The Corpsewood Manor Murders in North Georgia

Amy Petulla

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781467119009
• eBook ISBN: 9781625856456
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

The notorious true crime story of a sex party that ended in double murder in the woods of Chattanooga County, Georgia.
 
On December 12th, 1982, Tony West and Avery Brock made a visit to Corpsewood Manor under the pretense of a celebration. Then they brutally murdered their hosts.
 
Dr. Charles Scudder had been a professor of pharmacology at Chicago's Loyola University before he and his boyfriend Joey Odom moved to Georgia and built their own home in the Chattahoochee National Forest. Scudder had absconded with twelve thousand doses of LSD and had a very particular vision for their "castle in the woods." It included a "pleasure chamber," and rumors of Satanism swirled around the two men. Scudder even claimed to have summoned a demon to protect the estate.
 
But when Scudder and Odom welcomed West and Brock into their strange abode, they had no idea the men were armed and dangerous. When the evening of kinky fun turned to a scene of gruesome slaughter, the murders set the stage for a sensational trial that engulfed the sleepy Southern town of Trion in shocking revelations and lurid speculations.

Chapter 1

THE TOWN

Lying between the cities of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Rome, Georgia, is the sleepy little town of Trion, Georgia, population around 1,700, located in Chattooga County. While the rest of the country has been growing, expanding and moving on with life, Chattooga County has remained the Land That Time Forgot. Were you to travel in time from the present to 1982, you might well not even realize you had made the trip, other than some wear and tear on the residents. The same probate judge sits on the bench, the court clerk from that time is only now preparing to retire and the same deputies greet you as you come in the courthouse door. Nor is it only the people who have remained unchanged. The scenery on the way there becomes more and more remote, and this tiny rural refuge from progress appears exactly as it did all those years ago. Long stretches of flat, open road with only the trees for a view, a few stores here and there that may have changed names but are otherwise identical to their earlier iterations, the water/sewage treatment plant with its large round vats brewing—all offer the same placid appearance. A “Paradise Garden” marker now points toward the home of nationally known folk artist Howard Finster; years ago, the townspeople were not so anxious to point out the residence of the “loony street preacher.” The courthouse still presides over the square, populated in large part by shops that look like they went out of business decades ago. Natural beauty abounds, as do Christian values. The parks and ponds have not been sacrificed to the development gods, and even the old train depot has been preserved, serving as a gathering place for young and old alike. The one surprise when traversing this secluded province is the amount of art. Beauty created by both God and man thrives here.

Downtown Chattooga County shops. Amy Petulla.

Unexpected beauty in downtown Chattooga County. Jon Dennis.

As you approach Trion, there is a nearly imperceptible rise on the scarcely populated five-lane highway. There are mountains in the far horizon on both sides, but “Devil’s Mountain,” as it has come to be known in the days and years since 1982, raises its head alone in the near distance, presaged only by a sudden treeline in the otherwise barren landscape. The locals avoid this ancient ridge looming above. An eerie fog often rises in Trion just as you pass the turnoff to the landmark, perhaps occasioned by the water treatment plant, but sudden temperature drops of ten degrees or more in the space of just a few flat miles are not so easily explained.

The townsfolk are outwardly friendly toward strangers, at least those who do not appear to threaten their way of life. Not many black faces color the landscape, and you wonder how such a town could have been home to a couple of “devil-worshipping” Yankee homosexuals from Chicago. But like many small towns, Trion tolerates eccentrics, if they are its eccentrics. This is the area where a local named Zeke used to enjoy handing out his card, which read, “Zeke Woodall, Nudist. I sure do like running naked!” This area was also home to the phenomenon that was Howard Finster. Howard’s story goes a long way toward explaining the mindset of this tiny rural region.

Howard Finster is now known nationally for his folk art—his angels, soft drink bottles and Elvis, among other subjects, all covered with writings proclaiming his own particular brand of Christianity. But in Chattooga County, plenty of people will still tell you Howard Finster was the bicycle repairman. The kids called him “Finister.” Others called him the local nut, preaching in a church when he could, on the streets or even on the courthouse steps when he couldn’t. Odd, yes. But a national figure, a celebrated artist? The townsfolk would have laughed anyone who suggested that out of town.

The year 1976 changed the sixty-year-old evangelist’s life. He had begun his first “garden” museum in Trion in the late 1940s. His plan was to display one example of every single thing ever invented. As one might expect, he eventually ran out of space and expanded in the 1960s to a swampy piece of land in a nearby neighborhood known as Pennville. His focus changed from man-made creations to those of God, but he continued with his bike repair work to bring in some income. One day in the fateful year of 1976, he was doing a patch job on a bike tire when a smudge of white paint on the tip of his finger warped into a face, and the face began talking to him. Its voice echoed in his head, “Paint sacred art. Paint sacred art.” Howard responded that he was not a professional artist. The persistent voice simply answered, over and over, “How do you know?” Worn down, Howard took a dollar bill from his pocket, stuck it to a piece of wood and made a painting of George Washington as his first piece of “sacred art.” And that was the beginning of Howard Finster’s artistic career.

Finster painted his Cadillac in the early ’80s with Elvis, angels and moral lessons. At Paradise Garden, it is dusty now, as then. Amy Petulla.

Howard Finster’s first painting can still be found on a rusting outdoor structure hidden away at the back of Paradise Garden. Amy Petulla.

Howard claimed he started having visions at three years old. After the sacred art command, God originally told him to create five thousand paintings, so somewhere on each one of Howard’s paintings, you will find its number in the count. Apparently, God amended that figure at some point, as the artist reached the original goal at the end of 1985 but kept frantically creating art right up until the day he died in an effort to, as he put it, “see the last piece put on” the job God had sent him to do. Most estimates put the final tally upward of forty-six thousand. However you calculate it, Howard Finster’s body of work was prodigious.

Painting was not his only artistic directive, however. Howard continued to add eclectic (many would say bizarre) elements to his garden. He was literally building Paradise from garbage. You will find on display at Paradise Garden art created from trash, dust-coated old cars covered with portraits of his heroes, a sarcophagus that at one time had a glass window to display the two-hundredyear-old body of a seventeen-year-old girl that had been donated to him after being dug up on a local doctor’s property and Howard’s own coffin, in which he wanted his ashes buried, along with one million letters deposited into the coffin by visiting fans. Despite his wishes, Howard’s body is buried in Alabama, but his coffin remains.

The crown jewel of the garden, however, is the World’s Folk Art Church. God had given Howard another urgent directive in 1982, the same year as the Corpsewood murders, and Howard complied by buying an abandoned church building and turning it into a sanctuary for his work against evil. With only a sixth-grade education and no construction training, he rebuilt the one-story structure into a four-story wonder with a circular staircase and sixteen sides, from plans he received in this vision from God. It has been repeatedly compared to a wedding cake. One of the first people to call it that was his neighbor, Ethel Olene Dennis, who lived in a short tan house across the street. After completing the chapel, he asked her what she thought about it. She responded, “Well, Howard, I think it looks like a wedding cake,” to which he responded, “Well, I think your house looks like a peanut butter sandwich!”

An unknown body in Howard Finster’s Paradise. Amy Petulla.

Howard Finster’s World’s Folk Art Church, said by many to resemble a wedding cake. Amy Petulla.

The artist’s fame exploded when he did album covers for both the Talking Heads and REM in the 1980s. He did not, however, let fame change him and continued to chat with anyone and everyone who came to visit, often inviting them to camp out in his yard. To Howard, the rich, famous and powerful were no different than the folks who lived down the street. When Time magazine wanted to commission him to paint a cover, he told it that its magazine was small, but he would do it to help it out because “I am here to do for others.” He appreciated the fame for the sole fact that it helped spread his message to repent. As Howard put it in an interview with Kristine Mckenna in the LA Times on October 23, 1988: “Talking Heads offered me $3,000 to make a picture for ’em and I put 26 wholesome verses that the world needs to hear in that cover. And that rock ’n’ roll bunch took my 26 verses and in 2½ months they’d covered the world with ’em. They reached more people for me than 40 years of pastoring churches!” He spent the money on more art supplies and the garden to further share his Bible verses, as well as sharing very generously with his neighbors. Having come of age during the Depression, he had a parsimonious attitude toward money. He certainly didn’t spend it on himself and his wife, Pauline, who, according to neighbor and local attorney Jon Dennis, had been heard to complain that her husband was so cheap, he wouldn’t let her buy a clean pair of drawers. He was, however, always willing to share his wealth and life with those who needed it. Howard Finster at last completed his God-given mission on October 22, 2001, when he left this world behind for greater things. But while the townspeople are proud to have given birth to such a phenomenon, like Jesus, he is still thought of in his hometown as “the bicycle repairman made good” rather than the prodigy seen by the rest of the world.

Howard saw the world differently from most people. He believed, in a way some have described as child-like, that this world was populated by evil and was very clear that he had encountered that evil himself in his life in Chattooga County. Perhaps he did, in a form more tangible than most people can imagine.

For Chattooga County, Georgia, and its surrounds, a tiny remote area of the state, in a very short time span would host four of the most horrific crimes this country had ever seen, crimes that were even more appalling because they were planned and executed by the young or seemingly vulnerable. In the fall of 1982, teenager Judith Neelley and her Trionborn husband, Alvin, who had up until then been run-of-the-mill thugs and thieves, would kidnap thirteen-year-old Lisa Ann Millican from a mall in nearby Rome, Georgia; rape her for days; inject her with Drano; shoot her; and push her off a cliff.^* Thereafter in Chattooga County, they would rape and brutally murder intellectually challenged Janice Chatman and attempt to murder her boyfriend, John Hancock, and leave him for dead. Later, Judith would manage to kill someone miles away while in prison via a “suicide pact” where only the other woman died. She would become the youngest woman ever sentenced to death in the United States after it was established that she was the driving force behind the murderous pair. This area would also see the hellish landscape at Tri-State Crematory, where young Ray Brent Marsh would eventually be charged with 787 criminal counts for abandoning more than three hundred bodies among the grounds to putrefy and rot rather than cremating them. And around the same time, 400-pound schizophrenic Hayward Bissell, who despite his mental illness had never before been charged with a violent crime, would shock the world when, in a Trion convenience store parking lot, he brutally butchered his 105-pound girlfriend, Patricia Booher, cutting off her left hand and right leg and tossing them in the car floor, pushing her eyes so far into their sockets that they were originally believed to have been gouged out and then cutting out her heart. Following that, he calmly buttoned her shirt back up, reattached her seat belt and drove on to Alabama to continue his crime spree. When being interviewed by the police, he casually pulled her esophagus out of his pocket and started chewing on it. What concoction bubbled up in this rustic province all those years ago that brought multiple horrific murders in its wake? What conflict left behind such ghastly fallout? The most astonishing and notorious crimes in this provincial community, however, executed by seventeen-year-old Kenneth Avery Brock and his cohort, Tony West, were the Corpsewood Manor murders in North Georgia.

Janice Chatman’s body was so badly decomposed when found that her head had separated from her body. LMJC District Attorney’s Neelley file.

Judy’s October 15, 1983 letter to Alvin declaring her love, claiming full responsibility and stating Lisa was better off dead than in the Youth Development Center. LMJC District Attorney’s Neelley file.

Bissell killed and dismembered his girlfriend in the gravel lot adjacent to Victory Fuels. Amy Petulla.

The story starts in 1976. That year, Dr. Charles Scudder, a Wisconsin-born pharmacology professor who had lived for decades with his cook, housekeeper and companion Joseph Odom in a Chicago mansion,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Town
• 2. The Victims
• 3. The Manor
• 4. The Church of Satan
• 5. Life in Trion
• 6. The Killers
• 7. The Crimes
• 8. The Discovery
• 9. The Sheriff
• 10. The Prosecution
• 11. The Judge
• 12. The Trial
• 13. The Appeal and Plea
• 14. The Property Case
• 15. The Haunting or Curse of Corpsewood
• 16. The Bodies
• 17. Rest in Peace
• Timeline
• Bibliography
• About the Author