Posted on 04/06/2002 11:57:37 PM PST by sarcasm
NOBLE -- In the woods outside Tri-State Crematory, a hearse sat on four flat tires for more than two years.
Inside the hearse was a coffin, still bearing its now-shriveled flower arrangement. Inside the coffin was a long-ago mourned body.
Along with the hearse, investigators found five automobiles and truck carcasses as well as a rusted house trailer. The cars were stuffed with trashy debris, including disposable diapers, shirts, Clorox bottles, paper and plastic bags. Rusted tools, old refrigerators, rusting driers and broken folding chairs littered the woods.
In the crematorium office was still more clutter: invoices and cremation certificates scattered without any sense of order. At the nearby home, bills, personal papers and notices were crammed in every nook and cranny -- mostly unopened.
Welcome to Ray Brent Marsh's world -- a place of chaos, confusion and profound inertia.
But, investigators have come to believe, probably not the world of a scam artist or worse. Instead, officials now think psychological or character flaws may provide the best explanation for the strange story of a crematory operator who stockpiled 339 bodies rather than burn them.
Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI profiler who has followed the case, believes such an explanation makes the most sense.
"There is order in the most chaotic behavior. It probably made sense to him," Van Zandt said. "But he was overwhelmed by the paperwork, by the bills, by the stacking.
"He didn't have the organizational skills to carry out his job. It was the worst possible scenario -- 'I'm disorganized and I have no boss.' "
In the early days of the investigation, theories abounded on what lurked behind the macabre discoveries on the Marsh's family property in Walker County. Was Marsh dumping bodies and reselling caskets? Was he selling bodies or body parts? Might the 28-year-old have been involved with necrophilia? Was he selling pictures of decomposing bodies through the mail or were the pictures going out on the Internet? Instead, the bodies were left scattered around Marsh's family property in Walker County. More than 100 bodies weren't even buried.
Many bodies had been deposited carelessly in earthen pits, suggesting they had accumulated in a pile somewhere else before being dumped in all at once.
When authorities began looking at the crematory in February, they discovered the furnace hadn't been functioning for an undetermined but perhaps long time. But they got it working by simply connecting a loose wire.
Considerable speculation was sparked at one point when Marsh was accused of having pictures of decomposing bodies on his computer. But authorities later determined that the images had been recorded on the secondhand computer's hard drive long before it got to the Marsh household.
And as a scam, stashing rather than burning bodies is an unlikely profit maker. At $175 a body, Marsh would have grossed only about $10,000 a year over the six-year period in question.
Van Zandt, who now owns his own business in Fredericksburg, Va., believes it is possible that Marsh rationalized that it was OK to do what he was doing because it involved dead people.
"He probably thought, 'People don't care about them. I was going to burn them anyway. Someday I'll burn them and get it done, and [in the meantime] I'll give these people some ashes to keep them happy. If these people want a jar of ashes, what difference does it make if it's cement or ash? I've met their emotional needs,' " Van Zandt said. "He may have had the very best intentions and all of a sudden was so far behind."
The Academy Group in Washington, which also is composed of former FBI profilers, including Roy Hazelwood, perhaps the world's most famous, agrees with Van Zandt's theory.
"Basically this just sounds like he was lazy and didn't feel like working with the crematory equipment," said Martin Rehberg, the company's vice president.
The kind of behavior exhibited by Marsh can be rooted in psychological problems such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders, said Nadir Amir, professor of psychology specializing in anxiety disorders research at the University of Georgia.
"Depression would cause someone just to have a complete lack of interest. It could be at the level of their just not caring," Amir said. "That could lead to an extreme lack of interest and laziness, but that doesn't really fit."
Amir believes that an obsessive-compulsive disorder called a hoarding condition is a more likely explanation. People with this problem keep things they don't need. They can't make a decision about what to do with them.
"It's like the bills they found in his house being stuck here and there," Amir said. "It's not that they're really lazy, they just can't make a decision. It gets harder and harder [to make a decision] and the hoarding continues."
Hoarding, a little understood psychological malady, has only recently been recognized as a mental health issue and a public health problem. Unlike obsessive collectors, hoarders' piles are neither neat nor organized. But the behavior is rarely noticed until it's so extreme that the person faces eviction, action by a health department -- or death, in one famous case.
Two reclusive brothers were found dead in 1947, literally entombed by their disorder. The Manhattan brownstone of the Collyer brothers held 136 tons of junk, including 14 grand pianos, the chassis of a model-T Ford and specimens from their father's gynecology practice. The brothers had carved tunnels out of the piles and had set up booby traps for intruders. One of those traps triggered accidentally, trapping the siblings.
Hoarding behavior appears in several other illnesses -- including schizophrenia, dementia, anorexia, substance abuse and mental retardation -- making it hard to categorize. A growing number of experts believes it is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates the disorder affects 3.3 million Americans. Many sufferers have common symptoms such as compulsive hand-washing and counting. Ten percent to 20 percent of hoarders report no other symptoms.
Marsh's teachers and coaches describe him as more or less normal in his youth. He was awarded a football grant-in-aid at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, where he didn't distinguish himself academically nor athletically, although he was good enough to play in most games and start some.
But things seem to change for Marsh when he was 22 and fresh out of college. His father became too ill to continue running the family business, forcing Marsh to take over a generally grim business at a relatively tender age. It is unclear how much enthusiasm Marsh had for the business, which provides little pay for hard, unpleasant work.
The prospect that Marsh's actions can be explained as a character or psychological problem rather than criminal intent could have a bearing on how he fares in court. Marsh, who has been in the Walker County Jail since Feb. 16, faces 232 charges of theft by deception for allegedly taking money for cremations and not performing them. A number of lawsuits also have been filed.
Even though the lawyers involved in the case have been ordered not to discuss it, other attorneys said it would help Marsh to come across simply as inept.
"Assuming the theory is correct, I would say in terms of pretrial negotiations, it would help the defense," said Henry Hibbert, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney and civil litigator. "In terms of a trial, the sheer numbers would seem to have an impact on the intent element. The intent to steal seems to be lacking."
Dwight Thomas, a DeKalb criminal defense attorney, said any factor that tends to explain actions in a sympathetic manner can help the defense. "Especially when the state may have evidence to prove guilt, you've got to look at the mitigation aspects," Thomas said. The theory "would be beneficial to the defendant. Possibly his actions would not be seen as malicious or monetary. Judges see things a lot different if it's negligence where the actions of the defendant shows a pattern of negligence as opposed to making a profit."
Corinn Mull, a DeKalb public defender, questioned whether there even is a criminal case. "I might remove it from criminal court," Mull said. "This guy hasn't killed a living being."
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