Outrage Over Bodies Bridges Racial Divide

The schools may be desegregated and the 24-hour Wal-Mart open to all, but when it comes to the great equalizer--death--the races here go their separate ways. White bodies to white-run funeral homes, black bodies to theirs.

“It’s a cultural difference,” said Ron Cain, an undertaker’s assistant at a funeral home that caters to whites. “There’s a difference in the way we worship and the way we sing. So I guess it carries over into the funeral business.”

But since the first hint of trouble at the Marsh place this month, the blacks and whites of rural Walker County, Ga., have shared a common outrage. Nobody can believe that a member of the family--prominent local blacks embraced by the white establishment--allegedly desecrated hundreds of human remains by piling them in pits and vaults like bags of trash.

The gruesome find at the Marshes’ Tri-State Crematory, where authorities say they’ve recovered more than 300 bodies sent there for incineration, is an affront that goes deeper than Dixie, deeper than the legacy of segregation that lingers in this county of 61,000, where the races hew to separate churches and undertakers.

It violates one of the South’s most cherished traditions: respect, even reverence, for the dead.

“We’re brought up and raised to take care of our dead,” Sheriff Steve Wilson said. “We treat them with all the respect and dignity that they pass along to us while we’re living. And to see something like this, just a disregard for that upbringing that we’ve all been accustomed to, is why people are so outraged.”

The anger is greater than anything Wilson has seen in 35 years of law enforcement. And it was so palpable last week that one judge issued a gag order to try to dampen media coverage while another delayed a decision to release on bond Tommy Ray-Brent Marsh, Tri-State’s operator. Marsh, 28, who has been charged with 16 counts and counting of felony theft, was the target of a death threat two hours before his Friday arraignment.

There is lots of threatening talk in places like the Huddle House coffee shop, a gossip mill where most of the customers are white and almost every table is a smoking table. “If he [Marsh] don’t leave town, something’s going to happen,” waitress Linda Brown warned.

The bitterness is shared by relatives of the black victims.

“It was blacks too,” said La Tonia Harris, 40. The body of her boyfriend’s brother was sent to Tri-State. “This is highly upsetting, what he done to those people.”

In Walker County, about 85 miles northwest of Atlanta, there is plenty of allegiance to the dead.

Just south of the Chickamauga National Battlefield, a sprawling memorial to Civil War casualties, the rolling hills are punctuated with car shops, metal buildings, hangdog houses and cemeteries sporting large headstones and plentiful bouquets.

There is no movie theater within 25 miles. But there are four funeral homes, one with a marquee off U.S. 27, the main drag. Its message last week: Homer Wilson, 2 p.m. Wednesday.

Whites stay close to home. Blacks send their deceased to funeral directors in Chattanooga, Tenn., or Dalton, Ga., a half-hour away.

But many of the funeral homes--black and white--have used one crematorium: Tri-State.

Cremation isn’t popular in this notch on the Bible Belt. The Wallis-Wilbanks Funeral Home, which hasn’t handled a black body in at least 40 years, has had requests for only 42 cremations out of the 800 services it has performed since 1996, owners say.

“I guess it’s just not the Christian thing to do. I’ve heard that remark,” said Barbara S. Wilbanks, at the mortuary in downtown La Fayette, the county seat.

That didn’t bother the Marsh family much. When Ray Marsh, now 75, built the 988-square-foot crematory in 1982 for $90,000, it was an outgrowth of his work digging graves and selling underground vaults for coffins. His wife, Clara, 69, became the crematory’s chief financial officer, state documents show. Despite the South’s slow acceptance of cremation, they built the business while earning a good name in a county where blacks are only 4% of the population.

“The whole family is very respected,” said state Rep. Mike Snow (D-Chickamauga). “They lived with a vast majority of white people, and they got the respect of . . . folks who didn’t feel a lot of comfort with blacks.”

A teacher for 37 years, Clara Marsh left her mark on generations of Walker County students while attaining various posts and honors. She has been county Democratic Party chairwoman and coordinator of the sheriff’s anti-drug program. She is active with the Georgia Assn. of Educators and was Walker County’s 1995 citizen of the year.

County Commissioner Bebe Heiskell, who has served on committees with Marsh, said she is “very, very outspoken as a Christian and offers prayers for people.” Others say she has a humorless, strict manner.

“Some students did really get angry with her,” said Sharon Shropshire, 51, who was in Marsh’s high school home room and now clerks at Pit Stop Food Store. Yet Willie Womble, a 59-year-old Baptist minister, credited his former teacher’s lectures on personal responsibility for keeping him on the straight and narrow. “If it hadn’t been for her, I might have dropped out,” Womble said.

Ray Marsh, who friends say exuded a sincerity and gentleness, ran for county coroner in 1992, losing by 584 out of 7,700 votes cast. “This fellow right here is probably the only African American in my county that ever came close to winning an election,” said Snow, adding that Marsh was among the few blacks who ate regularly at the Huddle House.

As it happened, Marsh turned to Snow in 1992 for political help. Marsh wanted relief from new state standards requiring him to get a funeral director’s license to run his crematory. Snow responded with a last-minute amendment giving Marsh an 18-month reprieve.

In 1995, Tri-State faced scrutiny again. This time, Walker County Coroner Bill McGill, Marsh’s election opponent, complained to the Georgia State Board of Funeral Service that Tri-State was cremating bodies without a license.

Records show Marsh fended off the board’s intervention by pointing out that its own regulations defined a crematory as a business open to the public. Since Tri-State was a subcontractor to funeral operators, Marsh argued, it fell outside the board’s purview. The state dropped the matter.

That loophole, which lawmakers are now scrambling to close, allowed Tri-State to continue operating without oversight even as the Marshes handed the business over to their son, one of their five children.

A star athlete and happy-go-lucky student, Tommy Ray-Brent Marsh was the kind of guy everybody liked, said Veronica Lively. “He was always goofing off,” she said.

Still he had a serious side. In his senior year of high school, he was captain of the football and track teams, earned an academic letter and an award for his German language skills, and had perfect attendance. He went to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he played linebacker for two years. He studied business from 1991 to 1996, records show, but never earned a degree, although he returned for a semester in 1998.

Tommy Ray-Brent Marsh rose in Walker County civic affairs as well. He took his ailing father’s spot on the county’s Department of Family and Children’s Service board. He was appointed to the county Board of Equalization. About a month ago, he and his wife had a baby girl.

“He’s well mannered, well educated, very well dressed and very articulate,” said Mike Worthington, who rents the roadside Smokey’s BBQ on U.S. 27 from the Marshes.

He also impressed his customers on his rounds, delivering ashes.

“He brought them to me and put them right here on the table. A little black box,” said Wilbanks, pointing to her desk. “He was just one of the nicest people.”

The family’s position in the community perhaps has made the pain all the more deep.

“We’re devastated, in total shock,” said Lively, whose grandmother was found at the crematorium, still in her green funeral dress. “We’re devastated that a human being could do this to another human being’s body . . . . “It’s not a God-fearing human that did this. It had to be a monster.”

Said Patricia Shropshire, 49, who now wonders if the ashes she spread on the St. John’s River in Florida were really her father’s: “People are going to make this out to be a racist issue. It has nothing to do with that. It’s stupidity and greed.”

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Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this report.