the Marsh family was 100 years removed from the Civil War. But some centuries are shorter than others. Ray Marsh's grandfather, Monroe, was born into slavery, and Ray was a full-grown adult when his grandpa died. When I started to research the Marsh family's history, I did so because I wanted to get a sense of them as human beings, beyond what I'd read in archives and family history books, beyond what appeared in news stories from the early 2000s. Their story in America begins not by choice, but by force,

at a place that could not be any lower. And I think that history helped shape what happened later at the crematory. Because a family whose success is hard-earned will fight hard to protect it. From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble. I'm Sean Raviv. Episode 6, The Marshes. The Marshes After weeks on the Marsh property, investigators determined that it was between 1997 and 2002 when bodies were not being burned at Tri-State Crematory.

That window overlaps with Brent Marsh's time in charge. When his father, Ray Marsh, was running the crematory that he founded, it seems the operation was above board. But that still leaves open whether the rest of the Marsh family knew what was happening with Brent. What about his parents, Ray and Clara? Did they know? And if they knew what Brent was doing, what could possibly motivate them to hide it? To answer those questions, I took a trip to Noble, the very small community where the Marsh family has a long history.

And I met a man named Stan Porter. trip to Noble, the very small community where the Marsh family has a long history. And I met a man named Stan Porter. Back up a little bit, pull over there and turn around. Because cars come over this hill so fast. That's it. You would not have a chance if you backed out into the street. Stan Porter grew up in Noble on his grandfather's farm, about a mile as the crow flies from the Marsh property and tri-state crematory.

Stan is 72 years old, a tall and burly retired banker. He's bald, but with a gray walrus mustache, like Wilford Brimley. He's the kind of guy I could imagine sitting at the Dairy Dip Diner in Lafayette with a bunch of other old-timers, talking about long-ago football games over cheeseburgers and fries. Stan is well-known and noble, and in all of Walker County. He was chairman of the local technical college for a while, served on the board of a hospital, and he used to be president of the Walker County Chamber of Commerce. And Stan was kind enough to show me and my producer, Johnny Kaufman, around Noble, where he grew up and where he lives today.

So if you want to see Noble, where should we turn left? Turn left. As I drive, Stan points out a lot of stuff that used to be around here. Noble is mostly a residential area, a bedroom community for Lafayette, the seat of Walker County, and Chattanooga, the much larger city just north in Tennessee. Noble is like a village without a center, or even really a clear gathering place.

Even though most of the old businesses in Noble have been torn down, the legacies of Stan's family and the Marsh family are all around, sometimes right on top of each other. That's the store that Ray Marsh built, and that's where my barbecue restaurant was. I'll show you that. To the right or left? Left, that's all right. Take a left. A few decades ago, Stan had a little barbecue restaurant in Noble on Highway 27.

After the restaurant closed, Ray Marsh brought the property and built a general store in the same exact spot. When Stan was growing up, his grandparents hosted big barbecues, where they'd fry up meat skins in a big lard pot, throw hams in the smokehouse, and put out sweet tea and lemonade. Their family and friends would dance late into the night to the R&B tunes of WLAC out of Nashville. There were few, if any, streetlights in Noble back then,

so when families walked home after, they did so in the dark. But Stan remembers that as a kid he could somehow still see at night. As in lots of small towns, kids in Noble had night vision. The center of life for Stan and his family was a little white country church, constructed long before Stan was born. It was called New Home Baptist Church. In the late 19th century, freed black people left white churches for their own places of worship across the South,

no longer needing to conduct their services in secret. New Home began as a brush arbor in 1907, basically a structure made of logs and branches where people could worship together. A couple years later, a cornerstone was laid for the permanent church, and among the 17 attendees that day was its founder, Monroe Marsh, Ray Marsh's grandfather, and Brent Marsh's great-grandfather,

who was born into slavery. Stan's grandfather was one of the church's original deacons, and now, more than 100 years later, Stan is a deacon at New Home. This is a church on your left. It's called New Home Baptist Church? Mm-hmm, yeah. It's just a little small community church. What's it look like on the inside?

Ah, nondescript. It's like an old country church. After the church, Stan directs us to a cemetery just a couple turns away. It's small and serene, with about 50 or so graves surrounded on three sides by tall trees. It's the Marsh Family Cemetery. Stan has family here, too, because he's not just neighbors with the Marshes. He's also related to them. It's a little complicated, but Stan's mom's sister was married with the Marshes. He's also related to them. It's a little complicated,

but Stan's mom's sister was married to Ray Marsh's uncle. The point is the Marshes aren't just friends of Stan's. They're family. This is my aunt and uncle right here. She was my mother's sister. She died in 2002. It's a hot day late in the summer, but a light breeze makes it feel cool and comfortable at the Marsh family cemetery.

So we stand and talk for a while. Stan reads the graves and reminisces. Now that's Sam Marsh is the brother of Ray Marsh, the son of the original Sam Marsh. And I don't know where Mr. Sam was buried. I don't remember. I was a child when he died. We leave the cemetery and make a right turn. And Stan takes us by the place that Noble is most known for these days.

We're coming up on the Marsh property now, which I'll show you. We pass a house on our left and another on our right. But it's mostly trees on both sides. Until we approach a street sign that says Clara Marsh Lane. From here on, all this property on both sides of the road is Marsh property. A member of the Marsh family who grew up in Noble wrote about how back in the day, you could walk the equivalent of 50 city blocks in Marshland without having to cross a road.

You could leave New Home Baptist Church, stop at Auntie's Yard, play with your cousins, stop in at another Marsh house for a snack, see another aunt for the latest gossip, taste a strawberry from your uncle's yard, play with your cousins, stop in at another Marsh house for a snack, see another aunt for the latest gossip, taste a strawberry from your uncle's crop, and then wander through the woods some more. Marsh family there.

That is not Marsh. It was Marsh property, but they sold it to a friend. That's where the crematorium was. Down this road? Yes, right down this driveway. Okay. And it was? Yes, right down this driveway. Okay. And it was in that field right there. We drive slowly past the old entrance to the crematory. It looks like a normal driveway.

No sign or anything. Where the crematory building stood is now just an empty field. Could you see the crematory building from the road? Yes. If you were right here. And there were several buildings. It wasn't just one building. There were several buildings down in the back. They tore them all down. In this moment, what I really want to do is turn down that drive, knock on the door, and speak to the Marshes who still live there. But I'm still talking to their lawyer, McCracken Poston, about setting up an interview.

And so we just drive past. One reason I've tried so hard to interview the Marsh family is because I'm a white man reporting a story with a black family at the center. And I know I'm at risk of diminishing their perspective. I want them to tell their story. Stan tells me he spoke with the Marsh family before agreeing to do this interview. So in a way, he's acting as a proxy, or spokesperson, not just as someone who grew up and lives in Noble, but also for the Marsh family.

It's not the same as talking to the Marshes themselves, but like I said before, Stan is family, and has known them his whole life. So when we go to Stan's house to sit down and talk, I'm hoping that'll help me understand who the Marshes are as people. But when we get to Stan's, he tells me even more than I expected. If there is one single person who laid the foundation for the successful family the Marshes would become, it was probably Ray's grandfather

and Brent's great-grandfather, Monroe Marsh. Born enslaved in 1864, Monroe would go on to create a proud legacy for future Marshes and embody the family motto, you don't look up, you don't look down, you look them straight in the eye. Monroe Marsh never had a formal education, but he learned to read and write

and made sure that his children and grandchildren did as well. He opened a lumber company in nearby Chickamauga around the time of World War I and built it into a mini empire in North Georgia. He owned a sawmill, a planing mill, and delivery trucks. The mill employed blacks and whites and stayed open for nearly 50 years. The success of the sawmill seems kind of miraculous now.

It was owned by a black family in an almost all-white county at a time when racial violence was rampant across the South. And it opened around the same time that a black man named Henry White was lynched just down the road in Walker County. But the Marshers were known for their American-as-can-be entrepreneurial spirit, and Ray apparently inherited that spirit from his forebears. Here's Stan Porter.

Ray was driven. You know, if he saw a need, he went for it. He did what he had to do to make it successful. He worked very hard. He employed a number of people. Was it easy? I'm sure it was not. But he was a man who was focused in the direction that he wanted to go. Ray was well-liked and well-respected in this community, and he was light-complected.

So that probably helped him as well. Like Stan said, Ray had relatively light skin. He was once asked about this in a deposition related to a different case, where he served on the jury, and I got a hold of the transcript. For whatever reason, the lawyer questioning him was interested in the color of Ray's skin. And for whatever reason, Ray was feeling surly that day. And all he was interested in was giving the lawyer a hard time. The lawyer asked him, Mr. Marsh,

just for the purposes of the record, you're black. Is that correct? And Ray said, I don't know. You don't know if you're black or not? I've got a lot of white people that say I'm their cousin,

so I don't know whether I'm black or not. You honestly don't know whether you're white or you're black? I don't know whether I'm black or not. You honestly don't know whether you're white or you're black? I don't know. Colors have never bothered me. Would you say that in Walker County that you were perceived as white or black? I wouldn't know. I wouldn't say. I can go anywhere I want to in Walker County. Did it all my life. Ray had a lot of different jobs when he was younger. As a kid, he worked in the family sawmill. After high school, he was in the army for two years. He had his own construction company for a while. He worked at a T&T plant and at the post office. Even before Ray met Clara, he lived

on the land where he would later open Tri-State Crematory. And Ray's property was a commonplace for people in Noble to hang out. He owned horses and built a go-kart track for kids like Stan to race. Ray even had a real boxing ring, elevated off the ground and everything. And on weekends, there were fights. It would be various men in the community. There was a preacher in Chickamauga. His name was D.B. Chaney. He was a very good boxer. And then there were guys from various areas around, Somerville, Rome, and even Chattanooga. They would come down here for boxing matches.

So it wasn't like some local kids learning to box. These were like actual... These were guys that could box, yeah. You didn't mess with these guys. Also on the property, Ray ran something like an Elks Lodge, a place where adults could hang out while the kids were racing go-karts. But one day, young Stan found his way into the club. We snuck in there one time as little boys, and we snuck a couple beers out.

And next time we went in there, he took them out because he would not allow us to do stuff like that. That was for adults. And he did a lot of things in the community for the kids. I remember as a Boy Scout, he would let the black Boy Scouts come down and camp on his property down there. But sleeping on the ground wasn't for me. My idea of roughing is a holiday inn and no pool. But yeah, he did all sorts of things like that.

He worked with the community to help the youth. And Ray hosted big blowouts. They would sponsor hay rides from Chattanooga to Rays on the Lake, is what they called it. At Rays on the Lake, there was food and drink and sock hops for teenagers to come and dance together by the water. How many people would come to these type of gatherings? Oh my gosh, it would probably be 100 people or more, because they would come from Chattanooga. And mostly relatives and friends of your family and their family?

No, they would advertise on the radio And back during that time They would have, they called it hay rides And they would have big flatbed trucks And they'd load up kids on it And they would drive from Chattanooga down here And they would get out And there's a lot of land over there So they would get out and they would dance

And all that sort of thing there at the cabin I wish so bad I could have gone To one of these Rays in the Lake parties, taken the hayride from Chattanooga with the kids, stood by the lake under the moonlight, seen all the people dancing and having a blast in Noble. After all I'd seen in court documents and heard during talks with police and families,

this was the first time I could really picture good times, beautiful times, it sounds like, on the Marsh property. Clara Campbell moved to Walker County in 1960. At the time, schools were still segregated, and there was a shortage of black teachers. Clara was from South Carolina, but she came down and taught English at the black high school, Hill High.

At some point, she met Ray, who would have been a catch. Pretty well-to-do man, with a large property, who everyone seemed to think highly of, even white people. Part of the Marsh family that owned the lumber mill. The guy who ran the parties at Ray's in the lake. Clara and Ray got married in 1969. And Clara, now Marsh, was a pretty good catch herself. An educated, attractive, and no-nonsense young woman. She taught at Hill High until schools were desegregated in Walker County in the mid-1960s.

Then she switched to mixed schools, where she taught generations of students, black and white. As a teacher, Clara was well-liked, even though she had a reputation for being tough. She expected the best from you. That's the thing. And I felt like the Black teachers cared more about us because all my life I was told I had to be twice as good to get half as far. And Black teachers pushed us to do that. Would you say that Clara was an outlier in her being this difficult teacher, or was that just emblematic of what black teachers had to be like back then? I think it was what black teachers had to be during that time.

She was probably a little more adamant in how she did it, maybe, than some of the other ones, but they all were that way. Clara worked four decades as a teacher, but her influence in Walker County went way beyond that. Her resume was impressive. She was president of the Walker County Association of Educators, chairman of the Walker County Democratic Committee. She worked with the Chamber of Commerce and the Walker County 150-Year Anniversary Committee,

and she was a court-appointed special advocate for the best interests of abused and neglected children. And that's just a partial list. As Clara's lawyer told me, anytime some organization in Walker County needed federal money, they put Clara, a black woman, on their board. I've spoken with a lot of people who have opinions on Clara Marsh. One consistent word they used was matriarch. The other was overbearing, which Stan says is an exaggeration.

I think she gets a bad rap on some of that, to be perfectly honest with you. Yes, she is very aggressive. Yes, she takes no prisoners. But she will do anything for you. When Stan's mother was sick, and Stan and his sister were putting in long hours taking care of her, Clara showed up. She called one day and said, we're going to bring you dinner. And I said, well, great. I said, I'll get the house cleaned up.

She said, no, we're not going to eat inside. We're going to eat outside. I said, oh, no, it's warm. She said, look, I'm bringing dinner. Are we going to eat outside or are we not going to eat at all? I said, okay, yes, ma'am. And it was a wonderful thing. And when it was done, they cleaned up the food and the

dishes and everything. And you never would have known it was there. One year, the Marshes held a big family reunion at their church in Noble. Over two days, Marshes from all over the South prayed together, ate ham and macaroni salad together, and celebrated their ancestors together. The reunion was such a big deal that the governor of Georgia wrote a letter commemorating it. I hope it will be an enjoyable and memorable one for all, he wrote. Another letter came from Alex Haley, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and the author of Roots, and the autobiography of Malcolm X.

Dear members of the Marsh family, Haley wrote, it's most important that reunions include special remembrance and prayer for those ancestors who went before us. May we never overlook, never forget, that unless they'd endured the struggles and sufferings which they did, surely we wouldn't now be going about enjoying our possessions, our potentials, our accomplishments, honors, and titles. Ever since I started reporting on the Marsh family, I've wanted to learn more about their past,

to see if it offers any answers to what happened at Tri-State. I think the answer is clearly yes, it does. The family seems to have succeeded despite coming from Noble, this very small place, despite being descended from people who were enslaved, despite living in a place where schools were only desegregated in the 1960s, and despite being a black family living in a very white county. Ray and Clara Marsh had made it in Walker County. They had kids, good jobs, owned land all over,

were prominent members of their church, and were generally cemented as leaders in the community. At one point, Clara Marsh was named Walker County Citizen of the Year, and March 12th was declared Ray Marsh Appreciation Day, in honor of Ray's service, and for being, quote, an outstanding citizen, an honorable man of high moral character and honest business practices, a wonderful husband and father, and a beloved friend. For many years, a big part of Ray's service to Walker County and to northwest Georgia and its adjoining states

was helping with funerals. And around 1970, he began digging graves. When Stan Porter was growing up in Noble and attending New Home Baptist Church, if someone died, it meant there was work to do. The men of the church met and they said, we have to go dig the grave.

And they would take lanterns out in the field at night, and they would take them. I mean, he dug a six-foot grave, you know, big enough to put a casket in, so it took a while. The men would include young Stan, let him get down in the grave and play with the dirt before they'd pull him out and finish the job. Ray Marsh saw the strain that this put on the members of his church, and so he started a grave digging business. He dug graves from here to Alabama, I think as far south as Cardinalville, and all up in Tennessee. He went to a rent-a-hall place and rented his first backhoe,

and he started going out digging graves. And the business just flourished from that. And so at one time, he ran about three or four crews digging graves and putting vaults in. As a matter of fact, he manufactured his own vaults at one time, he ran about three or four crews digging graves and putting vaults in. As a matter of fact, he manufactured his own vaults at one time. Ray's involvement in all these funerals sparked another business idea, a crematory. Back then, if you wanted a body cremated, you had to send it to Atlanta. But he knew there would be demand up in northwest Georgia for an option that was far cheaper than a typical burial.

So in 1982, Ray bought a $20,000 power pack furnace, which weighed approximately 11 tons. He had to leave one wall of the 988-square-foot crematory building unbuilt in order to install the thing. He told a reporter back then that he'd have an assortment of urns available for customers. It would be a one-man operation, he said. I remember when he said he was going to do it, those of us here in the community were not happy about it. We thought it would smell, and he assured us that it wouldn't, because he said the temperature was so hot and that, that, that.

But again, he saw a need for it. Cremations were starting to become popular, And so he bought that crematorium and had it installed over there. Was he pretty proud of it? I'm sure he was. Yeah. I mean, at that time, he had the only crematory around here. For years, Ray ran the crematory and 90% of his business came from funeral homes who used tri-stateState as a third-party service. It wasn't always smooth sailing. In 1991, a new Georgia law was passed. It said that if you ran a crematory in Georgia, you had to be a licensed funeral director.

That would have required Ray, already in his 60s, to go back to school, get a degree from a funeral service college, and apprentice for at least 3,920 hours hours over a period of no less than two years. In other words, he'd have to train to become a full-on funeral director. I don't know what prompted the law, but it smells like classic protectionism. To make it as hard as possible for individuals like Ray to compete with bigger businesses.

And Ray would have been a victim of the law. But he hired a lawyer and recruited a powerful friend, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, who tried to get a permanent loophole passed just for tri-state crematory. Frankly, at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. Why should a nearly 70-year-old man spend thousands of hours and dollars just to get a license to do something he already did. In the end, the wording of the new law proved vague enough to grant Ray an exemption anyway. While initially the state tried to shut Ray's business down,

in 1996 they dropped their case against Tri-State. By then, the crematory wasn't exactly a one-man operation, as Ray predicted when he opened it. Over the years, he employed a few people, mostly family, to help with the crematory and his grave digging and vault business. Even Clara helped a bit, with bookkeeping and answering the phone. And in a pretty typical small business scenario, as Ray's son Brent grew up, he helped out with the crematory too.

By all accounts, Brent was a good, intelligent kid with a bright future. He was a sprinter at Lafayette High School, captain of the track team, and a lineman on the football team. He had perfect attendance his senior year as a student. Who does that their senior year? And earned a scholarship to play linebacker at UT Chattanooga. Stan Porter has known Brent since he was a baby, and he told me that Brent learned about service from his parents.

Stan described Brent, before the crematory stuff happened, as a pillar in the community and a rising star. He was kind of a guy that when folks needed help with things, he would do that for. He was a very respectful young man. He would have been someone that if I needed help, I would call, and he would be here. And Brent apparently made a sacrifice for his family in 1996 when his father, Ray, had a series of strokes. Afterwards, Ray suffered from dementia and could no longer walk, much less work.

And Clara had to take care of her husband. Brent left college and took over the crematory. The one-man operation had a new man. The earliest body that investigators found and identified at Tri-State, aside from the one outlier that had been exhumed from his grave, was a person who died on March 31st, 1997, well after Brent had become the face of the business. But while Brent was in charge, Clara Marsh was still living in the house with Ray just a couple hundred feet away from the crematory, and from the bodies that eventually piled up. A few weeks after Brent was arrested, the GBI had Clara, Ray, and Brent's sister arrested too.

It was based on a pretty meager technicality, basically an excuse. They were arrested for falsifying information on death certificates by signing their names under the title Funeral Director when they weren't officially that. Their lawyer, McCracken Poston, remembered how sad and ridiculous it was to see the deputies attempt to fingerprint Ray Marsh with him in a wheelchair and suffering from dementia. All three of them were let out on bond the same day they were arrested,

and eventually a judge dismissed all the charges, and none of them were let out on bond the same day they were arrested, and eventually a judge dismissed all the charges, and none of them were arrested again. It's very unlikely that Ray was aware of Brent's doings, given his health, but that still left open a difficult and ugly question about Clara, who lives so close to the crematory building. I asked a lot of people about this, including Special Agent Greg Ramey. How can somebody have that going on there and you not know that it's going on there? You know, I mean, your kid comes in the house smelling like pot.

Well, he's probably been smoking pot. So do you think he grows it or do you think he goes out and buys it? I don't know. You've got woods behind your house. You see him going out there with a shovel and stuff. Okay. You probably suspect he's growing pot, but you don't know it for 100%. I think she knew what was going on. Can I prove that 100%?

No. Does the geography of the property indicate more towards it'd be really easy for them to know or it's possible they don't know? Unless she got out, walked into the buildings, she could conceivably say, I didn't go in the retort building. I didn't go in that building. I didn't go in this barn. I came here. I parked here. I got out.

I went in the house. So that's a possibility? It's a possibility. It's possible that she didn't know. I sort of doubt it, but, you know, I mean, I don't know. Greg seems to be split on Clara. Like as a regular citizen of Walker County, he's of the opinion that Clara knew. But as an investigator, he knows he can't back it up with hard facts.

I also put this question to the Marsh's lawyer, McCracken. Everybody that really knows Clara would know that she would not allow that to happen. I will never believe that the family knew things were as bad as they were because it took several attempts at getting law enforcement out there that nothing panned out what do you think this is just theorizing obviously but what do you think clara might have done had she known what was going on? Well, I think she would have whipped things into shape in all likelihood. I don't know how at that point, because once you're behind and haven't given the right body remains to the right person,

I don't know what she could have done. I can't imagine that she would have known. But I think they also felt this is Brent's operation now. We don't need to push him. It's his now. Let's let him feel like it's his. And they pretty much washed their hands of the place and let him operate the whole thing. In the early 2000s, Clara was asked by lawyers in a deposition about her involvement in the crematory.

She had a pretty incredible response. Here's what she said to the attorney interrogating her. You're thinking, I'm talking to a lady who taught 40-some years and with a master's degree, so I expect her to be very intelligent about a lot of things. And I promise you that I am. About a lot of things. But about my husband's business? That was my husband's business. Clara denied any knowledge of what was going on at Tri-State,

of Brent not burning the bodies, of there being bodies on her property, period. If you look at a map of the property and where the bodies were found, none of them are really near Clara's house. The vast majority are behind some buildings opposite Clara's and probably couldn't be seen from her windows or where she parked her car.

So like Greg said, it's possible she didn't know. After learning so much about the Marsh family's history, about their ancestors who started off enslaved and somehow built up a lumber empire, too many other businesses to count, and a church still going today, I took away one big thought. And this is just my own opinion.

That this family, this pretty amazing family, had succeeded against all odds, and had a lot to lose. And like any family that has a lot to lose, they would probably do a lot to protect it. Not just the physical things gained, not just money and land, but reputation and legacy. I asked myself if it were my son or my brother, and he did something like what Brent did, something huge and unforgivable, what would I do if I found out? Would I immediately run to the police

and make my family suffer the collective punishment, the public shame, the potential ruin of all they'd done over a hundred years? Or would I turn a blind eye and hope he corrects it, somehow? I'm not saying this is what happened. I'm just saying I can sort of picture it. The victims of Tri-State, the families, were so angry because they wanted nothing more than to protect their relatives.

To defend them even after they died. If Clara knew what Brent was doing, and she kept it a secret, she was probably trying to protect her family too. The living and the dead. To protect their memories and honor. To protect everything they had accomplished. If that was the case, to me, this is not a paradox, but a parallel between the families and the marshes.

It's actually something that links them. But as Brent's trial approaches, the families aren't exactly interested in the marsh's past. They want to know why Brent did this, and they want to hear it from the horse's mouth. But at this point, Brent hasn't said more than a few words in public. And whatever is in his head is still a mystery. Everybody kept saying, we never found out why. And it just seemed like a bit of anger behind that.

We never found out. We weren't given the reason why this happened. And I thought, well, here, I'll give you the reason. I'll give you what was going to be the defense. That's on the next episode of Noble. To be continued... Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer. Sierra Franco is our associate producer. Editing by Jason Hoke, Johnny Kaufman, and Matt Scher. Fact-checking by Kaylin Lynch. 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.