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Teper has a theory. "The whole situation reminds me of an office worker who gets behind in his paperwork, so he chucks it in a drawer," he says. "After a while, he's spending more time finding new places to hide his papers than on doing any actual work."
It's a similar mentality to that of the postman who is discovered hiding 20 years' worth of mail in his apartment. (Except that tampering with mail is a federal offense, while junking human remains doesn't even violate state law.) It may start with a few letters here and there, but eventually reaches a point where it seems more prudent to cover up the crime than to correct it.
Of course, there's a world of difference between a magazine sweepstakes notice and the body of someone's beloved mother. But that difference wouldn't have quite the same resonance for someone whose job involves dealing with death every day, especially someone who literally grew up around corpses.
"The site looks like the guy was picking up bodies from funeral parlors and, if he didn't have time, he'd just toss them somewhere," Teper says. "Then, when he got the time, he'd dig a hole and bury them. What makes it confusing for the GBI is that it looks like he'd reopen a hole he'd dug years earlier and maybe forgotten, so you're finding newer bodies stacked on older ones."
The disturbing level of detachment it took to carry out such an operation is easier to picture in someone who interacted professionally only with similarly dispassionate morticians, someone who was never exposed to the reality check of grieving family members.
Finally, imagine that planting bodies in the back yard is the way one was taught the trade. After all, there's been no evidence so far that Brent Marsh even knows how to operate a crematorium. Call it a case of "like father, like son."
State Rep. Mike Snow, D-Chickamauga, concedes that he considered Brent's father, Ray, a friend. He helped out the elder Marsh in 1992 by passing a local bill that gave him a two-year reprieve from needing to get a funeral director's license, a measure that would have meant more regulatory scrutiny. Ray Marsh eventually went to court to successfully argue that because Tri-State Crematory did no business with the public, it was not subject to state inspections under Georgia law.
Much as he wants to believe his old friend had no part in the five-to-a-casket burials at the crematorium, Snow (whose own will calls for him to be cremated at Tri-State) says: "It's hard for me to believe that nobody else in the family would have known about this."
But Ray Marsh, 78, is unlikely to be much help to the investigation. While it's been widely reported that he's ailing, Snow says, "I've heard he has Alzheimer's."
Snow is leading the charge to close what many see as a loophole in Georgia law by making crematories subject to random inspections and making it a felony to desecrate a corpse.
While Teper signed Snow's bill, he intends to be watchful that it isn't broadened through some act of reactionary zeal to make it a crime simply to "mishandle" parts of a dead body, a revision that could effectively shut down women's clinics.
"I'm concerned about what the crazy anti-abortionists might do with this bill," he says. "Everybody thinks it's so easy to make laws, but it's very tricky."
Speaking of which, Ken Poston, a former state legislator himself, has the tricky task of convincing a jury or a judge that Brent Marsh has been wrongly accused of defrauding his funeral-home clients; more likely, he'll somehow try to downplay the level of wrongdoing. Neither will be easy.
Certainly, Poston can be expected to remind jurors as tactfully as possible that the actual laws his client is charged with breaking lie somewhere on the seriousness scale between shoplifting and DUI.
And, if the case does go to trial, it's a given Poston will request a change of venue to get Marsh far away from anyone whose family or friends might have been adversely affected by the years of malfeasance at Tri-State Crematory.*
