Episode 352

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-Grainger, click Grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger. For the ones who get it done. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip-off and Grainger is your trusted partner. Offering the products you need, all in one place, from HVAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-Grainger, visit Grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger. For the ones who get it done. Sorden Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Gary is in the burn pile. And no, he is in the burn pile. And I said what? Are you ready for some murder? Is that a yes? I can't hear you. Speak up. Here we go. Grainger. Call 1-800-Grainger, visit Grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger. For the ones who get it done. On July 5th, 2018, in Cherokee County, Georgia, a family goes looking for their missing dad. The address is 2555 Purcell Lane, a dead-end gravel road off a two-lane highway north of Atlanta, but a long way from the city. The expansive house sits on ten fenced-in acres back from the road, past pasture and trees, the kind of semi-rural property that could be a small farm or just a place to be left alone. Now, out here, it would be easier to disappear into your own routine or into something worse. The fairest property isn't a commercial operation so much as it is a hobby farm with a pasture, a pond, a barn apartment, and a small collection of animals. A few horses, a few little milk goats, and some chickens. Essentially, this is Melody's dream life, the kind of charmed Southern life she had always envisioned for herself. The kind they sell in magazines. Lots of kids, animals, and an outdoor space. Her husband, Gary Farris, is a prominent attorney in the Atlanta area. A partner-level lawyer whose practice and income are centered in the city, not on the land. By this time, their children have all married, some divorced, and grandchildren often come to stay. Known to the grandchildren as Big Daddy, 58-year-old Gary Farris hasn't answered calls or texts for at least a day, and no one knows his whereabouts. His truck is still in the driveway, his CPAP machine, the one he uses religiously every night, is still inside. His wallet and other personal things are in the house. Nothing about it says I left on my own. Gary's four children are grown, including his son Scott. But Scott just happens to live on the property working as a farmhand. When his mother Melody asks him, have you seen your daddy? In her Southern drawl, the answer is no. This wasn't entirely unusual. The property is huge, and Gary tends to mind his own business. Besides, Scott has mostly been away for the previous few days. But his son Scott goes out to the property with Melody to look for. The kids are half playing outside, half looking. Melody and Scott separate. They check the house, the barn, the pasture. They call his name. Just as soon as he releases a loud, Dad! He hears his own name. It's his mother urging him to come back and check out the burn pile. Scott walks to the back of the property to a spot where his dad sometimes burns trash and brush. It's obvious Gary has been out here. Scott sees a large burn pile there, and for a few seconds the smoke burns his eyes. The burn pile is blackened, still warm with chunks of debris fused into the ash. It's early July in Georgia. The air is thick and damp, and the heat radiates off the ground. Melody and Scott both stand at the perimeter of the large pile, and Melody points out something odd to her son. Scott said, did you throw the goats in there for something? Maybe you went and died. Because we have several of them. I said, did you throw a goat in there or something? Because it was just something that wouldn't be bald. I said, did you throw a goat in there or something? He went over there and looked, and he said, no, but that didn't mean that he'd... ...you know, then he really looked. Scott steps closer and looked down. At first it was just shapes in the ash, charred wood, metal, bone-colored fragments. Then his brain caught up to what he was seeing. One of those shapes wasn't just bone-colored, it was bone. He realized he was looking at what appeared to be a human skull. He backed away and yelled for the others to get the kids out of there. Whatever this was, they didn't need to see it. Melody still wondered out loud if maybe it was an animal, a dead goat or something. But Scott was sure it was the skull of a human being. He called 911. And I will say, he actually took a stick and made it up. You could tell it was this big. It was like that. You know, that you could say the font, you know, of it. And it's like, tell me that that's a goat or a cow or a... He took off, he said, I'm calling 911 now. The skull Scott uncovered was human. And when he poked at it, the remains of a face stared up at him. This was no goat. Yerick, you can't even have one patient with emergency. Two one five five person playing. My father has come up missing. And we just searched the property with a small farm. And I just found something near a farm that doesn't... It was a huge burning brush. And I was just stompin' the fire deck. It could be him. I don't know. But if anyone would know whether this was a human or animal, it would be Scott Ferris. I'm calling the same. I've been walking around looking for him. And I went with it. The fire is still small. I'm ex-military. I was deployed to Iraq. I've seen what burned up bodies look like. And this looks like a body. Okay. You said your father? Yes, sir. I'm... We just turned 16. Gary wasn't without health problems, even though most would consider 58 to be relatively young. He'd been having what his wife called spells, but was refusing to follow through with his doctor visits. He's had these spells for years. And he talks. He gets very slurred speech. His motor coordination gets very off. He stumbles. His dad had Parkinson's. And I kind of wondered if maybe he had Parkinson's. But they did. I never did personally talk to the cardiologists, but I did talk to his physician's assistant. And because Amanda and I went with Amanda to go look at a wedding venue. And so we left before the actual cardiologists came in. But they found that he had a leaking aortic valve and a leaking tricuspid valve. And they wanted him to go back to the cardiologist on Friday. He got out late Wednesday. And wanted him to go back to the cardiologist on Friday to be hooked up to a heart monitor. Or a link to a telegram to see, you know, what all was going wrong with his heart. And he refused to go. Of course, this beg the question. Did Scott have a spell, stumble and fall into the fire pit? According to Melody, Gary loved burning fires, but she did not. And for good reason. Well Tuesday, he started to be burned. Late Tuesday. Started to be burned. Tuesday this week? Yes. Every week, yes. And most of the time out here, he had set the house on fire. Two years ago this happened at the end of August. And I got so scared of the fire. After that, he had set it in his office. We think what he did was a good, nice try. I don't know. That's when he started, a son and a Scott were here. And he did so much damage. And so soon as then, I think so, just scared of fire. I'm here. Just way scared. But he is all the time just, he has the thing with starting fires. He set one at my other house in the woods. Behind my house, we were doing a subdivision. I had a call from the neighbor. One morning, four o'clock in the morning, our department was there. He had started it like the week before. And it hit them slowly. And it kind of got out of control. Sounds like Gary might have been a little bit of a pyromaniac. Not saying he actually was. I mean, that's a real mental disorder. And it's not the same thing as being an arsonist. Pyromania is an impulse-controlled disorder. A person feels drawn to setting fires, fascinated by them. And sometimes even relieved by them, like a coping mechanism. A vice. The way some people reach for alcohol or cigarettes. It's weird, man. And honestly, Gary had reasons to need a vice. He was a high-powered attorney with health issues and a big family. He didn't get out much, wasn't a partier, and mostly kept to himself. His family described him as a social introvert. And he didn't really drink. So, pyromaniac? Maybe. Or maybe Melody's fire incidents were just isolated moments. Nothing more. Either way, his real daily habit wasn't liquor. It was a 12-pack of Mountain Dew. Yeah, 12. He drank 12 Mountain Dews daily. That's gotta be worse than alcohol, right? So, we had been maybe six months or so since he had burned it before. This burned down here? Yeah. I mean, it had trees, it had fence in it. We had pulled up the fire pit down here. We had an excavator here, and they had pulled up the tree stalks and that kind of stuff. And put on the burn pile. So, it had a lot of fence in it and stuff on it. And he said something not long ago that burnt us. Please do not burn it. It's too dry, it's too windy, it's too... They always do this, keep... don't burn it. Well, Scott came home. I don't know what time it was when he got hit. Because I called him and I was chasing horses. Gary had started the burn pile on Tuesday, the evening of July 3rd. He forgot to close the gate and the horses got out. Melody remembered chasing the horses and calling for her son Scott to help. She was worried about the fire getting out of control because it was going to burn for a long time. The next day, she says Scott came up to the house for a credit card and remarked that the fire was still going. Right before Melody left the property, she saw Gary gathering up even more wood to put on the fire. She begged him not to make it any bigger, but he didn't listen. Not only was Melody worried about the fire and the property, she was also worried about his mental health. According to her, he had tried to commit suicide twice before they were married. Keep in mind, they had been married for 38 years, but still. He had a family history of all kinds of mental and physical problems. Melody didn't just say Gary was struggling. She told investigators his whole family tree was steeped in mental and physical problems. His sister with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in and out of psych hospitals, his mother on antidepressants and antipsychotic meds, eventually being placed in a memory care facility with what she calls really bad Alzheimer's or dementia, and his father, who had mental illnesses of his own. Later dying from Parkinson's disease. Melody claimed Gary would say things like, I think I'm getting like my parents. Yet they shrugged as a couple through the good and bad times. And then somebody asked me, why did you say, and I said, I took a role. In her mind, she wasn't the unhappy wife looking for a way out. She was the one holding the line while everything around them got harder to manage. The more Melody spoke to officers, the more what she had to say seemed like low key versions of Yellowstone. Not with the shootouts and land wars, but in the way she painted the whole family as locked in constant drama. Everything revolved around Big Daddy and the farm. Growing kids, coming and going, relying on handouts from a weary patriarch. Then there was the constant tug of war between who's helping, who's taking, and who's just tired of the whole thing. You might have had some conversations in your family. That sound pretty similar. I told one of the other deputies that was here, so we've been having trouble with him taking money. Over $900 a month, he's got the check into camp robbing them. And I said, Gary, refuses to talk to him. Refuses to, I said he sends emails and text messages. And it's all he does. She went on to allege that her oldest son, Chris, was unkind, bordering on abusive to his kids, who often stayed at the farm. And I said, Chris, I'm going to stop you from taking money some way, some how, some, you've got to get help. You cannot treat them to girls like this. You cannot treat them to, you know. And I said, I beg you, you know, get help. Melody talked about all the expensive trips her son planned. A bachelor party in Panama, a trip out west because a friend's dad died. And yet another leisure trip he was planning before all this happened. But Chris wasn't the only one taking advantage of Gary, according to Melody. Gary was just like, you know, it's not like I can't, you know, he kept saying, well, I can afford to do it. And I said, Gary, that's not the point. I mean, that's like spot that lives by my barn. He hasn't worked since he came back from Iraq, except for a very short time. And I can't make it work. I can't make it, you know, and it's a Gary. He, you know, he's like 35 Saturday and it's a Gary. He needs to work. He said, well, you don't work. Gary. I only imagine this place is a full time job. It's a full time job. Take care of it. I mean, it is. You know, in Scott, I mean, in Scott is the hell. But I mean, like this last week, I mean, he's played golf three days. He's gone to the lake. He's gone. And you know, it's just like, come on now. This is Scott that's done all this. So he's just enjoying life. He is enjoying life to the fullest. Melody gave details of a family under strain, a big property, lots of animals and not enough help. But she said she was working some up to some down while her son Scott drifted in and out instead of helping consistently. And Gary's health was getting worse. All of the grown children were mooching off their generous dad. And Melody was trying to reign it all in and hold it all together while Gary was trying to keep the peace in a setup like that. It isn't hard to imagine his heart finally giving out or him having one of his spells at the wrong time near an open fire. And for a little while, that's exactly what this looked like. A tragic accident on a hobby farm with a burned body where a husband and father used to be. But when what's left of Gary was finally boxed up and sent to the medical examiner. Detectives started digging into the burn itself and the digital trail it left behind. What they found in the ashes and in the timeline didn't fit the idea that this was just an accident. Soon the family would dissolve into bickering and finger pointing and blaming each other for Big Daddy's death.哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎哎 because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip-off. And Granger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need, all in one place, from HVAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRANGER, visit Granger.com or just stop by, Granger, for the ones who get it done. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Granger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Granger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. In Cherokee County, Georgia, Melody and Gary Ferris have spent the last five years of their lives on a 10-acre hobby farm. Melody's dreamscape. Gary worked hard as an attorney and Melody worked on the farm and managed the family. Four grown children with children of their own, including Scott, who lived on the property. The last time Melody saw her husband was on Tuesday evening, July 3rd, after he'd set a bonfire, or burn pile. Melody said he came upstairs that evening, asked if she was making dinner, and she pointed him to the food in the fridge. After that, he went back down to the basement bedroom where he slept alone with his CPAP. On July 4th, both Melody and Scott said they'd never laid eyes on Gary, and Melody told investigators this wasn't unusual. He kept to himself even on July 4th. It wasn't until the next morning, July 5th, that two of his grandkids wanted to ride the RTV with Big Daddy, but couldn't find him. Their daughter Amanda was already there. Their oldest son Chris showed up soon after, and the adults started searching the house and the property. Scott walked down to the burn pile, looked into the ashes, and saw part of Dad's skull, so he called 911. While detectives and medical examiners were sifting through the bones and the days that followed, detectives continued processing the situation with the family. This is Chris. What I want to think is he just had one of his spells and something happened, had a heart attack, and fell in there? Just, I don't know man, something seems weird to me. Well, I will tell you what we do is we handle it as if it's the worst possible scenario because obviously if you approach it like that, then when it turns out to be that he had a heart attack and fell in the fire, you've done everything you could. What we do is we investigate something like this, we follow the evidence, and we gather evidence, and we try to get to, the evidence is going to lead us to some sort of conclusion in terms of what happened. So, you know, he will go, your father's remains will go to an autopsy. So that is, you know, essentially the next step we're going to, you know, be documenting outside the inside of the house. That's why it's secured because, because this is the house, it's not far from the house. You have to, you know, look at everything and make sure we're not missing anything and do a good job of documenting so that nobody can come and say, you know, if it does turn out that he did fall in the fire, nobody can, and he just had a heart attack, nobody can say, we didn't do a good job and we missed the fact that someone did something bad to him. I just want to know what happened. I asked what we're going to look at. I hope to God that it's just an accident. I understand. But, and we'll do everything we can to get all of you through something. Because, you know, we all love to do very much. But someone obviously did not love Gary very much. Because what the autopsy revealed after putting all of Gary's burned pieces back together was a bullet lodged in his rib cage. Unless it was suicide. But if that were the case, then why would you be hearing this story on sword and scale? Once the medical examiner confirmed he'd been shot, detectives took that news back to the family. One of the first calls was to their son, Chris. Well, I'm going to tell you something. And I just want to make sure you're ready and that I'm at. I just want you to tell me what you think when I say it, okay? Okay. The evidence we have obtained on the scene suggests to us that your father was shot. Wow. Wow. That's a lot. Oh man. Have you called anybody up for shit? There are some other people that are aware. I can't believe it man. I know, but I was talking to you today. I was just like, I told you, I suspected you. But I just wanted not to be. Everything in my soul today was not right with this. Oh, that would be accurate. Whatever you need from me, let me know man. When the medical examiner opens the bags from the burn pit, there's no body in the usual sense. Gary has been reduced to charred pieces of bone and scraps of tissue, divided into almost 50 bags labeled by quadrant. Gary was six foot five inches and more than 300 pounds. The bones are blackened, brittle and cracked from heat with fragments of pelvis, leg bones, and skull mixed in with the ash. The soft tissue left is moldy and wet after sitting in its own liquid collected in the bottom of the bags. The only way to be sure it's Gary is by matching the teeth to all his dental records. And there's no guarantee that this bullet killed him. Investigators quickly rule out an intruder. There's no broken glass, no kicked in door, no drawers pulled out or valuables missing. This isn't a burglary gone bad. It's a dead man on his own land at a house that sits by itself at the end of a gravel road. Whoever did this was extremely close to Gary. So like the night of the third and the day of the fourth, you were just never even in Cherokee County? Sure. Okay. Um, can you, if I asked you if there's anyone who would want to hurt your dad, what would you say? Would Scott ever want to hurt your dad? No. Did they get along pretty well? Scott and my brother, yeah, I mean, they lived in the same place and they dickered back and forth all the time, of course. But, you know, let's be honest, like Scott has a pretty good life. He's got his apartment. He's got, I mean, my dad does a lot for him and he loves my dad. Who would stand to gain it? Who would stand to gain anything if something happened to your dad? Honestly, I mean, as far as money goes. As far as anything. Probably, probably money-wise. I don't know. While the kids are still clinging to the hope that this might somehow be a horrible accident, investigators sit Melody back down and tell her what the medical examiner has actually found. They've been sifting through the remains in the ashes and they have found a projectile. It's a bone. It does not appear to be self-inflicted. Okay. So, I mean, do we know what kind or what? The circle was already pretty small. Gary, his wife, and his grown kids who came and went. But it was growing even smaller. You know how it all comes down to motive and opportunity? The motive seems simple. Money. There you go. Once you rule out a stranger, what you're left with is the ugliest kind of murder. Someone inside the family did it. And the rest of them were trying to decide how much they really want to say out loud. The only two family members who were at or around the property at the time of Gary's murder were Melody and Scott. Once detectives found the projectile in Gary's remains, the search was on for the gun that fired it. On 10-acre farms in rural Georgia, guns are pretty much part of the landscape. There are long guns, a 22. And according to Scott, about two weeks before Gary's death, he saw a small pistol in the basement close to where Gary slept when he was looking for a remote. Because AT&T was there at the house trying to repair the internet. That's when I found that 38 special. That's where the hell did that come from? And the only reason why I didn't continue to ask them about it and everything is because I had the AT&T out there. And I didn't want to pull this sucker out and tear the crap out of him. I shut the drawer back and I was like, you know, playing all night asking my mom and dad where he came from. I just slipped my mind. And that was sitting right there. Was it in a holster? Yeah, it was like this old leather, crappy looking holster. And you know, I just saw it and just kind of pulled it out and you told it was just a 38 special, it was small. Did it look, I don't know how to say this, old? Yes. Or like a more modern revolver? It did not look brand new. It looked like an H1. Now there's a pattern investigators can ignore. Two weeks before Gary's death, Scott sees a 38 in a drawer in a basement bedroom. After Gary disappears, that gun is gone. In the basement room, they later find a second bullet on the floor. When the lab compares that round to the one taken from Gary's ribs, they say both bullets were fired from the same gun. One shot in the house, one shot that ends up lodged in Gary's bones. And the gun that ties them both together used to sit in a drawer beside his bed and it's not there anymore. Huh. At this point, detectives know two things for sure. Gary was shot and whoever pulled the trigger was close enough to know their way around the house. The pool of suspects is basically just the people who live on that land and move through that basement. So they don't just look for bullets in phones. They listen to how the family talks about each other. And when they ask Melody about Scott, she doesn't describe a calm, steady son. Does he have any PTSD or anything from? He's always been very hot-headed ever since he was a little boy. I mean, to the point that, I mean, he went down on when he was born and he was just a handful. So you're not protecting either of your sons? No. That you know of? No. And we're not going to find any evidence to prove otherwise? No. Can you shed any light on any of this? No. I mean, I don't know. I mean, like I said, Scott is very hot-tempered. I mean, and he and Gary, I have seen them get into the point that I was just like, okay, you all just take it down a notch. I mean, you know. I'd really like to believe that if Scott shot Gary on your property or inside your house, and then the body was exposed of in your fire pit, you would probably know about it or find some evidence of it yourself. Or help clean up or? Yeah. No, like I said, I wouldn't have. You were there? Well, I mean, I was, but I left. I mean, you know, and I just saw it smoldering. I didn't think it was, you know, okay, it's not blazing. It's not whatever. We're good. You know, didn't think, you know, that I kept thinking last night, why did Scott come in here and get so angry last night? But that's not all that unusual either for him to just blow up. Scott insists he's not a hothead. He admits he gets angry like anyone and he admits loud bang still make him jump. But he pushes back on the idea that he's some kind of ticking bomb. My version of PTSD is if I hear a loud bang or something, that I'm just not, you know, prepared for my drill and just gets through the roof in my heart about the pound out of my chest. And I've learned to start taking deep breaths and calm me down, but gunfire doesn't bother me. I can still be around that. You know, the nightmares have ended and they ended a long time ago. I don't know, I don't get violent with anybody. I'm just like my dad, you know, I make friends everywhere I go. By all accounts, Scott and his dad were really likable guys who made friends everywhere they went and they got along well together. When his dad wasn't able to keep up with the farm anymore, Scott was a huge help. It was more Gary and Melody who didn't get along so well. And Melody had her own habit of making friends wherever she went, if you know what I mean. What I mean is that Melody didn't just collect friends, she collected other women's partners, starting with a guy named Ted, who'd spent more than 20 years as the boyfriend of Gary's sister. So, yeah, Melody's brother-in-law. Melody was fucking her brother-in-law. The truth is that Melody and Scott had been together for decades until something pulled them apart. And that's something the family would later say was Melody. This was Chris' take on. You know, my parents don't get along. They honestly don't really like each other. And so the communication- How long have they not liked each other? This has been going on, this is nothing new. My grandmother, in about a series of three months, my grandmother had open heart surgery that went really wrong. She survived, but it put her in debilitating. Around a month or two after that, my ex-wife told me she was leaving. Then, through that whole situation, my mother had to be in Alabama, because my mom's- My grandmother's house, because she no longer functioned on her own. So my mom had to go up there and get her house, deal with the affairs. This was a bit of a double entendre. Melody had to deal with the affairs of Grandma and her house, but also had her own affairs. So during that period, my mom started- The affairs? Affairs. Started withdrawing a lot of money out of my father's account. I remember him calling me and saying, your mother just took $50,000 out of my account that I had set aside to pay taxes with. So I'm scrambling to find out what I'm going to do. She spent a lot of money. Everybody was spending, oh, big daddy's hard-earned money. And nobody seemed to be bringing in any of their own. According to Melody, Scott was constantly taking the debit card for cash. But Scott would say his dad knew about every penny, and it was considered compensation for helping on the farm. Melody would say that Chris was abusive to his kids and constantly took vacations at the expense of Gary, big daddy. But Chris would answer that his dad didn't have a problem with it. In fact, he was going to go with Chris on vacation shortly before he died. And Melody wasn't happy about it. The last thing that Chris had done was booked a vacation to the beach that they're supposed to be leaving Saturday. I think it's Saturday. And Gary had said, I'm going to go with him. Instead of him just taking the money, like what he usually does, I'm going to go with him. And he said, are you going to go? And I said, no, I'm not going. He keeps taking, I mean, it's serious money. I mean, it's like, it's serious money. I mean, like I said, it's $800, $900, plus the girls airline tickets. To hear Melody tell it, even plane tickets for her granddaughters were one more example of everyone spending Gary's money. But the truth was that trips with the kids weren't exactly what had nearly blown this marriage up years earlier. I mean, I told him we needed to find somebody else, you know, because she talks so bad about him every month to make him have to be such an awful person. And now granted, she does that to a lot of people too. My mother has issues. Basically, he's in a tough situation. He didn't want to break the whole family up. He got a very conservative traditional person, you know. And I don't know all the ins and outs. And when you're a kid, you don't want to hear that kind of stuff about your parents no matter how old you are. But there was definitely a lot of problems, a lot of issues and a lot of problems. Okay, have you ever known there to be any domestic violence or anything? No. Is there any substance abuse going on? Anything other than her cheating and money issues? Do you know any names of anyone she had an affair with? Or you just know she had a... Ted Wiley. And then some guy named Rusty. I think his last name was Barton. And I don't know that that was an affair that actually happened. That's just something we suspect. She would tell my daughter's things. You know, Big Danny, this is that name. She would not... Oh, bad mouth. Yeah, bad mouth him. But she'd be on the... She would have like always on her phone, always talking to somebody. Ends up getting a tattoo right here that says XOXO. And my daughter said, well, that's who when she calls people, it says XOXO on her phone. And the... And my brother told me today, he's like, yeah, she's got a whole other cellphone. According to Chris, Gary tried his best to avoid divorce. For a while, they even moved away and tried to hit the reset button. When that didn't work, Gary bought Melody's dream farm, where he ultimately died. He thought buying this would fix everything he did for a while and then things started happening again. So it's been an on and off thing. Has anybody ever actually filed for divorce? I think my dad filed that he withdrew it. Okay. Because I remember him calling me and telling him he was going to take it back. And I told him, you know, I mean, I told him not to buy this place because it's not going to fix it. I mean, I told him he needed to find somebody else. Scott backed up Chris's statements about his parents' marriage in a separate interview. Why do you think they reconcile and never divorced? Why don't you thank your dad for all the two of them? My dad loved her. He didn't like conflict. He didn't like to argue. He, you know, he always tried to find the easiest way out of any kind of conflict. Man, that's part of why he... I mean, we loved her. He was the one, and I think at one point he said something to either Chris or somebody. I just heard that he tried to get her to go to the marriage counseling, but she wouldn't do it. By the time detectives were done listening to everyone, Melody, the two sons and the two daughters, Emily and Amanda, they'd heard every angle on this family. The affairs, the money, the move, the dream Farm Gary bought to try to hold it all together. Emily and Chris were pretty clear. They think their mother is capable of this. Amanda, the youngest, was still defending Melody while planning her wedding with her. Scott also thought his mother might be capable of it, but he was a person of interest too. He was the son who lived on the farm and stood to gain the property if Gary were to be gone. None of this told them who actually pulled the trigger, though. On paper, it looked bad for Melody, but Scott, with his temper, his time on the farm, and his proximity to the missing gun, still seemed like the most dangerous wildcard. So detectives stopped asking about feelings and went back to the three days that mattered most, July 3rd, 4th, and 5th, to see what evidence said about who was there when Gary died. At first, the family wanted to believe this was an accident. Gary had one of his dizzy spells, maybe a heart attack, and fell into the fire. Burn quickly and gone, just like that. But finding the bullet immediately rules that out. And the body burning quickly in a fire? Well, that's just not how it works, kids. Bodies don't burn like that. You don't burn on bodies. You don't throw them on a burn pile. That's unusual. The amount of effort needed to burn a body is significant. Go. I know that he burned one. Okay, I'm telling you, bodies just don't burn in fires. They just don't go away. We're all water. You can't burn water. Incinerators are designed to burn for a very long time in an exceedingly high heat that is not reaching a regular bonfire. It's not reaching a brush fire. It's barely reaching. It's not even really reaching a house fire. House fires where houses collapse on people, we still find more of those people than we did of your husband. Okay, then how did he burn? It was outside your bedroom window. I was hoping maybe you could shed some light on it. Yeah, I saw this, but I'd never went down there. But someone did. Because someone would have needed to make sure the body itself kept burning until the job was done. And Melody was on the property all day long on July 4th. The fifth is when they all went searching for Gary and found what Melody claimed to be a goat. I mean, when we were all down there the other day, everybody, me and Amanda and Scott and Chris, even, you know, Madison and Cameron, I think we were all circling around. Scott actually, when we were discussing that about the goat, I said, do we have a goat to die? Did you put one on the burn pile? And did your daddy put one on, you know, whatever, because all I saw was two legs, what I thought was two legs sticking up. Melody wasn't just playing along. So that fire had to be tended to you for a while? I just told Gary, I see you've got to keep an eye on that. Someone had to go back repeatedly. And do what? Keep it burning. I did not do it. I did not do that. I mean, when I took you that fire, it was massive. It was massive. And he had a bunch of, like I said, there was fencing and boards and all kinds of- Woefully insufficient for the type of heat and the amount of the burn and everything else about it. Woefully insufficient. Woefully insufficient. It sounds like feedback on a failed science project. But what he's really saying is her version wouldn't come close to doing this. A fire, like the one she describes, doesn't erase a 300 pound man. Someone had to stay with it and continue feeding the fire. That's all in it. That's all in it. That's all in it. That's all in it. I know that Gary- What can you tell me about the blood in that? What can you tell me about the blood you found? I don't- I didn't know that there was any blood. I mean, how much blood do we have? We found blood. You know, anything about the blood. I didn't know anything about the blood. Nothing. And the entire time you were there? Because this is where- And see if this makes sense to you and I'll let you try to explain how this could happen. Something happened to him. How did he die? I don't know. You were told. You were told how he died, weren't you? What happened? Well, we just assumed, when Scott said this is human remains on this fire. But you know what they say about assumptions, right? It's an old Benny Hill joke. Have you been told how he died, what we found? He told me that there was a- a shot or whatever, a slug in the rear. Okay, so what does that indicate to you? The gunshot wound. I mean, that's like- I mean, I told Amanda last- I mean, we told her last night here. And that's when I found out that it was when we came here. And it was like, how do you ever have an illness? I mean, I'm thinking he just got caught in the fire. Because what we have is a gunshot wound, burned up on him, which took a wrong period of time. And you were the only person at the house. So that's why I was hoping- I know you keep saying you didn't- you don't know anything and you didn't do it, and you keep saying that. I did not. I didn't. But the problem is, is there's almost no way in this world that you didn't see something, hear something, or know something, and someone is shot, moved, and burned, and burned, and burned, and burned, thirty feet from your bedroom window. Of course, Melody knew how he died. It was absurd for her to sit there and claim she didn't. Or she forgot, or whatever. But this wasn't the detective's first radio in Cherokee County, Georgia. And Melody's role in Gary's death was becoming more and more suspicious. Or sus, as the kids say these days. I don't know anything does not make sense. It doesn't jive, it doesn't match the evidence, and it just doesn't work. I don't know the time frame. I mean, I know when I saw him. You realize, though, this makes no sense. I did not- I realized that I have had hundreds of conversations with people that have lost loved ones, people who have had loved ones shot and we didn't know who did it, people that have had loved ones who they have done something bad to. I have had these conversations with people on both sides of the spectrum, who have had countless ones. People tend to act certain ways, whether they want to or not. But I'm honestly telling you, I don't know. And the problem is that just doesn't fit. It's absolutely impossible that you don't know. I'm not saying, I'm saying, it is the evidence we have, it is absolutely impossible. By now, detectives have made it clear. Her I Don't Know Act doesn't match what they're seeing. A body burned to fragments, bullets in the bones, blood inside the house. A fire that, in their words, would be woefully insufficient unless somebody kept coming back to feed it. They've pointed these things out to Melody, but she doesn't know yet that they've tried Gary's cell phone moving back and forth between the house and the burn pile on the very day Melody said she never saw him. To add to this, Scott says he searched for his dad's wallet the day they found the body. He always kept it on him or in his room, never in the car. Scott searched the car twice over and found nothing yet. Later that day, it was in Melody's hands. When he asked her where she found it, she said, the car. Detectives were on to Melody's lies, so they changed tact at this point. If she won't talk about the night he died, maybe she'll say more than she means to about how she really felt about him. Did you catch it? She said she loved him? To death. Huh. Figure of speech? During the investigation, Chris and Scott both found themselves going back over the little things they'd brushed off at the time. The meals she made for Gary, the way he'd get sick afterwards, the spells everyone talked about and nobody really named. They started to ask themselves, not did she really love him to death, but was death the version of him that she preferred? My daughter, when she landed, called my mother and asked, can we have that? Remember the sleepover? Can we have the sleepover? They wanted to do it the third. And she said tonight would not be a good night. That's what I know for a fact. Other than that, other facts, I'll tell you what else I know. I don't know. When my dad was in the hospital, was it April? I came in there, you know, I walk in and I was like, what's the deal? For my dad, he's like, oh, I'm okay, I'm okay. Like, no, you're not okay. What's the deal? He said, well, you know, I just keep having these spells. And I was like, well, what's going on? He said, well, your mom says my blood sugar, because she has this test kit, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, I go to the doctor and I say, what's up with his blood sugar? She tells me, she's like, I run marathons and your dad has better blood sugar than I do. So don't say anything. Let me finish. So I was like, oh, okay. Now she could this, like number one, can you, like this whole blood sugar thing? Where did that come from? You know, and why does Melody Ferris have a blood sugar test kit? And how can she, and then I asked the doctor that she tells me that. So then my dad, I'm sitting there and she goes, he goes, well, about a week ago, I was sitting in the theater and your mother comes down and hands me a tray of freshly baked cookies. And he said, I ate them. And he said, I probably shouldn't have because she doesn't even have the time to even talk to me. And when she does talk to me, she's yelling and screaming at me, but I was like, well, they look good. So I ate them. And he said, they started burning my mouth and burning my throat. And he said, then I started feeling bad after that. So I called my sister and I called my best friend and I told him. And so I said, and he was just like, I think she's trying to poison me or something. And just laughing it off. And I thought, oh my God, you know, like, no, I mean, come on, you know, maybe. But he said, well, then a few weeks before that, she brought home a pasta dish and the same thing happened. And I said, so I just went to the doctor and I said, look, I said, they have a farm. They have a lot of stuff going on out there with pesticides. And I was like, maybe y'all should run the toxicology thing on him. That might not be a bad idea. Just trying not to be like, holy shit, he just told me that he thinks my mom might be trying to poison him. You know, I didn't, you don't want to just tell the doctor that and set off something that doesn't need to be set off. But now thinking back on it, I wish I would have said something a little bit more. One of Melody's final acts of hospitality towards Gary was caught on tape. It appeared Gary knew that he was being poisoned, but maybe nobody believed him. This is the voice of Gary after he's discovered a shattered plate right outside his bedroom just hours before his disappearance. What happens when you leave a plate, forget to take it upstairs, a minor temper tantrum. I wish I had supper tonight and it was six for me, so I'm sure I'll be feeling poorly here within minutes, but we'll see. When the two brothers were interviewed together for hours, their memories became clearer and clearer. Within this past year, the fighting between the two of them just got worse and worse and the comments my mother and my dad never said anything negative to me about my mother, except for her going out and spending so much money on stuff like that and all. But he never said anything other than that negative way. On the other hand, I can't tell you how many times I've heard her say I can't wait until the day I don't have to live with him. I wish you would just have a heart attack and die. She definitely tried to turn all of us on to each other. She has said stuff about him, she has said stuff about Emily. She's just trying to basically stir the pot up with us. She's been doing that ever since all this happened. She's been trying to get me to turn against him and my sister Emily and I guess she's been, you know, vice versa with Amanda. Trying to get Amanda to turn on all of us. And that's not really, I mean that's kind of crap my mother would do. She would love to draw them. It's been always really weird. My mom would treat her like strangers and people she recently knew or even like her pets a lot better than her family. It wasn't that Melody couldn't show emotion. It's that every emotion began and ended with her. And the only thing she ever seemed to feel for Gary was resentment. Resentment that he'd seen through her hedonistic version of marriage. She didn't just want to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted to eat hers, take his and still complain that there wasn't enough frosting. Family members have passed away. She got more upset but when I discovered his body, his remains and even the paramedic. So yes, as her human remains, she had zero emotion. No, no crime and nothing. But yet when Breville, the horse gets put down a couple months after we found him, she bawls her eyes out. The more the brothers spoke about their mother, the more they realized. They just may have been raised by a sociopath. The End On July 5th, 2018, on the Faris family's 10 acre farm off Purcell Lane and Cherokee County, Georgia, Gary Faris, a 58 year old Atlanta attorney, is missing. His truck is there and his CPAP and personal items are inside. Also inside are blood droplets leading from the kitchen to Gary's basement room. His wallet ends up in the hands of Melody, who says she's found it in Gary's car. The same car Scott had already checked twice. The timeline matters. Gary's last confirmed day is July 3rd, when he's been working around a burn pile behind the house. Melody claims she last saw him that night and never checked on him the next day. That next day is July 4th and Scott isn't on the property but Melody is. And by the morning of July 5th, the family searches until Scott is called to the burn pile and recognizes human remains. He calls 911. At first it looks like a terrible accident. Then the autopsy destroys that. Gary was shot with a bullet lodged in his remains. Investigators say a burn pile would have been woefully insufficient to destroy a body of that size unless someone kept tending it. Gary's cell phone pings from the house to the burn pile and back to the house, but investigators know that Gary has been killed. They know that Gary has already been shot and set ablaze. So the case collapses to the people with access and time. And the spotlight lands where it's been sitting all along. The house, the burn pile and Melody. Only a few missing pieces were left in this puzzle. One of these was the missing pistol that Scott had seen in the basement before Gary's death. Another one was the question of how Gary's body was moved from the house to the burn pile. We found other things in the basement. Why? Other things in the basement that are significant. We know how long it took. We know the lengths of time things took. We know that moving somebody that's 300 pounds and 6 foot 4 that's bigger than I am, that is a significant feat. We are putting layer upon layer upon layer upon layer on this picture. And right now the only thing you're saying, bear with me for a second, the only thing you were saying is that you don't know anything about anything about anything. That does not, and you know what? That, I will tell you, that does not make sense to me from a very just simply based on the information that I know. That is just simply not make logical sense in any way, shape or form. Regardless of how the body was moved or where the pistol was, this case was prosecutable. Melody was arrested on June 18, 2019, nearly one year after Gary's death. During this time she continued to have her affair with Rusty. Remember Ted, the first guy she had an affair with? The guy who had been her sister-in-law's lover for 20 years? Well, Rusty followed a similar pattern. Melody liked to keep it in the family, I guess. Rusty was the stepson of Melody's cousin, Martha Jane. Gross. Yeah, this Rusty guy, he just came in the picture when Martha Jane had a murder. I knew, I had some suspicions about it before my sister's wedding, because Emily called me a few months before and said, Melody's shown up in Nashville with this Rusty guy driving daddy's Mercedes or daddy's whatever car, I don't remember what car he had at the time, and just, you know, acting really funny. And then she invited him to my sister's wedding in Franklin, Tennessee, and was dancing with him, and acting extremely, too friendly. Rusty took a while to come forward with crucial information, but fortunately he had a conscience. What Melody told him left no doubt and would be used in the trial. Also, I wanted to let you know what I told your lawyer that I'm putting my name on the line, too, because that's how confident I am in you and about what you're going to tell us, okay? That would be an interest to us, not the time or anything about what happened. I think there was only one conversation that is what you're looking for. Okay. Okay. And it was the last conversation. Okay. It would be safe to say it wasn't much talking after that. No. No, that was the end of the conversation. Okay. And it's at the last time you was fucking with her. No, no. No, I talked to her. I talked to her every single day, but again, every day was just every day. So, let's talk about that conversation that you filled. So, probably the last minute of the last conversation, she said, Gary is in the burn pile. No, she said he is in the burn pile. And I said what? And she said he's in the burn pile. And I said, do not say another word and do not tell me anything. I do not need to know. Okay. And that is everything. If I'm going to give an ounce, I'm going to give a pound. That was all of it. That was all of it. That was everything that she said that had anything to do with whatever happened. That's pretty, I mean, and I don't know what happened. I don't know when happened or what happened. And here's the thing, at the time that that statement was made, you got to remember, he wouldn't even report it as missing. By the time the trial took place in October of 2024, Melody's defense tried to shove the spotlight back onto Scott, the son on the property, the hothead with supposed PTSD, the one they argued had access and opportunity. More importantly, they pulled a statement of Chris saying he preferred 38 caliber ammunition, which they located on his premises. But that narrative contradicted the very finding that changed everything. Scott had never owned a 38 caliber pistol or revolver. He had only seen one in the basement. In a twist, a woman came forward to say her gun, matching the murder weapon, had come up missing in the weeks prior to Gary's murder. It was Melody's cousin, the stepmother of Melody's lover, Rusty. And turned out Melody had spent a few weeks at her house helping to take care of her. One last question lingered in the minds of the jury. How did tiny Melody move Big Daddy's body? The answer was a tractor. A tractor with a big bucket attached. Melody knew how to drive the tractor and Scott knew this because he had taught her. The tractor was moved on Tuesday night and the RTV was moved in the middle of the night. The reason why I remember that tractor being there is because there was a cat that I've never seen before. And he was sitting right there on that implement on the back of the tractor. And that's when I walked out and saw the cat. So I knew the tractor was there on the third. After that, I don't. Until the fifth, when you physically walked out there and saw it. I didn't even seem to even to look. So the only way I knew that it was down here is because I wasn't looking for my dad. And so it was parked there and that's when I walked down there and put my hand on the hood to see if it was still warm. When detectives cornered Melody on this, all she had were flimsy excuses and a panicked voice. And on that property, when you were there, something that did not happen in the blink of an eye, something that took time, something that took people, something that took moving, the tractor was moved from Tuesday night and Gary could not have done it. The RTV was moved in the middle of the night and Gary could not have done it. Things were done. Things happened. You said you parked it in one spot and woke up. That was the day. That was and that was the next. The tractor wasn't. And here's the thing, even at the end of the day. I just assumed that Scott can't come in. You did and I'm telling you that we can find evidence to prove that that is not how it went down. And that is not what happened. I don't know. I mean, I was with a man in jail and Gary. Okay, but the night of the third, the only person there until 11.30. Yes. And then after that, you were still there. His body was burned in that fire pit. Unquestionable you saw with your own two eyes. 11.30 that fire is still going. Yeah. That timeframe. You don't have. Nobody's not came through the woods and was sitting there attending to this fire for time. But Scott was on that property at that point. Scott found his father in the burn pile and called 911. Melody watched that and later tried to make him out to be a murderer. It's one thing to lie to the police and it's quite another thing entirely to hand your own child to the wolves and call it self defense. What a bitch. I was like, gloves are off. I mean, you try to throw your own child over to the bus and straight up lie to the police. And I fronted her about it. So I was just like, I never said that. I'm like, it's in the police report. By the time Melody Ferris' trial wrapped up in late 2024, the prosecution had presented a 18 day case calling dozens of witnesses and more than a thousand pieces of physical, digital and forensic evidence. On November 4th, 2024, a Cherokee County jury found her guilty on all five charges. Malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, concealing the death of another and making false statements. The verdict came after several days of deliberation following closing arguments. At her sentencing hearing the next day, the Superior Court judge sentenced Ferris to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years for the murder conviction and an additional five year term for related charges to run concurrently. The judge also barter from contact with certain family members as part of the court order. The prosecutor read a letter from Gary's daughter, Emily, as part of the victim impact statement. She said that since Gary was taken, their family was living inside a unbearable void. Not sometimes, every day. They'd lost the laughter, the warmth, the steady presence that held them all together. And now even the happy moments felt contaminated because he wasn't there to share them. But the worst part wasn't only that he was gone, but it was who did it. The betrayal of realizing the suffering came from the person who should have cared for them the most, their own mother. And as the prosecutor read her words, Chris sat in the background breaking down, openly sobbing, wiping tears from his face. Scott conveyed an expression of hurt so deep it was impossible to ignore. While Melody just sat there, resolved to finish what she started one way or another. In the moments that preceded her statement, she spoke to the judge in a calm and steady voice. But the second she began reading, she suddenly and dramatically, uncontrollably became tearful. In July 5th, 2018, six years, five months ago today, again the worst nightmare that I could have ever imagined. Not only my world, but my family's world was absolutely destroyed at the hands of one person. I've had six flesh years of being told not to talk, don't say that, take legal advice. I could walk out of this courtroom today and drop over dead. I want to make sure that my children, my grandchildren, and Gary's family, and to be honest at this point in time, the entire world who has viewed this, I have waited for years to make this statement to everyone. I want the world to know who did this. I have always heard that the courtroom is the last place you're going to get the truth. And has that ever been proven to be the truth in this case? Not only did I not do this, but I did. I know Scott killed his father. Melody's sentencing statement wasn't a defense, it was a mirror reflecting exactly who she was all along. Melody wanted her dream life, the farm, the family, the image. Oh, and you know, all the lovers. But it was all powered by Gary, how inconvenient for her. And the moment that he stopped fitting the role she needed, she treated him like an obstacle, just like all narcissists do. When confronted with the consequences, she never once showed empathy, accountability, or concern for what her children had already lost. She minimized, argued, lied, and blamed. When the case threatened her, she didn't protect her family, she used them. First as cover, then as human shields. A normal person hearing her daughter's grief and seeing her son sobbing like this would stop the charade. They'd realize all the hurt they'd caused all the people around them that loved them, that they supposedly loved. It would be an awakening, a moment that would define their lives. Suddenly realizing what they had done and accepting the responsibility and asking for forgiveness. Melody didn't do that. Put it that way. Even in the end, with nothing left to win, she chose the move that hurt her family the most. Because protecting herself mattered way more than taking responsibility for her own actions. Well, hope you enjoyed that. I'd tell you to go on over to our website or download our app to get more, but then some asshole will say I'm begging. So just do whatever the fuck you want. I really, really don't care. Stay safe. Thanks for watching!