Noble - The Missing Right Arm | Chapter 7

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

As Brent Marsh’s court case winds up, one victim of Tri-State Crematory has a remarkable change of heart, even after seeing her husband’s mummified corpse. Other families are not so forgiving.

This podcast contains graphic descriptions of death and decay. Please listen with care. Walker County, Georgia, and Noble, they're places where people and families are entangled. Where if a store closes, your neighbor might be the one to reopen it. Where your high school teacher knows you before you actually sit at a desk in their classroom. Because they also taught your parents, and your cousins. So imagine how it was when the bodies were discovered at Tri-State Crematory.

It must have been impossible for the families to go to the grocery store, or the bank, or the dairy-dipped diner, without someone asking them how they were doing, and reminding them again about the horrible thing that had happened. But some families, the lucky ones, do eventually get some relief. Like Sheila Maness, the independent, loyal wife of Ira Maness, who died in August 2000. Sheila loved her husband so much that she unwrapped Hershey Kisses for him before his hunting trips.

In September 2002, seven months after the bodies were discovered, Sheila learns that Ira's body has been found. I was just laughing and I was just so glad that they had found him because I had no idea what I would have done if I had not got a body. I couldn't have lived with that, I don't think. You had immediate elation. Yes. Just thank God there's an end for me, you know. Ira's body is first identified through DNA samples taken from Sheila's daughter

and with the help of some of Ira's old x-rays. Sheila calls Special Agent Greg Ramey to thank him, and he tells her a little bit more about the condition of Ira's remains. It's not pretty. Brent had put a tarp over him. He was outside. And at some point in time, the animals had kind of dragged that tarp

kind of half off of him. So he was partially mummified and then the other side was skeleton. Most of his body parts were there, you know, but he was missing his right arm. So when Greg tells Sheila that they found Ira, what he really means is that they found most of Ira. They don't know what happened to the missing arm. Ira wasn't buried or in a vault.

Since he, or most of him, was found outside, among a bunch of other bodies, his right arm could have gotten mixed up with another set of remains. Now Sheila has to decide what to do with Ira's newfound body. Some of the other families who have gotten bodies decide against cremation this time around. They bury them instead. But Sheila wants to stick with the plan that Ira so meticulously prepared for himself and asked her to carry out. She's going to have him cremated, for real this time.

A funeral home near Sheila, not the one she originally used, offers free cremations for bodies recovered at Tri-State. So Sheila asks them to pick up Ira from the temporary morgue near the Walker County Civic Center. She's filed a lawsuit against the original funeral home that sent Ira's body to Tri-State. The attorneys want to get a DNA sample from Ira's body to confirm the remains are actually him. So Sheila invites the representatives of the people she's suing to poke and prod at her dead husband before he's cremated.

It turns the funeral home into a bit of a scene. There are lawyers and forensic experts and reporters there. And it's all going smoothly until McCracken posted Brent Marsh's attorney decides to show up. Because I knew I was about to be trying a case, potentially, where these issues of how the DNA was extracted was going to come up. Sheila sees McCracken pull up to the funeral home in what she describes as his little Mercedes. Funeral home lawyers are one thing,

but no way in hell does she want the jerk defending Brent Marsh there when she views Ira's body. She tells her lawyer, get Poston out of here. He gets out and he's taking his jacket off. And by this time, I'm halfway to him and my attorney catches up with me. And he talks to me, this is what you're paying me for. You know, I'm supposed to fight your battles. Sheila's lawyer stops McCracken and tells him that Sheila doesn't want him around for this.

And I got it. I said, man, don't worry. My role here is not that critical. And I, you know, deferred to the widow's wishes. So McCracken leaves without a fuss. Sheila and her daughter view Ira's partially mummified remains. From the pictures I've seen, the remains look closer to a pile of bones and dirt than a human body. But Sheila was married to the man for 20 years, and she finds ways to recognize Ira.

She sees a familiar plaid pattern from his boxer shorts among the bones, and that old dental appliance that Ira wore. There's no doubt it's Ira, or most of Ira anyway. The lawyers get the DNA sample they want, and Sheila gets one last look at her husband's remains before he's put into the furnace and burned. Knowing that Ira is finally being cremated brings Sheila some relief.

But seeing his half-mummified corpse also sharpens her anger towards Brent. Now she knows for sure that Ira's body was mistreated, kept outside for a year like an old car. And any joy she feels over her own closure is tempered by the knowledge that other families are still waiting, hoping, praying for their own positive identifications. Later that night, while Sheila is still at the funeral home,

she gets a call from a friend. He says that McCracken wants to talk. I said, no, I won't call him. I said, what does he want? Well, he's wanting to apologize to you. He didn't know it would be that upsetting. I said, are you serious? And he said, yeah.

And I had his number, and I thought, no. But then Sheila takes a beat. She thinks that showboat lawyer McCracken is calling me after midnight to apologize? Normally he'd do it on TV or in the newspaper so that everybody can hear him. He wouldn't do it in private. So maybe he's being sincere this time. Maybe he's really sorry about showing up at the funeral home. And Sheila calls

him back. Once you get to know Sheila, she's extremely plain spoken. She is going to tell you how she feels. And then it's over for her. And she called me and we had a very frank discussion about what, about Ira and learned about his life. And I listened to her. He said, yes, he said, I'm really sorry. He said, I'm just doing what I got to do. And he said, but I think I found a formidable opponent. I said, yeah, I think you have.

And I said, tell me about Brent. And he said, well, I'm not supposed to. I said, I'm just asking, will you tell me about Brent. And he said, well, I'm not supposed to. I said, I'm just asking, will you tell me about Brent? McCracken tells Sheila some things about Brent that haven't been getting much attention on the evening news. About how close Brent is with his family. About his football career at UT Chattanooga. How he's the son of a school teacher, Clara.

And that his elderly father had a stroke. And this conversation with McCracken, the hotshot lawyer, plants a seed in Sheila's mind. All this time she's hated Brent, thought he deserved harsh punishment for what he'd done. But the call with McCracken gets her wondering if she's been fair. If Brent really deserves life in prison. If he's really what she's been calling him on the online forums. If Brent Marsh is really a monster after all. From Waveland and Campside Media, this is Noble.

I'm Sean Raviv. Episode 7, The Missing Red Arm. As Brent Marsh's trial approaches, his attorney, McCracken Poston, does everything he can to put pressure on Walker County prosecutors. In pretrial motions and hearings, McCracken argues that a human body cannot be property. He cites a case from 1905. A widow in Georgia sued the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company for $2,000 for desecrating her husband's corpse.

The railroad had been paid to transport the body to where it was going to be buried. But during a changeover from one train to another, they left the body out in the rain for hours. And so they gave the quasi-torque right to the widow because she saw the body being damaged and messed her head up and all that stuff watching it. But the opinion was beautiful because it described how can we evaluate a rotting corpse? It's not like pig iron or other commodities. It's changing too. It's becoming less and less as time goes on. The judge in that case wrote in his opinion, a corpse in some respects is the strangest thing on earth. A man who but yesterday breathed and thought

and walked among us has passed away. Something has gone. The body is left still and cold and is all that is visible to mortal eye, of the man we knew. It is not surprising that the law relating to this mystery of what death leaves behind cannot be precisely brought within the letter of all the rules regarding corn, lumber, and pig iron. Based on that old case, McCracken's team argues that Georgia law says a body holds no monetary value, and that the bereaved have no right to possess a body.

A body cannot be owned in Georgia, they argue, and therefore Brent has not committed theft. On top of this, McCracken is doing his damnedest to increase the cost of a trial. He's already convinced the judge to bring in a jury from outside of Walker County, which will have to house and feed the jurors. And at one point, McCracken tells a county administrator that the trial is going to be really expensive for the county.

He tells him, don't you maybe want to tell the prosecutor that taking this case to trial isn't such a good idea? And I was prodding him, please go talk to him, because I'm just going to dig in, and you're going to have to identify everybody and I'm going to cross-examine that witness as to everybody. So this thing looked like it was going to take months to try. Eventually, McCracken thinks he's done enough to compel the prosecutor to negotiate a plea deal and avoid a trial.

And that's his goal, even if it's not necessarily what McCracken wants. It's what his client wants. Brent was the one that put the brakes on. I would have loved to have tried the case. I would have loved to be in a three-month-long trial, you know, because I think they would be so frustrated. The prosecutor starts negotiating. McCracken likes to point out that originally Brent was facing a sentence of 8,000 years, four times since the death of Jesus. Now he's trying to get the DA to go down to single digits. Brent, he just said, do it. When we got to the number 12, do it. I don't want to put my family through anymore. A lot of time has passed at this point. It's been over two years since the bodies were discovered. But after some wrangling, McCracken and the DA agreed to a deal. Brent will plead guilty to 787 counts,

including 122 counts of burial service fraud and 179 counts of abuse of a corpse. In exchange, he'll get a 12-year sentence. But the sentence is only one part of Brent's punishment, and time in prison is only one part of what the families want. A lot of them think he's getting off way too easy. Even those who are satisfied with the deal still want answers from him and why he did this. And they finally think they're going to get those answers

in November 2004, when Brent pleads guilty in court. And he speaks. To those individuals who were genuinely harmed emotionally as a result of my actions, I apologize, Brent says during the hearing. But he says that he can't give the families in the courtroom the answers that they want. He says, quote, not for lack of a desire to give those answers.

Sheila Maness is there to hear Brent, and his speech runs through her mind as she drives away from the plea hearing. My son was home when I got home. I went back in his bedroom and I sit down. I said, can I talk to you a minute, Matt? He said, yeah. I said, if I asked you to do something for me,

would you do it? He said, what do you mean? I said, anything. If I asked you to kill somebody for me, would you kill somebody for me? He said, you're my mama, yeah. That's all I needed to hear. The talk with her son and him telling Sheila that he'd do anything for her, even kill someone, confirms a theory she's been developing in her own mind, which is Brent took over Tri-State Crematory, not because he wanted to, but because he's a good son. She believes that Brent didn't want anything to do with the crematory, but when his father got sick,

he agreed to take it over out of a sense of duty to his family, and to his mother specifically. Then, when Brent found himself in charge, he couldn to take it over out of a sense of duty to his family, and to his mother specifically. Then, when Brent found himself in charge, he couldn't keep up, couldn't handle the difficult job of cremating bodies, but he also couldn't admit he'd fallen behind. He loved his mother. They were a close family. And same situation, Matt's dad was gone, and it was up to me to handle everything. So, yes, my son would have done anything for me. So you had gone through somewhat of a similar thing as Brent. Brent's father was sick for a long time.

He and his mother helped to care for him. His mother was left holding it, and, you know, she couldn't do it, so she had to ask him if he would do it. And being the good, obedient son, he done it. Just like you and your kids had to step up when Ira died. Yes. Sheila sees clear parallels between her family and the Marsh family, and she begins to regret the mean things she said about the Marshes in the online forums.

It's kind of a jolt back into my reality that, you know, family. And she begins to regret the mean things she said about the Marshes and the online forums. It's kind of a jolt back into my reality that, you know, I'm a Christian and I wasn't acting like one. And it wasn't helping my kids, me going around ranting and carrying on all the time about Brent and all this stuff. And so Sheila calls up McCracken again. I asked him, I said, what can I do to help? And he said, what do you mean? I said, what can I do to help Brent? He said, are you serious? I said, do I lie? He said, no.

And he said, well, he said, let me see, and I'll get back with you. The judge still has to decide if he'll accept the 12-year plea deal agreed upon by McCracken and the prosecutors. They'll hold a hearing where the families, the victims of Tri-State, will have an opportunity to speak in court. Brent will be there and McCracken expects he'll face some harsh words. He asks Sheila if she's willing to speak at the hearing.

But so far, Sheila has had a change of heart only in private. She hasn't spoken about it on the forums, much less in public. She has to decide if she can take her new

and true internal feelings about Brent and say them out loud, in front of the very people who hate him most. Good morning, everyone. I'm getting organized here, and then I want to speak to you briefly.

My name is Jim Botterford, and I'm a... And it's been almost three years where I was specially appointed to handle this case. It's the morning of January 31, 2005, and Judge Jim Botterford begins a hearing at the Walker County Courthouse in a big, echoey room with high ceilings. If anyone wants to speak, they are permitted to speak. Sheila Maness has found her seat, along with dozens of others in the back of the courtroom. Across from Sheila, she sees the other victims sitting together in the jury box, wearing yellow memory ribbons on their chests. She sees Special Agent Greg Ramey sitting with the prosecutors

in a wood-backed chair right by the jury box, as if to show the families he's still with them all this time later. Both the state and the defense's side, which is pretty empty in comparison. She wears a white church hat with a flower on the side and holds a huge Bible in her lap. At one point, a news camera catches Clara reading what looks like a highlighted section of Isaiah 53, a chapter that foretells the life and death of Christ. Her son, Brent Marsh, in a gray suit, sits next to McCracken Poston at the defense table. They're back to the spectators. The final word belongs to the judge. After the plea is submitted, the judge can reject it. Light slants in through the large windows behind Judge Botterford as he explains that the

family members can give their opinions for or against the deal. And if he doesn't approve it, then the case could still go to trial. Botterford has also read the nearly 250 statements that were already submitted in writing. I know that many of you have trouble sleeping. That was probably the number one thing you told me. Many of you have nightmares. Many of you lose your temper easily. Many of you, unfortunately, have had bouts of depression. Many of you are anxious, have had bouts of depression. Many of you are anxious, have anxiety attacks. And Judge Botterford keeps reading from this list.

Problems focusing, general distrust of people, isolation, troubles at work and with family, marital issues, and a big one, guilt about what happened to their relative's body, which was entrusted to them, something that Sheila has been dealing with for a long time now. Botterford turns the floor over to the families. Julie Kinder. They're called to the witness stand one by one. You solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you shall give

shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God. I do. Please be seated, Ms. Kinder. Just pick up where the judge can hear you, okay? Everyone has their own unique story to tell and their own unique reaction to what happened to their relatives. One man gets on the stand and shows a picture of his wife's corpse. Another shows a painting of her sister's urn.

Some of the victims who speak are clearly still angry three years later, like Julie Gosnell Kinder, whose father was Robert Gosnell. Well, Mr. Marsh, how many felonies did you commit? How many times did you break the law? Perform a gruesome act? This man needs to be punished. He has caused me extreme emotional pain. I walk around with the stress and anxiety burning in my stomach. I grieve over and over for the gruesome treatment of my father. You're a sicko, in my opinion. Judge Botterford, please give him the maximal penalty you have at your discretion. Thank you.

Some of the most intense words come from people with personal connections to Brent or the Marsh family. Adrian Brock was a high school football referee, and Brent was a regular customer at the store where he worked. Brock's younger brother, Van, was sent to Tri-State in 1999. I was proud of how you did your football career, but when this happened, if this was a football game, I would have to throw you out. This has had a tremendous effect on me and my family, and it has had a real effect on my nerves. And my brother, he died in my arms and his wife's arms. And two and a half years later, I'm looking at a skeleton and it hurts. And Brent, I'm so disappointed in you. Natasha Mann's father, Johnny Dykes, was taken to Tri-State in October 2001.

Natasha had economics class with Brent, and her parents knew Ray and Clara Marsh. Her dad actually visited the crematory and watched Ray work. So when he died, her family felt comfortable sending his body to Tri-State. Natasha looks right at Brent as she speaks. Brent, I don't know what your problem is or was, but it didn't take a lot of brain cells. I keep asking myself, why and how could you have done this to my daddy? The answers that I come up with turn my stomach. You have told us that you cannot tell us why you did this horrific crime

and I guess unfortunately we have to live with that I have come to learn through this process that you will meet your maker one day and excuse me but all the hell you've put us through will come back to you two fold I see nothing when I look at you

you have hardened me in ways that I could never begin to explain will come back to you twofold. I see nothing when I look at you. You have hardened me in ways that I could never begin to explain. You may not have killed my father, but a part of us died when you put my father's body in a vault with 20 others. I love my daddy with all my heart and no matter what you have put us through,

you could never change that. Life in prison would be just right for you. Throughout all of this, sitting at the defense table, Brent is stoic. He doesn't turn his head away from the people speaking at the witness stand. He appears to be looking directly at them. It could be that Brent's sympathetic to their pain and wants to dignify their words by giving them his full attention. Or it could be that that's what his lawyer told him to do.

I don't know. Sheila Maness has been waiting to be called to the stand to say her piece. She knows there could be consequences for saying the words she wrote down. She knows that people in this courtroom will turn away from her, maybe even hate her. But she also knows it's the right thing to do. And then the bailiff calls Sheila's name. Ms. Maness, where are you from, ma'am? Chatsworth, Georgia.

And what deceased are you connected with in this case? My husband, Alra Maness III. Ma'am, if you would, please tell the court how this crime has affected you and any other matters that you want to discuss with the court. Well, there's been a wide range of emotions, but I do have a statement that I would like to read. Sheila's wearing a black low-cut suit and a black jacket. Her hair is dark and goes past her shoulders, and she wears big, dangling earrings.

If she only had a veil, she could be dressed for a stylish funeral. She reads from a printed sheet and looks at Brent on and off as she talks about Ira. How handsome he was. How he died. How angry and shocked she was when she found out about Tri-State. How guilty she felt. I kept waiting for this so-called closure, but it never came. I was full of hate and anger, and I had no direction to aim it at. Then finally the day came that I realized that

I would never find it as long as I was full of the hate and anger. So I had to let that go. Sheila talks about that earlier plea hearing, when she heard Brent apologize for all that happened, and how after that she went home and discussed it with her children. And Brent, I want you to know that my family and I accept your apology. The most wonderful thing about being a mother is the fact that they love their children unconditionally. Even though they don't condone what their children do, they will always love them. And I also think you're a very brave man

to sit here and accept the punishment set forth by this judge. I think we've all been punished enough, and I include you in that statement. If it were up to me, you'd go home today. But I don't have the power to do that. You can't hear it well in the recording, but when she says that, that she'd like to see Brent go free, people in the courtroom start making noise, grumbling about what Sheila is saying.

The judge cuts them off. Now, let's respect... I want you to do this. Let's respect everybody's opinion. There are going to be many, many opinions here today, and you don't have to agree with them, but let's respect them. We're in a court of law. Let's please do that.

Thank you. Thank you. The only thing I can offer you at this time, Brent, is my forgiveness and best wishes. And please know that not all of us want you to die in prison. And I will never oppose your release on parole. And if there is anything I can do, I'm willing to do it. Thank you. When Sheila goes home after the hearing, there are TV trucks outside her house. She unplugs her phone from the wall, sends her kids to their friends, and leaves town for a week. Sheila's evolution from leader of the Brent Marsh

hate club to his advocate is pretty shocking. Other victims eventually forgive Brent, but few make such a complete U-turn as Sheila. It really does make her an outlier in the community at the time. I still to this day am not sure how she managed the transformation. Maybe it was the shock of Ira's death, and his post-death adventure that triggered it. Or maybe, like McCracken said, she has a rare ability to see outside of herself. Over the years, Sheila finds peace. With Ira. With what happened to his body. By the time I meet her in 2023, she's lost a daughter.

And she's fighting a debilitating disease of her own. She shows me a memory book that she's kept all these years. It holds Ira's awards, certificates, accomplishments. It's also got love letters he wrote to her when he was dying, news clippings from all the crematory stuff. It has pictures of Ira when he was alive and dead. Death's part of life, you know, and you can't run from it.

And if I took all the bad things that I've been through, I would just be miserable and wallowing in pity, and I'm too independent and educated to do that. Sheila is also still at peace with Brent. At one point, they even wrote letters to each other. Sheila can now laugh about what happened at Tri-State, to Ira, to her and her family. She can even laugh about the one final twist in the saga of Ira's body.

In January 2003, four months after Ira was identified and cremated for real, Sheila got a call from Greg Ramey. He had two words for her. Ira's back. They'd found Ira's missing right arm, a mile away from the body. Animals must have dragged it away. The coroner gave Sheila the arm in a large manila envelope. She had Ira's arm cremated,

and she keeps the ashes in a box in her living room, mixed with ashes of her deceased daughter. And when she dies, Sheila's ashes will go in there too, commingled with her family. After the hearing, Judge Botterford approves the plea deal. Brent will get 12 years. Botterford tells the families he's not going to make Brent explain why he did what he did, but he hopes that Brent will find it in his heart to do so.

The families seem desperate to know. But Brent goes to prison without ever explaining publicly why he didn't burn the bodies, why he put bodies in vaults, why he buried bodies in mass graves, why he gave families fake remains, why he would or could do something so obviously wrong.

Noble, Walker County, the families, as time passes, they keep asking this question. And two years after the hearing, McCracken gives them an answer. In February 2007, with Brent Marsh in prison, a couple years into his 12-year sentence, McCracken Poston issues a nine-page press release to the media.

I did it on the five-year anniversary of the discoveries. And the reason I did was 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. In the press release, McCracken writes that people still come up to him unsolicited and offer their theories for why it happened. The most difficult to tolerate, he writes, are ignorantly conceived opinions involving racism or misguided and inaccurate

conspiracy theories. I realize now, he writes, that the need for a plausible explanation is what has invited the rank speculation. At this point, McCracken has been working on the Tri-State case for half a decade. He's gotten paid some. In fact, one of his payments from the Marshes comes in the form of a commercial property they own, the piece of land in Noble where Ray Marsh once owned a general store,

and where Stan Porter once owned a barbecue restaurant. But overall, McCracken hasn't gotten anywhere near the amount an attorney would normally get paid for working on a case that long. He just seems to really like Brent and Clara and the Marsh family, and he thinks the press release might have a positive effect on Brent's eventual parole hearing. The title of the release, in all caps, is A Scientific Explanation for the Events at Tri-State Crematory.

When he first took on the case, McCracken explored any possible theories to explain what he calls Brent's bizarre behavior. Investigators ruled out necrophilia or any other abuses of the bodies, outside of leaving them to rot. And he didn't save a ton of money by not burning the bodies. So why did Brent do it? McCracken saw Brent as, quote, the most unlikely person to have deceived so many people.

And, McCracken writes, he was led to believe that Brent was suffering from some kind of neurological disorder. During my many talks with McCracken, when I asked him about Brent's emotional state in the days after the discovery, he always described Brent as being in a fog. You know, he was in a fog. He was, to me, in a fog. He was operating in a fog for some time.

He told me that Brent seemed bewildered. To get a second opinion on this, McCracken asked the one person who might be able to explain Brent's foggy state. Brent's wife. His wife told McCracken that indeed, something had been off with Brent. She said he really suffers from insomnia the last couple of years or something like that. Just as long as she had known him, he seemed to have this insomnia the last couple of years or something like that, just as long as she had known him. He seemed to have this insomnia problem. Brent's wife also told McCracken that Brent had frequent headaches and body aches.

And of course, Brent's father, Ray, had multiple strokes, neuropathy, senility, and Parkinson's-like symptoms. That's all before Ray died in May 2003. McCracken asked Brent what it was like when a body was burned in the Tri-State furnace. And Brent told him the crematory building filled up with smoke. This machine was in fairly bad shape in terms of ventilation. The stovepipe coming out of it leading to the outside of the building was compromised. It was thinned out, rusted, and missing in big parts.

So when they would burn a body, dust and vapors fill that building up. And here's two men in there breathing that in. One man for a long time, and then another one comes in and helps him, and then the older one leaves, and the other one is there still breathing it in. McCracken became convinced that Brent and Ray had suffered from mercury poisoning, which could theoretically have caused their symptoms. Brent didn't just ignore every body that he took in. It's believed that he burned approximately 660 bodies over his five years.

And all those bodies he burned, a lot of them had dental fillings made partially of mercury. And if you burned the fillings and inhaled the smoke, you'd be inhaling elemental mercury, which is not good. So McCracken started reading academic articles about mercury toxicity, dental amalgams, mercury-tainted fish, and the mercury-associated set of symptoms famously known as Mad Hatter's disease. And in 2004, McCracken had some of Brent's hairs tested for heavy metals. The results showed that Brent had elevated levels of aluminum, antimony, arsenic, cadmium, lead, nickel, and tin, all of which together could be a sign of mercury poisoning. Simply put, McCracken's argument is that Brent's brain

wasn't functioning properly when he was running the crematory. And the extension of that explanation is that Brent wasn't fully responsible for what happened at Tri-State because he was mentally impaired. Brent could never articulate why this happened, and I believe him. I believe that he was in a fog, and I think the mercury poisoning was the reason. The mercury, the effect of toxicity of mercury on his brain was the reason would it be accurate

to say that you've it seemed like to you that brent marsh threw out the case while you were working with him closely that it felt like he was in a fog the entire time no no no not at all he he he cleared up he cleared up it certainly seems plausible to me that both Ray and Brent were exposed to mercury. And who knows what other chemical fumes, when the furnace was so porous. And exposure to mercury is a known hazard for people working in the cremation business. But I spoke with an expert, who told me that elevated levels of metals, like Brent's hair test showed, are not a good substitute for clear, direct evidence of mercury exposure.

Ray and Brent's symptoms could have been caused by a million things. A lot of people have strokes and get dementia for reasons other than mercury poisoning. And Brent's fogginess? Who wouldn't seem like they're in a fog after going from a seemingly normal guy in a tiny town like Noble to being arrested and put on international news overnight? I personally don't buy the mercury poisoning theory, because I just don't think it's been proven.

And frankly, neither does McCracken. He ends his 2007 press release with the word opinion. He says, It is an opinion based in science that I stand by and am confident will not be contradicted. I ask that any and all in the community consider these facts before making their own final judgment about Brent Marsh and the

events at Tri-State Crematory. If a better explanation is to be had, it is simply not to be found. Over all this time I've spent learning about Tri-State, I've loved talking with McCracken, texting with him day in and day out, laughing with him,

begging him for documents, contacts, and his memories. But I think there is a better explanation about what happened at Tri-State. And after more than a year of reporting, I figured out where to find it. I know why it happened, when it happened. I know exactly where all the bodies were. I know exactly what he did. I know everything that he did.

And I know the reasons why. That's on the next and final episode of Noble. Noble is a production of Waveland and Campside Media. Noble was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me, Sean Raviv. 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.