We’ve come across a great deal of strangeness in our research but nothing quite like the confluence of events and characters in the Dec. 12, 1982, murders at Corpsewood Manor in Georgia. This one is (quite literally) a cult classic.
The sordid tale begins in Chicago back in 1976, when 50-year-old pharmacologist Charles Lee Scudder along with his house-man and lover 15 years his junior, Joe Odom, left the big city for a 40 acre plot of land in northern Georgia, where the self-professed satanists built an off-the-grid brick castle for themselves and their two English mastiff dogs, Beelzebub and Arsinath.
They named their remote mountain manor Corpsewood.
It was accessed by a road they dubbed Dead Horse Road, because they found a dead horse on the road the day they arrived.
The house was plastered with pentagrams and included a winged devilish gargoyle.
In Chicago, Dr. Scudder was an associate professor at Loyola University of Chicago Institute for Mind, Drugs and Behavior. His work included government-funded research involvement in LSD experiments.
His work at the University began at some point in the late 1940’s. Loyola helped to play a part in the MKULTRA program by working to recreate LSD-25 which the CIA had bought from Sandoz Laboratories.
The titles of the papers that Dr. Scudder contributed were “The mind an evolving system of models”,”Mindless meaning; meaningless mind”, “On the environmental mind” and “The brain: a neurohumorally regulated ultrahomeostat. It’s worth noting Scudder’s background and work with psycho-reactive drugs and neurophysiology.
In the last video an associate of his satanic scene in Georgia described him as a “radical pharmacologist” into power over others – creepy.
When Scudder left Loyola, he took three vials of LSD-25 liquid with him, which was equivalent to 12,000 doses. Apologists claim it was “a souvenir.”
There’s some disinformation online that claims Scudder was a mere dilettante Satanist, but the Church of Satan website says otherwise. The site will also give you the moral-relativist, “innocent-victims” version of events.
A search of Church of Satan’s archival material reveals Dr. Scudder did indeed formalize his affiliation with an Anton Lavey group. He mailed his membership form and a check for $50 to San Francisco on June 16, 1980. And a cancelled check for a subscription to the Church of Satan’s newsletter, “The Cloven Hoof,” was found on Scudder’s desk after his death.
According to his friends, whenever the subject of church or religion came up, he would say, “I’m a Satanist.”
Read “Satanic Temple Head: ‘More Than 50% of Our Membership is LGBTQ’
A pastime of the Corpsewood couple were sex parties and orgies in a separate structure they built and dubbed the “Chicken Coop.” Chicken, of course, is a slang term for adolescent boys or young men. In the top of this three-story structure was the “Pink Room,” a party room with mattresses on the floor, Satanic images on the walls, troves of pornography and sex toys.
Notably, in order to access the top-floor Pink Room, one had to climb a 40-foot ladder. Scudder and Odom did not allow guests into their main house, only in the pink room, where they offered guests homemade wine and drugs, and possibly without their knowledge. Indeed, this seemed to be a private destination or clubhouse for the local rural homosexual community, which was mostly in the closet.
This so-called, alleged “quiet couple” had all pink room guests sign into a black book. When discovered it contained over 300 names.
Life went on like this for the couple for about six years.
But eventually, the Corpsewood satanists ran across a couple of local criminal types. Whodathunk.
Reports claim that the couple invited 17-year-old Avery Brock to visit their Pink Room, where he was given wine and drugs, and 56 year old Scudder performed oral sex on him. Brock returned five or six more times after that for more sex and drugs.
Brock witnessed the couple’s carefree lifestyle and got the impression that Scudder and Odom were millionaires. While it is true that Scudder did receive a small trust fund from his deceased father’s estate, almost every cent he and Odom had between them went toward their property.
One evening, Brock brought to Corpsewood his roommate, 30-year-old Tony West, who had been recently released from prison. West turned down sexual overtures from the Corpsewood couple and disliked the satanism and homosexuality.
West and Brock then began hatching a plan to rob the couple, then run away to start a new life somewhere else.
On the night of Dec. 12, 1982, Brock and West — along with Joey Wells and Teresa Hudgins, a teenage couple on a date who said they just happened to be riding along with them — made their way to Corpsewood to drink some wine and get high on “toot-a-loo,” which is a combination of alcohol, paint thinner and glue.
They received a warm welcome from Scudder. The group spend many hours in the Pink Room of the manor, drinking homemade wine and partying with the couple, according to “Abandoned Southeast.”
When Odom left the room, Brock went downstairs to his car and then returned with a .22 Remington Speedmaster rifle. Scudder laughed until Brock pressed a knife to his throat. Brock then cut strips of bed sheets and bound Scudder’s ankles and wrists, and balled up some more strips and shoved them into Scudder’s mouth.
Wells and Hudgins tried to flee, but the car would not start and they were forced to return to the manor, where Brock and West had tied up Scudder and were demanding money.
As West held Scudder hostage, Brock went downstairs to the kitchen where he shot Odom and the couple’s dogs. Brock then returned to the tower, and he and West led Scudder through the main house house, to kitchen and to the living room, where they threw him on the couch, removed his gag and demanded money. Scudder said he didn’t have any.
After ransacking the house and finding nothing of value, West murdered Scudder by shooting him in the head at point-blank range.
Curiously almost like Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now Dr. Scudder’s last words were, “I asked for this.”
Even more freakish was a self-portrait found on the premises. Scudder illustrated his own death based on a dream that bothered him. He’s gagged, head bound, in a chair, with five head shots — almost precisely what happened. Did Scudder have a death wish? Plopping down in rural bible belt Georgia seems to suggest so.
Brock and West attempted to steal Scudder’s harp, “but it would not fit in the vehicle.” So they stuffed into a pillow case some silver candelabras, a gold-plated dagger, a leather jacket, a bracelet, some cut glass and a radio. They left in Scudder’s jeep, telling Wells and Hudgins that if they called the police, Brock and West would kill them, too.
With their car out of action, the pair took Scudder’s black Jeep as they fled west. But at a rest stop near Vicksburg, Mississippi, they ditched the evidence and stole another vehicle from Navy Lieutenant Kirby Phelps, murdering him in the process.
That day, Hudgins went to the police. She and Wells cooperated with investigators and were not charged, but their testimonies sparked a giant nationwide manhunt for Brock and West.
“Abandoned Southeast” writes that Brock turned himself over to police on Dec. 20, 1982, in Georgia. West turned himself in on Christmas Eve in Tennessee.
During West’s confession to Chattooga County Sheriff Tony Gilleland, “the suspect stated, ‘All I can say is they were devils and I killed them, that’s how I feel about it.’”
While investigating the murders, the police found “two human skulls, three vials filled with LSD, an occult library, numerous occult tools, a large general academic and literature library, and homosexual pornography.”
Part of the perpetrators’ defense on how this turned to murder was to allege that Dr. Scudder had drugged them with the LSD that had been discovered on the premises. In fact, there was no trace of any drugs anywhere in the bottles of wine Dr. Scudder had passed around. The mother of Brock discusses this theory in the last video.
This video does a good job of giving the details on the case.
Both are serving life sentences. Brock is currently in Georgia State Prison, while West is being held at Augusta State Medical Prison. Both have been denied parole multiple times.
This last video made by a local church woman soon after the murders is literally a frozen-in-time cult classic. There is strange background music and an eerie script with religious overtones. If you read the comments below the video, you’ll see the moral relativists and pervert justice warriors fully offended.
Today of course there are cause celeb memorials all over the internet coming from justice warrior and moral relativists types. The Corpsewood men seem to be defacto discordian martyrdom saints.
But the Christian filmmaker is only describing the slippery slope, and the concept of karma. This applied to all the characters in this bizarre situation.
Interview with mother of Avery Brock is at 26:35 and with main eyewitness, Theresa Hudgins at 38:04. You will note continual nodding of Theresa’s head indicated truthfulness.
The “satanic panic” that emerged in the 1970s and 80s has been dismissed and mocked by the same usual suspects that have effectively ruined society. This topic is fair game, and we weighed in on it with our post , “In Defense of Carl Raschke’s ‘True Story of How Satanism is Terrorizing Our Communities’” We aren’t in Kansas anymore.
Denied parole multiple times… I doubt they’ll ever get out, if the roles were reversed and they were satanists who had killed some Christians, they’d have been paroled by 1990.
Loyola University, that”s a Jesuit operation. Check out David Icke’s list of Jesuit-Vatican connected CIA directors.
What unbelievably shoddy brickwork. The worst in the entire history of masonry. How those hillbillies could think that anyone who lived in a dump like that might actually have any money is the biggest mystery in this whole sordid affair.