Corpsewood Manor: Appalachia’s Gay Devil Worshippers

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Devil worshipers in a castle in the middle of the woods. The arid smell of death lingered throughout the house. Unsanctioned psychedelic research.

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Their blood had since dried where they fell.

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Books bound in human skin.

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Human skulls cluttered the study. Books on satanism filled the shelves, and the bedroom lay whips and hex signs.

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And a prophetic painting that foretold the end. Corpsewood Manor has everything you'd expect from something out of the satanic panic, Except this is one of the rare cases where the satanic part

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The insignia of the devil was clearly the sun under which the castle was built.

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Was real. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Zeitgeist. I'm your librarian and host, Joshua Spellman. On this podcast, I tell a ghost story as it's typically told, and then I dive into the archives to uncover the truth. But today, I'll be playing with that format a little bit more than usual.

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You see, I try to drop little nuggets of information literacy into every episode, and I like to think that I'm so subtle that you probably don't even know that I'm doing it. But in today's episode, it's going to be about as in your face as the neon pink gargoyle that sits atop the ruins of Corpsewood Manor. When evaluating any source of information, whether that's a TikTok video, a newspaper article, or your lying, cheating ex's excuse for where he was on 09/23/2018, it's important to consider the bias. And we don't think about it often, but bias can go in both directions. The story of Corpsewood Manor was originally told through the lens of religious conservatives amid the satanic panic and growing homophobia during the AIDS crisis.

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But contemporary accounts sometimes overcorrect in an attempt to counter the bigotry. The story of Corpsewood Manor is a prime example of how important it is to be able to hold two truths at once. But before we can rummage through the ruins and learn who these men really were and what actually happened to them, we must first learn the alleged history of Corpsewood Manor. An early morning call reported trouble at Corpsewood Manor, a place officer Charles Starkey and Greg Lotta had only heard about from brave visitors. And indeed, many were drawn to the Corpsewood Estate and openly welcomed by doctor Charles Scudder and his romantic partner, Joey Odom.

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However, entry into the castle itself was forbidden, a rule that was enforced by their giant mastiffs, Belzebub and Arsenath. These dogs were trained to kill and they were tall enough to peer into a pickup truck window while on all fours. And while only a small inner circle was allowed into the castle itself, many were welcomed with open arms into the chicken house, a three story structure with each level serving as its own ring of pleasure. The 1st Floor was a simple chicken coop, hence its name. The 2nd Floor was a storage pantry for canned and dried goods, as well as an extensive library of homosexual pornography.

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The final circle of pleasure was, well, Joey and Charles affectionately called it the Pink Room, but most knew it as the pleasure Chamber. The room was sensually lit by oil lamps and candles containing absolutely no furniture aside from several old mattresses draped in pink linens. The walls were adorned with whips, chains, ball gags, and other instruments of earthly pleasure. Most infamous though was the guest book, which the couple had their guests sign. It contained intimate information about those guests, including their sexual preferences and compromising photographs.

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Rumor had it that at least one prominent figure in town had their name signed in that book, along with some rather embarrassing details. But pleasure and curiosity weren't the only things that drew guests to Corpsewood Manor. There was also the couple's hospitality and homemade wine. Joey Odom was a quiet and effeminate man, publicly known as doctor Scutter's housekeeper, though he was in fact Scutter's longtime romantic and sexual partner. Joey came from a poor family and lacked a formal education.

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On the other hand, doctor Scutter differed significantly from Joey. He was more traditionally masculine and culturally refined. He was a retired psychology professor from Loyola University where he specialized in mind control and studied the effects of psychedelic drugs on the human brain. Rumor had it that he maintained a secret lab in the castle's basement, manufacturing experimental drugs that he tested on not only the local wildlife, but the citizens of Treon. Charles Scudder was incredibly charming and capable of influencing others with a simple look or a quiet command.

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While many attributed this to his studies in mind control, others speculated it stemmed from a pact with the devil. Scutter was not only a homosexual, but also a devout Satanist. Not your casual Hot Topic rebel, but a card carrying member of the Church of Satan with contacts who included Anton LaVey himself. In 1977, Scutter and Odom left Chicago moving to rural Georgia to hand build a castle in the woods. Some believed that they simply sought solitude, while others suspected that they were conducting illegal experiments and establishing a southern outpost for the Church of Satan.

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The pair acquired 40 acres in the Chattahoochee National Forest in the Appalachian Foothills for an incredibly low price. The previous owners, the Jacksons, had all died from rattlesnake bites on the property. Coincidence? Or the first act of black magic cast upon the land? The estate earned its name the day that Scutter and Odom arrived in their black Jeep adorned with occult symbols.

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After driving through a severe snowstorm, they were greeted on the drive up by a dead horse. And when they arrived at their parcel of land, decaying petrified trees leading them to christen the estate corpse wood. The couple painstakingly built the castle laying all 45,000 bricks by hand with every detail serving a specific purpose, including the castle shape. The castle had no corners. I mean, not really.

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Every wall was rounded. Every join between the ceiling and the wall was curved, and this was to protect them from evil, quite literally leaving evil with nowhere to hide. Well, except the evil of their own making. Scutter hung a sign at the entrance of the property, loudly declaring, beware of the thing. Most believe that this was in reference to one of the giant mastiffs, but it was undoubtedly a warning of the manor's protector, a demonic spirit that Scutter had summoned as a guardian.

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The castle itself had no electricity and no running water. When the castle was complete, it was a two story structure with a kitchen, a library, and a spiral staircase leading upstairs to two bedrooms. It was decorated with Elizabethan era furniture and custom stained glass windows, including a skeletonized medusa and a bathymia looking out over the property. The four chimneys in the home all had upside down pentacles down them in red. A neon pink gargoyle perched atop the entrance of the home, and above that was a small rooftop sundeck where Scudder would play his golden harp at night.

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His altar stood there too, the place where he worshiped Satan. You see, in addition to rare antiques, the house was decorated from top to bottom with satanic art and symbolism. Most famously, they had a large black and bronze statue of Mystopheles. A shocking diptych flanked the spiral staircase depicting a baby emerging from the womb on one side, and a mirror image of the same baby on the other mummified and decaying. Two demonic statues were carved into the posts of their bed.

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On their bedside table lay a satanic bible bound in human skin. But what would become the most famous piece of all was Scutter's self portrait. The disturbing piece hung proudly in the home depicting Scudder, his mouth gagged by a strip of duct tape with five bullet holes in his head. He told at least one of his friends, this is how I'm going to die, which brings us back to our officers. When they pushed open the door to the castle, they were immediately hit with a horrid stench, a mix of rotting flesh and body odor.

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Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw inside. On a normal day, these small town cops would have been scandalized by the satanic imagery alone, but given what was in front of them, they didn't have the time to take it all in. Walking through the entrance, they could see a pool of blood in the feet of Joey Odom. As they made their way through the kitchen, they found Joey lying there, and just beyond him, Scutter, hands bound, face gagged, with five bullet holes in his skull. As predicted by his portrait, nearby to Scutter were the two giant dogs huddled together by the stove, seemingly shot as they slept, apparently having done nothing to stop the attackers.

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Inside the home, the police found human skulls and human bones, and outside, they found mounds of loose soil, likely the buried remains of satanic sacrifice and previous victims of homosexual assault. Based on the rumors in town, they surmised that one of the men's victims had finally fought back and escaped. According to the men that they eventually arrested for the murders, that is exactly what happened. On the evening of 12/12/1982, Tony West, 30, and his roommate Kenneth Avery Brock, 17, made their way up to Corsewood Manor with two teenagers, Joy Wells and Teresa Hudgens, to get their hands on some of the homemade wine that they had heard so much about. When they arrived, Scutter charmed the visitors into joining him in the pink room to chat and enjoy some wine, and things went fine at first.

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Scutter gave Brock and West one flask of wine to drink and the two teenagers another. However, West and Brock soon found themselves feeling all out of sorts. The walls seemed alive, shifting and moving around them. In the corner, Scutter's golden harp glowed with a sinister light. Tony West felt himself leave his body, hovering over himself and watching the others from above.

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But when he returned to his body, he saw before him two lions and he opened fire with his gun. In his altered mental state, he mistook the couple's mastiffs for wild cats, and what happened next was a blur. West claimed to have been bewitched, and later claimed to be under the influence of LSD from spiked wine. But all that was clear was that by the end of the night, Scutter, Odom, and their dogs were dead. The four guests left in a panic, not knowing what to do.

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Eventually, Tony West was arrested and put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death, though he escaped the death sentence on a technicality. The castle mysteriously burned to the ground just before the trial, leaving nothing but a shell of what it once was. But something still lives on the grounds of corpse wood. Indeed, something, the thing. The guardian spirit or demon that Scutter summoned has been seen lurking amongst the trees, protecting the estate from would be intruders, of which there are many.

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Thrill seekers and treasure hunters ventured the estate for kicks, while some modern day Satanists treat the site as a pilgrimage destination to pay tribute to their lost brothers and perform satanic rituals on the land. And many of these visitors have fallen victim to the curse of Corpsewood Manor. For a while, it was customary for vandals to take a brick from the rubble as a trophy. But those who took them seemed to suffer accidents and tragedies soon after. And the streaks of bad luck seemed to dry up as soon as the removed bricks were returned to corpse wood.

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But this curse wasn't just for the vandals. Many valuable pieces from the home, including the Elizabethan furniture and satanic artwork like Scutter's self portrait, landed in the homes of friends and collectors. While his loved ones seemed to escape the curse, the same could not be said for the collectors. One specific collector, a firearms dealer from Atlanta, procured several pieces from the home, including the large wooden bed with the carved perched demons and a panel of stained glass featuring Baphomet. This dealer married a young girl who worked for him, and he put her on the company's board.

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Around the time of the murders, they had started a new business venture, kits that allowed people to build their own unregistered submachine guns. These guns were being sold to international arms dealers, drug smugglers, and gangs. The guns were linked to several murders and at least one school shooting. Eventually, this couple was charged with federal gun crimes, though the charges were later reduced to misdemeanors. But at the end of the day, the ordeal was a strain on the couple and they eventually divorced as their lives began to unravel.

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But rather than taking responsibility for their own actions or considering that karma had finally come back to get them, the dealer's wife blamed the corpse would curse for their misfortune. And so, she blasted the stained glass Baphomet with a machine gun and threw the rest of the items into a blazing bonfire in the front yard. So while Corpse Wood lies in ruins deep in the foothills of Appalachia, its power lives on. The pink gargoyle is gone, the portrait is gone. But the thing, they say, is still lurking in the woods, and it may not be alone.

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Some visitors have reported being greeted by two men, one blonde and charming and the other quiet and reserved. The same men those officers found dead inside the castle all those years ago. Perhaps even now, Charles and Joey are still welcoming guests to Corpsewood. Just be sure that when you leave, you take nothing home with you because Corpsewood has a way of getting things back. And that's the version of the story that you may have heard around the time of the trials and the period that followed.

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A great example of this is the documentary Corpsewood, which while originally intended to be unbiased, became a stunning display of religious rhetoric in conservatism, including a rather pathetic attempt to banish demons from the property and reclaim the land for God.

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Now, I feel like it's my duty because I'm a handmaiden of the Lord. As I kneel on this altar that doctor Scutter is believed to have given his soul to the devil because this was his altar, I have something in mind I'm going to do for the devil's altar to settle this thing once and for all. These people that were so corrupt that their minds were destroyed, some of them are already in hell. We are delivered and set free by the power of God. In Jesus' name, we pray.

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And, altar, I have plans for you, and I'll show you what I'm gonna do with you.

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I just love that. It's pure comedy. The little bloop as she attempted to throw what she claimed was a satanic altar into the pond. Beautiful. You couldn't even write it if you tried.

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However, even after watching the documentary, I don't believe that they were very effective in their efforts. You see, they interviewed Teresa Hudgens who was an unwilling participant in the murders, and Teresa had nothing but nice things to say about Charles Scutter and Joey Odom, all things considered. Throughout the interview, Peggy Joanne Thompson, Thompson, the narrator and producer continually asked Teresa leading questions, but came up short nearly every single time. And many modern sources actually use clips like Hodgins interview and quotes from others who knew Scutter and Odom personally to push the idea that the couple was guilty of nothing more than the perceived crime of being gay in rural Georgia. But that's not quite the truth, which brings me back to the little information literacy lesson of this episode, bias.

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Charles Scudder and Joey Odom were not irredeemable devil worshipers who deserve to die for their unusual and unconventional beliefs and sex driven gay lifestyle, nor were they blameless pure victims simply misunderstood and demonized for being different in a conservative small town. They were complex individuals with their own flaws. They were people, but they were also victims. But victims don't always have to be paragons of morality. And so I want to introduce you to the real Doctor.

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Charles Scutter and Joey Odom before telling you what actually happened on that horrible, horrible night. Charles Lee Scutter was born on 10/06/1926 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was born into a well off family, and both of his parents were college educated, which was pretty rare at the time. And his parents passed that emphasis and importance of education onto their son. Charles studied zoology and languages in his undergraduate work, and he married his first wife at the age of 19.

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They soon divorced and he remarried in 1949. They had four children, one of whom died tragically young at the age of only 17. From 1950 to 1959, Charles occupation was listed on his resume as farming, which was undoubtedly a skill that would come in handy once he came to build corpse wood. Eventually, Charles' second marriage also failed, He ended up moving to Chicago and began teaching biology at the University of Illinois in 1959. He enrolled in graduate school and received his PhD in pharmacology from Loyola University in 1961 because contrary to the rumors, he was not a medical doctor, but he was a PhD.

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However, the rumors of unlicensed medical experimentation in the nonexistent basement lab, like literally, not only was there not a basement lab, there was just never a basement. Do you know how hard that would be to dig by hand? But I digress. Those rumors were not unfounded. Charles Scudder became an associate professor of pharmacology and the assistant director of the Stritches Institute for the Study of the Mind, Drugs, and Behavior.

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And it was there that he conducted experiments with psychoactive drugs, which are believed to have included LSD, something that his murderer would later use against him. Somewhat ironically, his friends and family said that while Charles studied drugs and hallucinogens, he was against taking them himself. And despite his buttoned up professional career, Charles was always a little bit of an outsider. At one point, he had dark purple hair and later dyed his hair blonde, which many people thought was his natural hair color. And at one point, Charles even had a pet monkey.

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The pink gargoyle that sat atop corpse wood was originally a water fountain at his mansion in the West Side Of Chicago. But somehow, he managed to compartmentalize this part of his life. Those who knew him didn't even know that he was gay nor were they aware of his status as a member of the Church of Satan. Aside from being eccentric, Charles was also a very personable man. He could talk his way out of any situation and get you to do what he wanted.

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Many people attributed this to his academic background, while others still claimed it was mind control or supernatural powers. Whether he was a magician or a charmer, he seemed quite good natured. His humor and levity are on display in an article titled A Castle in the Country that he wrote for Mother Earth News in 1981. It detailed the life he made with Joey and was full of humor and wit. Though, it also contained some falsities and skewed some facts to portray the image of himself that he wanted.

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But before there was a castle in the country, there was his West Side mansion in Joey Odom. Charles had met Joey not long after moving to Chicago. Joey Odom was born on 03/27/1938 in Chicago, and his upbringing couldn't have been more different from Scutters. His parents were from Georgia. His father only had a second grade education, and his mother only had a fourth grade education, a stark contrast to the college educated parents of Charles Scutter.

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Joey struggled growing up and served at least one stint in jail where he allegedly learned to cook, something that he would become known for in Treon while living at Corpsewood. Not long after they met, Joey moved into Charles' Westside Chicago mansion and served as his housekeeper, cook, and assistant, and of course, a romantic, loving companion. Well, much of the coverage of the case implies that Joey and Charles were deeply in love. Their relationship was probably in reality a little bit harder to define. Their close friend, Candice Williamson was quoted as saying, they may have had sex a few times a month, but they were not a couple.

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And quite honestly, it could be that this is a misunderstanding of queer culture as having sexually open relationships is not uncommon, but their relationship seems to go a little bit beyond that. But whatever label best described their relationship, Charles clearly cared very deeply for Joey. In 1977, Charles and Joey were in a car wreck, and Joey sustained a traumatic brain injury. Joey was in recovery for at least a year afterward, and Charles waited on him hand and foot. While Joey made strides, the incident left him with short term memory issues, which mainly went unnoticed as he was already quite quiet.

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This accident was around the same time that Charles and Joey left everything they knew behind and started constructing their paradise. As Charles put it in his Mother Earth article, within two short years, we were living in an elegant mini castle. Our small country estate boasted a circular rose garden at the end of the drive, fruit trees and grapevines, a vegetable garden that produced fresh corn, cabbage, carrots, turnips, and other edibles. A brick gazebo topped by a sundeck overlooking the garden where we take tea. We use many homegrown and foraged food products, and our meals Which must certainly be among the best in the world.

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After all, as Joe instinctively knew, nothing compares with wood stove cooking. That was a stark contrast to how many believed the couple to live, but it was also a carefully painted portrait of their life. Scutter was trying to portray a very specific version of himself in this article. So naturally, there was no mention of the neon pink gargoyle, his Baphomet stained glass, his extensive occult library, or his disturbing baby diptych, and certainly not the three vials of LSD that he swiped from the Loyola lab before moving to Georgia. However, Candace Williamson, who commented earlier on the nature of Joey and Charles relationship, was one of the only people in Tryon who ever gained entry into the castle itself.

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Candace certainly didn't feel unsafe around Joey and Charles as she often brought her children up to Corpsewood. As for Charles' choices of decor, she simply assumed it was eccentric and different. It was perhaps a bit uncomfortable to look at at times, but she didn't think it demonic. And her daughter Carrie recalls Corsewood as a quote, magical place. She finally remembers the desserts that Joey would bake for her using the blackberries that they would pick on the property, and the beautiful sound of Charles' harp, and how Joey would allow the kids to play with his Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls.

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It was even said that when one of the couple's chickens became injured, instead of slaughtering it, they kept it as a pet. And despite what news reports at the time would leave people to believe, Charles and Joey were generally well liked amongst the townspeople, or at least tolerated.

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They was real nice. Both of them loved them. Both nice people. They talked to everybody. They were real friendly and all, but yet when you went up there, you just knew there was something different.

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They was just nice people. Both of them was just as nice as they could be.

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But again, those memories describe just one side of Corpse wood, which like its owners was multifaceted. You see, Charles was quite the prolific pen pal. Recovered from the chicken house was an extraordinary amount of extremely explicit correspondence that Charles Scudder had with other men, most of whom were incarcerated. He put out personal ads to solicit for sex and many of the responses he received included nude photos. In all of the correspondence that he wrote, thousands of pages, Joey was never mentioned to any of these men.

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And these men weren't all just long distance lovers. Many of the photos in Charles's stash were taken in the pink room at Corpsewood. In fact, as far fetched as it sounds, the pink room with its whips and chains and ball gags was very real as was its famed guest book. This guest book also contained many entries for the sex parties that they would often throw. During these parties, guests would arrive a few days early to receive a medical exam from doctor Scutter.

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Though again, doctor Scutter wasn't actually a medical doctor, but I guess in this case, he was quite literally playing doctor, so to speak. But the guest book contained clinical notes from these medical examinations, as well as explicit details of what they would get up to once the party commenced. And one of the people who knew this side of Corpse Wood was 17 year old Kenneth Avery Brock. Before the murders, he had several sexual encounters with Charles Scudder in the chicken house. You see, teens in Tryon and the surrounding area were much more familiar with Corpsewood than the adults.

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They knew that the gay devil worshipers who lived in a castle in the woods freely shared their wine and allegedly their drugs. For many teenagers, Corpsewood was a party spot. However, to his credit, this is not how Avery Brock met the couple. According to him, he first came across them while deer hunting in the fall of nineteen eighty two. Brock became friendly with the couple and it wasn't long before he was invited into the pink room and shared some of their homemade wine.

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And there in the pink room, Charles performed an illegal oral act on Brock. And this wasn't illegal because of Brock's age. The age of consent at the time in Georgia was only 14. It was illegal because of the other conservative sex laws in Georgia. Oral sex was illegal not only for gay men, but also for married heterosexual couples as well.

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While Brock would later use this encounter as a motive for the murders, he returned many times for wine and sexual play in the Pink Room. Now whether this was because he wanted it or because he was drunk and manipulated by a man who was known to magically get his way remains unclear. But during the last few visits before the murders, Brock's new 30 year old roommate, Tony West, had joined him. As Brock's niece would later say, Tony took him under his wing, the wing of a bat out of hell. And indeed, West's influence was dark.

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He had seemingly always been a haunted soul. When he was around 13 years old, Tony West shot and killed his two year old nephew point blank in the face. He would later claim he didn't know that the gun was loaded, and he was trying to show the toddler that there was nothing to be afraid of. But this was just the beginning. He lived a very troubled life, spending it in and out of jail, and one time while serving for theft, he escaped from prison and shot his brother-in-law.

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Two things were clear about Tony West. He was violent, and his growing criminal resume made it hard for him to get a job, which is how West ended up with Avery Brock as his roommate, right around the time that Brock first met Joey and Charles. On Tony West's first visit to Corpsewood, he alleged that Scutter had engaged in sexual activity with Brock, and when Scutter tried to approach West to do the same, he left. After that visit, everything changed. West, being the genius that he was, began to plan.

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He got it into his head that the couple was rich. How else could they afford a castle in the forest? Well, the assumption that they were rich could be argued by logic. It wasn't reality. The couple lived off of what remained from the sale of the Chicago mansion after building Corporalwood along with Charles' pension.

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Together, these totaled around $40,000. They kept no cash on them and paid for everything by check. As Charles put it in his Mother Earth article, the whole point of moving out to Corswood was to quote, get back to the basics, be poor. And they more or less did, living on a monthly budget of around $200, which was only supplemented a little bit by their wine and vegetable sales. At first, West and Brock only planned on a simple robbery.

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But as they ruminated, their revenge fantasies grew darker. Brock decided that Scutter would pay for his unwanted advances and they would not only rob the couple, but they would sodomize Scutter with a soldering iron to find out where the devil worshiping queers kept their money. However, there was a fatal flaw in their plan. While Brock and Wes spent plenty of time in the chicken house, they had actually never been invited into the protected confines of the castle. And if they had, perhaps they would have rethought their plan after they saw how the couple had lived.

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No electricity, no cash, no nothing. West and Brock decided to follow through with their plan on the evening of 12/12/1982. They would need a weapon, so Avery Brock borrowed his mother's rifle. They spent the day at West's sister's trailer watching football with her 19 year old son, Joey Lavonne Wells. Earlier that day, Wells had asked Teresa Hudgens out on a date, and she arrived at the trailer around six that evening.

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For some reason, West and Brock thought it would be a good idea to bring the two teenage lovebirds along for the ride, thinking that it would somehow deter Scudder and Odom from trying anything gay. But Brock later testified that Joey Wells was in on the plan, even if Joey himself denied it. But regardless of whether Joey Wells knew what was going to happen that night, Teresa Hudgens surely did not. And if they hadn't brought her, they may have gotten away with it. On the car ride over, the group huffed Toodaloo, a mixture of paint thinner, glue, and alcohol.

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And once they arrived at Corpsewood, Scudder greeted them and took them up to the pink room while Joy was still at work in the kitchen. Charles Scudder gave Hudgens and Wells a flask of wine to drink while West, Brock, and Scudder shared another. At trial, West would claim that Scudder had his own flask and that the wine that he and Brock had was laced with LSD. However, testing of all the bottles confirmed that none of them were spiked. After some time lounging in the pink room, Brock got up and descended the ladder from the Top Floor of the chicken house to get more toodle loo from the car, but that's not what he was actually getting.

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Instead, Brock grabbed the rifle and returned to the group in the pink room. Scutter wasn't scared when he saw the gun and simply laughed at Brock and said, bang bang in a joking manner. Now whether he was aware of Brock's intent in trying to diffuse the situation with his charm is unclear, but Brock did settle down and continue to drink and talk for almost another half an hour. However, when Scudder got up to trim the wick of one of the oil lamps, Brock grabbed him by the hair and held a knife to his throat. Charles, once again, calm as a cucumber, simply said, what kind of game do you wanna play?

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I'll play your game. But Brock threw him down in the mattress and bound his hands with strips he cut from the pink sheets. Brock screamed and demanded to know where Scutter kept the money. And Scutter honestly and calmly told him, the bank. But Brock and West refused to believe it.

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At this point, Hudgens was hysterical and crying, and perhaps a testament to Charles' good nature. Right before he was gagged, he asked her if she was okay. To which Hudgens replied, You'd better worry about yourself. And she and Joey Wells ran down the ladder to escape the scene. But West was following them closely with the gun, demanding that they come back.

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Somehow, Wells had convinced West to get in the car to leave, but the engine wouldn't start. And West decided that this was some divine sign that meant that they were supposed to be there, and they were supposed to do what they were going to do. And so West dragged them back up to the Pink room where the torture and interrogation of Charles Scutter continued. Meanwhile, Joey was still inside the castle cleaning the kitchen, unaware of what was going on inside the chicken house. West and Brock were having no luck, and they figured they might have better luck getting information from Joey.

[00:35:10] - [Speaker 0]
So West handed Brock the rifle. Brock went down to the castle alone, shouting for Joey and the dogs to come out of the house. While Wells tried to convince his uncle to stop, they heard gunshots from downstairs. And not long after, Brock came back up the ladder and told the group that he had shot and killed Odom and the dogs. It was then they dragged Charles Scudder down the ladder, bound and gagged, and into the castle's kitchen.

[00:35:39] - [Speaker 0]
Upon seeing Joey's body in the pool of blood next to it, Scudder let out a pained and muffled cry from behind the gag. West prodded Charles forward past his lover's body and into the library, where West pulled down Charles' gag to ask him one more time where the money was. Despite his feet still being bound, Charles tried to get to Joey. West threatened to shoot him if he didn't stop, and Scudder simply said, I asked for this. As Charles tried to inch closer to Joey, West shot him in the face.

[00:36:15] - [Speaker 0]
But that shot didn't kill him. It only knocked him off his feet. Charles, now wounded, continued to try and get up and make his way over to Joey. Wes shot again, and again, and again. Charles finally fell back against the bookcase, four bullets to his face.

[00:36:36] - [Speaker 0]
With the dogs and the men disposed of, or so they thought, Brock and West ransacked the home looking for the money. They didn't find it in the library, they didn't find it in the dining room, and they found nothing upstairs. The only valuables that were in the house were the massive pieces of Elizabethan furniture in the artwork, which they couldn't remove. There were also three vials of LSD in Scutter's desk drawer, which they could have sold if they hadn't missed it. West and Brock returned to the library and resumed searching.

[00:37:08] - [Speaker 0]
At some point, it became clear that somehow Charles was still alive, and Brock fired a fifth and final shot into the center of Charles' head to make sure that he was gone for good. And shortly after the final shot to Charles rang out through the castle, the criminals heard gurgling sounds from inside the kitchen, and when they looked, they saw that Joey was still alive, and he dragged himself across the kitchen and into the hallway on his way to Charles. Instead of using the rifle, they used Charles' own gun to finish Joey off. Hanging not far from Charles was his self portrait, him gagged with five bullet wounds in his head. While many say that Charles had this vision of his own death, perhaps granted to him by the dark forces that he tampered with, friends of the couple say that it was actually Joey who had the vision in a dream.

[00:38:12] - [Speaker 0]
Joey awoke in the middle of the night sometime not long after his car accident and told Charles about what he saw, and Charles painted it. And it's one of the things about Corpsewood Manor that simply cannot be explained away. It is so specific, and one must wonder what Charles meant when he said, I asked for this. Did he make some dark deal? Was he aware of what was going to happen to him, or did he simply mean that he had been far too trusting?

[00:38:44] - [Speaker 0]
That we'll never know. The criminals loaded the jeep with whatever valuables they could take and drove off. And not spend too much more time on the perpetrators, but they made Teresa and Joey Wells swear not to go to the authorities, and they went so far as to forcibly sequester Teresa for four days before she finally got ahold of someone to get them to call the police. But by that time, the bodies had already been discovered. One of Charles and Joey's friends noticed that something was wrong and had called the cops.

[00:39:17] - [Speaker 0]
West and Brock had tried to escape to Mexico, and while trying to ditch the couple's jeep, they ended up murdering an off duty police officer named Lieutenant Kirby Key Phelps while trying to steal his car. While they didn't initially plan to murder him, while West was trying to handcuff Phelps to a tree, Phelps got his hand free and punched West. And West, doing what he had done so many times before, shot Phelps in the face three times. Now eventually, following a lot of drama, both Brock and West were arrested. Brock took a plea deal, and West went on trial where he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

[00:39:57] - [Speaker 0]
Due to some legal complications with jury selection, West's verdict was pretty much overturned before he was resentenced to life in prison, narrowly escaping the death penalty. Following that, there was also a lengthy battle over the inheritance of the corpse with estate between Joey and Charles' families, which they didn't really speak to anymore. You see Charles had disinherited his children in favor of Joey. But because it wasn't clear who died first, there was a huge fight over the estate. But it was eventually settled out of court.

[00:40:33] - [Speaker 0]
And there is so much more that I was not able to cover in this episode and plenty of things that I deliberately left out, including hearsay attributed to anonymous police officers with so much misinformation already surrounding corpse wood. I really didn't want to add more fuel to that fire. But much of my research came from the book, The Corpsewood Manor Murder in North Georgia by Amy Pichula, which goes into much more detail about some of these insane rumors and inside information if you would like to give it a read. And while this story has everything that you could want from a haunt, demons, a curse, fabulous off grid homosexuals, and a prophetic painting, It's a story that is still full of complexity and uncertainty, and it's told with an undue dichotomy depending on the bias and the goal of the outlet. You'll hear other podcasts frame it as either a gay couple who lived in a castle in the woods throwing raucous sex parties and spending their free time taking drugs with teenagers and worshiping the devil, or they'll be framed as innocent eccentric homosexual hippies who wanted to be left alone in their wooded paradise, making homemade wine and growing vegetables.

[00:41:46] - [Speaker 0]
But the truth, it lies somewhere in between those two versions. We'll likely never have the full story on. And I think, quite honestly, that Charles would appreciate that. I think he would relish in people believing he was some sort of dark wizard who conjured a demon to his property and foretold his own death through a macabre self portrait. But what can't be argued amongst all of this is that Charles and Joey and Arsenath and Belzebub, the dogs, and Lieutenant Phelps all lost their lives unnecessarily.

[00:42:20] - [Speaker 0]
The ordeal that Charles and Joey went through on their last day was brutal and horrific. So instead of a call to action or a snarky sign off like I would usually do, I want to end this episode a little bit differently, and I'll let Charles Scutter play us out on his harp in a recording that is said to have been taken on that fateful day. So until next time, I'll see you in the stacks.

[00:43:03] - [Speaker 3]
When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night? What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?